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we're still driven in part by peoples' capacity to consume," Prof. Yates says. "And if we reduce peoples' capacity, that will have long-term implications."
Experts are quick to point out that the impact on today's generation will be uneven; some people will always do well. But in the future, outcomes will be even more splintered between those with higher education and skills and those with lesser education and skills ill-suited for the labour market, says Craig Alexander, chief economist at Toronto-Dominion Bank.
He sketches out a future scenario where post-secondary education becomes even more more vital. More people go to school for longer, which means they carry more debt upon graduation. And as a result this generation will instead have less time to save for retirement. And what awaits them in retirement is far less appealing than it was for their parents.
"I doubt I will ever get a pension, ever," says Edmonton resident Alix Kemp, 25. She graduated in 2010 with a history degree, and now works as an assistant editor at a magazine. She earns less than $40,000, and is still paying down $8,000 in student debt.
"When I look at the older generation who actually have pensions that I will never get, and who are horrified that they might actually have to wait an extra two years until they retire, I'm like, 'Who's entitled now?' "
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Her hunch about ebbing access to pension plans is right. One of the biggest shifts over the past decade is in the proportion of companies that have closed their traditional defined benefit (DB) pension plans to new employees, who are shunted into group RRSPs or defined contribution (DC) plans. Unlike a traditional DB plans, the DC plans don't pay a guaranteed level of income in retirement. The difference between the two is staggering.
A private sector employee who starts work today at age 25 with a salary of $40,000 will see her DC pension plan grow (assuming steady compound interest and investment returns) to about half a million dollars in value by age 65, an analysis by Mercer shows.
By contrast, a typical DB plan member with the same work history over the same period will have earned a pension with a value of about $1-million under the same circumstances.
The DC conversion trend isn't new, but it means an even greater proportion of the population will have a less-valuable DC pension plan, or more likely no pension at all. That means lower savings early in life because DB pension contributions are a form of forced savings. It takes enormous discipline to voluntarily save as much.
"As a society, I think people are going to lose that period of saving early in their career," says Mazen Shakeel, senior retirement consultant at Hewitt Associates. "And what does that translate into for them? It probably means they work longer. They're not retiring at 55 certainly, maybe not even at 65, because they won't be able to afford to."
Young people are not the only ones bearing the burden, says Ian Markham, Canadian retirement innovation leader at Watson Wyatt. Their parents – his generation – are increasingly subsidizing them, keeping their children at home far longer and helping them more with tuition and housing costs.
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In fact, his own children, all in their twenties, still live at home, and so do many of their friends. The additional costs are causing some parents to work longer to help support their adult children.
"It causes all sorts of other issues by the boomers continuing to work. The next generation down can't fill the more senior positions yet because there's a boomer sitting in the way, so you get productivity potentially lowering for the next generation down."
The education vacuum
For now, the obstacles confronting the young have garnered little urgent attention from governments. They should, Ms. Maxwell says. "It would be very helpful if we had more national recognition that there are many people whose future is in jeopardy. And we can't afford that in a country with a small population. We need everything these young people can offer."
Governments should boost incentives to employers that hire young people and train them, says Nancy Schaefer, president of Youth Employment Services in Toronto.
But the onus should rest on young people, too – some of whom have unrealistic expectations of earning $60,000 right out of university, she says. They should start working early in life to gain skills, contacts and experience. They should seek out employers to ask them what skills they're looking for.
Now, "there's a disconnect between what young people want and need, and what is available out there."
Canada would also do well to study systems in Germany and Switzerland, which have strong co-op and apprenticeship programs, and whose universities work more closely with employers. And employers in Canada, many of whom complain about skills shortages, should beef up on-the-job training – an area in which this country lags.
Parents, teachers and guidance counsellors should place much value on skilled trades as a secure, well-paying career option, Ms. Maxwell says.
Hartley Miller, 25, who majored in political science at the University of Guelph, wishes she'd got better advice in school about the opportunities out there – particularly in skilled trades. "I chose something I liked, but it wasn't the most intelligent for job prospects," says Ms. Miller, who works as a receptionist.
But a big rethink can still spark big opportunities. Stephanie Wilson, 25, had hoped to be a lawyer or veterinarian one day. She stumbled into engineering when a UBC program opened up in her hometown in the Okanagan area of British Columbia.
She was one of few females to graduate in mechanical engineering in May, 2010. She landed a job at engineering firm Hatch Ltd. in the very same month. It wasn't the career path she'd dreamed of as a girl, but she loves it.
"I love the diversity. No day is the same as the day before. And there's really opportunities to go everywhere."
Editor's note: Acadia University is in Wolfville, N.S., not Halifax. Incorrect information appeared in an earlier online version of this story.NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The government insurance fund designed to protect consumer bank deposits will likely stay in the red through 2012, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. chief Sheila Bair said Wednesday.
Testifying before members of the Senate Banking Committee, the nation's top commercial bank regulator stressed that her agency was taking immediate steps to replenish the dwindling fund. But she said those efforts would not put the rescue fund in the black until a little more than two years from now at the earliest.
The fund has come under severe strain in recent months amid the recent surge in bank failures. Ninety-eight banks have failed so far this year, which has reduced the fund's value to $10 billion from $45 billion a year ago.
Last month, the agency painted an even more dire picture, estimating that the fund is currently in the red after taking into account future bank failures it anticipates will happen.
That would not be the first time the fund has had a negative balance. During the S&L crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s, it slipped into the red.
With bank failure costs expected to reach $100 billion over the next four years, regulators have been looking at ways to raise quick cash.
"The problem we are facing is one of timing," Bair said, according to a copy of her prepared remarks.
One proposal currently under consideration would have banks prepay their deposit insurance premiums for the next three years. Under FDIC guidelines, bankers and others have until the end of October to comment on the proposal before it becomes a rule.Mohammad Shahabuddin +
double murder case +
Siwan +
Shahabuddin’s release +
SIWAN/PATNA: The judge who sentenced RJD memberto life imprisonment in awas transferred fromjust two days after the former Lok Sabha member secured bail from the Patna high court in another murder case.Additional district and sessions judge (ADJ) Ajay Kumar Shrivastava had himself sought the transfer through a letter he wrote to the HC. Though the exact contents of the letter are not known, sources said he felt unsafe in Siwan following. The Nitish government in Bihar has provided security to him. Shahabuddin got bail on September 7 and walked out of jail on September 10.Taking cognizance of Shrivastava’s letter, the HC issued a notification on September 9 for his transfer to Patna in the same capacity. Shrivastava had headed the special court constituted for the trial of cases against Shahabuddin.Mandated to function from inside the Siwan jail, where Shahabuddin was lodged since his arrest in 2005 to May this year, the special court had, on December 11 last year, sentenced the former MP to life imprisonment for the murder of two brothers, Satish Raj and Girish Raj. The duo was drenched in acid at Shahabuddin’s village, Pratappur, in August 2004. Their elder brother Rajeev Raushan, an eyewitness to their killings, was also murdered on June 16, 2014, three days before he was to depose before a trial court.It was in the Raushan murder case that the Patna HC had granted bail to Shahabuddin. JD(U) spokesman Ajay Alok said the state government would provide security to Shrivastava.“A sense of fear has gripped residents of Siwan ever since Shahabuddin reached home,” Alok said, quoting from a report sent to the state government by the Siwan administration. “We have provided security to at least 20 people since Shahabuddin’s release,” Siwan SP Saurabh Kumar Sah had told TOI last week.Siwan police have also enhanced the security cover of the murdered trio’s elderly parents and the family of journalist Rajdeo Ranjan, in whose killing Shahabuddin is a suspect. Shahabuddin was shifted from Siwan jail to Bhagalpur central jail in May, just days after Ranjan was murdered.“Romney has already visited Israel twice. Sarah Palin went in 2011, when everyone assumed she would be running this year. And at this very moment in the 2008 cycle, having finally seen off Hillary Clinton, Democratic Senator Barack Obama went to Jerusalem to proclaim his ‘unshakeable commitment to Israel’s security’.”
“Some of Israel’s most vociferous supporters are conservatives and evangelical Christians, a major segment of the electorate. Offend them by sounding lukewarm about Israel and you are in serious trouble.”
Instead of fighting over the Jewish and Christian Zionist votes by trying to out-do each other in their support for Israel, the candidates should be putting all their efforts into out-doing each other in their support for America. It’s just as simple as that.
American infrastructure is crumbling and cities are declaring bankruptcy, and yet there is always billions for Israel. To an outside observor such as me, this is stark raving madness.
Perhaps Americans have been so brainwashed by their Israel-compliant media that they no longer connect Israel’s constant enrichment with their tax dollars to their own real or impending poverty.
It is very difficult to break away from ingrained habits, such as having a two-party system. But as long as both parties are owned and operated by parasitical foreigners, Americans must indeed break away from their present system, and embrace candidates who will put their own country first.
Anything else is national suicide. And if Obama wins in 2012, that will occur within the next four years.
Ron Paul is the only potential candidate who promises to extract America from Israel’s wars, and to smash the power of the international bankers by doing away with the privately-owned Federal Reserve system.
You know what to do!
Jeff Goodall.
Today, Jerusalem. Tomorrow, Washington?
The Independent
Rupert Cornwell
July 22nd, 2012
Life offers few greater pleasures than catching up with old friends. Take Mitt Romney and Benjamin Netanyahu. The pair were in their late twenties, rising stars at the pioneering management company, the Boston Consulting Group when their paths first crossed in the mid-1970s. Back then, Bain Capital was no more than a distant gleam in Romney’s eye, while Netanyahu was in the US to hone his business skills after fighting in an Israeli special forces unit during the Yom Kippur War.
But they’ve kept in touch, and now one is prime minister of Israel, while the other might soon be president of the United States. One way and another, there’s a lot to talk about. But that’s only one reason why Romney is off to Israel next weekend, after dropping in on the London Olympics.
Another consideration is the need to prove he knows something about foreign affairs (not Romney’s strongest suit). Above all, though, he is fulfilling what has become an obligatory rite of passage for aspiring US presidents: a public appearance on Israeli soil, to display undying solidarity with the Jewish state.
Oddly, once they are elected and forced to deal with the Middle East’s intractable realities, US presidents are in much less of a hurry to visit America’s closest regional ally. Ronald Reagan never went to Israel, nor did George HW Bush. Bush Jr, perhaps America’s most pro-Israel president yet, waited until his final year in the White House to do so; Barack Obama has yet to go as president.
But when you’re a candidate, it’s different. Romney has already visited Israel twice. Sarah Palin went in 2011, when everyone assumed she would be running this year. And at this very moment in the 2008 cycle, having finally seen off Hillary Clinton, Democratic Senator Barack Obama went to Jerusalem to proclaim his “unshakeable commitment to Israel’s security”. Such statements of course are not meant to bring about the miracle of peace with the Palestinians, or to instantly counter the Iranian threat. They are solely about winning votes back home. And you don’t do that by upsetting America’s mighty pro-Israel lobby.
In absolute terms the Jewish vote here is small, 2 per cent or so of the electorate, and for many of these voters, other issues are at least as important as the fate of Israel. But their clout is out of all proportion to their numbers. And this is not merely because some of the largest Jewish-American populations are in closely fought swing states such as Florida.
Some of Israel’s most vociferous supporters are conservatives and evangelical Christians, a major segment of the electorate. Offend them by sounding lukewarm about Israel and you are in serious trouble. And then there’s money. Jewish groups have long been major campaign donors, but in the age of the Super Pac and unlimited personal donations, their importance has only increased. Newt Gingrich’s 2012 White House bid, for instance, was bankrolled by the Jewish casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson, for whom support for Israel is the most important issue (and which may explain why Gingrich breezily dismissed the Palestinians as an “invented people”.)
And so to what many see as the spider at the centre of the web, the Lobby – in other words Aipac, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Of the many Jewish groups, Aipac is the most influential. No fewer than 13,000 delegates attended its 2012 annual conference in Washington, addressed by President Obama and every Republican presidential candidate, outbidding each other in declarations of fealty to Israel. Its influence on US Middle East policy is legendary; if America’s inbuilt bias towards Israel is the biggest obstacle to a Palestinian settlement, as many contend, then Aipac is probably the biggest reason why.
Is it really that powerful? Incur the wrath of the Israel lobby, it is said, and your political career may be doomed. Exhibit A for this theory is Republican Senator Charles Percy, who was defeated in 1984 after he had crossed Aipac by supporting the sale of US military aircraft to Saudi Arabia, a step vigorously opposed by Israel. Whether or not that is true is beside the point. Power lies in the perception of power, and Aipac is perceived to be very powerful indeed. Just how powerful, even the Obama campaign may now be starting to wonder. In every election, Jewish-Americans are a reliable Democratic constituency; four years ago they went 78 per cent for Obama. But this time Republicans sense an opening, as they assail the President for his “disdain” for Israel – manifest in his demands for a halt to new settlements, his use of the word “occupation” for the Palestinian territories, and his clear opposition to a military strike against Iran’s nuclear sites.
Obama will surely carry the Jewish vote again, easily. But polls suggesting his approval rating among Jews has slipped, and the Democrats’ loss in 2011 of a heavily Jewish New York district in a special congressional election, have given the Republicans hope. All this may be wishful thinking. But it will be one more topic for two old friends to chew over in Israel next weekend. And one thing may be safely predicted. If Mitt Romney wins, and Benjamin Netanyahu remains prime minister, US ties with Israel will never have been closer.
See original here.
See “Do supporters of Israel ‘own’ the Democratic Party?” here.By Steve Kim
Manager Vadim Kornilov is best known for handling the careers of former world champions Ruslan Provodnikov (25-5, 18 KOs) and Victor Postol (28-1, 12 KOs), who both of whom lost their only bouts in 2016.
Last week Kornilov said of Provodnikov - who was out-pointed by John Molina on June 11th, 2016 - "I think he's just enjoying his time in politics, he's in Congress, he's a deputy."
"He got more votes than any other deputy when he was getting elected back in September. He's enjoying that but as far as whether he's retired or not, I think it's on the borderline. He's still considering offers."
So for the time being he is a politician in his native land in Russia and if he doesn't fight at all in 2017, should he be considered a retired prizefighter?
Kornilov state - "If he doesn't fight by the end of the year, I would probably say yes."
The manager did add - "We're getting some offers but nothing serious."
As for the Ukrainian-born Postol, who lost WBC title in a unification with WBO champion Terrence Crawford in the headline bout of an HBO Pay-Per-View event last July 23 - "Right now we're just waiting to see what Top Rank will offer us. Top Rank is still involved with Postol as a co-promoter. We've done great business together so far. I'm happy with everything, it's been a great relationship and a great experience and I just want to see what happens next.
"I've been waiting for Top Rank to hear if they can get him another fight."
Steve Kim is the news editor for BoxingScene.com.The Beginning Of The End Impossible to hit, even harder to defend, Floyd Mayweather is fighting to leave the ring the way he entered it: Standing. ESPN The Magazine by Tim Keown PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER HAPAK 04/29/15
Gallery THE THERMOSTAT ON the wall reads 94, and the humidity created by all the sweat in the room makes the air feel rank and static, as if it's possible to breathe the exact same breath from the moment you enter to the moment you leave. A solid percentage of the people here today are lining the apron of the boxing ring, pounding their palms and fists onto the canvas with an insistence that goes beyond noise. It's like being trapped inside a bass drum in the middle of the tropics. Floyd Mayweather hops into the ring. The pounding accelerates. They urge their man forward -- Always in control! -- with a vigor that angles toward desperation. There's a woman in a tiara and pink boxing boots yelling at Floyd to use his jab. There's 86-year-old cut man Rafael Garcia, dancing like it's the senior prom. There are four of Mayweather's nine security guards, circling the Las Vegas gym like hypertrophic mall walkers, making sure no phones leave pockets. They're all in it together, all celebrating the arrival of Mayweather's biggest moment while dreading the inevitability of its end. Oh, to be 22-year-old Canadian Cody Crowley, the sparring partner -- Fresh meat! -- bounding on the balls of his feet, shaking his hands at his hips, rolling his neck side to side, as if he could gyrate himself into composure. Mayweather begins by laughing in his face, then says, "I'm coming for you," as Floyd's uncle John, standing by a turnbuckle, wonders out loud who's going to catch the kid when he goes down. Crowley has "The Crippler" written on his headgear in cursive, and wait -- what's that on his T-shirt? Does it really say "Let Me Show You How Great I Am"? No, Cody, no. Crowley takes three jabs to the nose. "Take that," Floyd sneers as each connects like vehicle vs. pedestrian. The fists pound louder, and Call the helicopter! pierces the clamor. When the last round ends, the pounding turns to applause as Floyd flops down and rolls under the bottom rope. Nearly three hours later, when the day's work is done and his locker room is cleared of everyone burrowed into corners and leaning against walls, Mayweather stands in front of a television to watch the Nuggets at the Rockets. He is watching his money, as he likes to say, and he's got $200,000 that says the Rockets will be leading by more than five points at halftime. His eyes are weapons; those around him are so attuned to his needs that words have been relegated to a secondary form of communication, employed only when the eyes fail. When he is displeased, his glare lingers longer, the better to maximize the recipient's discomfort. If he is happy, they can loosen a whole room. As he watches the Rockets make good on his bet, the 20 or 30 people still in the room drift into their own conversations. Ever so briefly, he is not the sun around which all planets rotate. Perhaps he senses opportunity in the static; he turns to me and asks, quiet enough that nobody else can hear, "I'm boxing pretty good right now, don't you think?" Coming from Mayweather, this simple offhand question is jarring. His questions are rhetorical, occasionally informational. He might want to know a score or where someone is, but he rarely feels the need for opinion. This time, there is a different look in those eyes. As he prepares for the biggest fight of his life, the one nobody thought would happen, is there a seed of doubt to be found within them? Vulnerability? Mayweather lives within a self-contained world, with someone there to accommodate his every need. He employs those nine security guards (approximate combined weight: 3,500 pounds). There is a woman who comes to his house to place and light the style of candle he prefers. He once called his car dealer in Los Angeles, Obi Okeke, and told him he needed two Bugattis at his house in Miami in 48 hours. Okeke had the cars loaded on a transport truck with a 400-gallon diesel tank and three drivers, who stopped only for food and bathroom breaks. OK, one more: Mayweather said he once gave a pregame talk to a Division II basketball team -- nobody can remember the school -- and afterward he called David Levi, his assistant in charge of placing his bets. I'm staying focused on my job. It's just growing -- growing as a person. - Floyd Mayweather "Dave, I gotta bet this game," Mayweather said. "Floyd, it's Division II. There's not even a line." "I don't care. Have them put one up." And so a request was made to the sportsbook: Floyd Mayweather is interested in putting a maximum bet on a Division II basketball game. A line was found in some dark offshore corner of the Internet, and the sportsbook told Levi $50,000 was as high as it would go. The bet was placed, and Floyd's team -- and Floyd -- won big. "Why did you want to bet that game?" Levi asked afterward. "Because I got those boys fired up," Mayweather said. He lives in a world of absolutism and delusion, with rules of his own devising, where people exist to serve his desires and commemorate his accomplishments. Reality is like that D2 betting line: It can be altered or created to fit his needs. The Sun King comparison has been made before, but it remains apt. "It is legal because I wish it" is as pertinent to 2015 Las Vegas as it was to 17th-century France. Mayweather's civilization -- Floydville? -- was built to serve the singular immortal. When an Access Hollywood reporter asked him for his celebrity crush, he said, "There's not really a woman I can't have. If I want it, I can go get it." No smile, no wink. The man was serious. Sometimes it seems the rest of the world could cease to exist and Mayweather wouldn't notice until he attempted to place a bet on a game. And yet within his civilization, where he knows with certainty how his questions will be answered, there remains a part of him that needs to know how he looks from the outside. It's like watching the man in Plato's cave sneak looks over his shoulder, noticing more than his own shadow. He will fight Manny Pacquiao on May 2, in Las Vegas, at long last. The fight, which puts an end to the Vietnam War of boxing speculation, will be the type of preposterous commercial enterprise that will manage to be both riveting and borderline obscene. In keeping with Mayweather's subversive nature, he will also be sabotaging the normal athlete's career arc. The path of youth/prime/decline? Not for him. He is preparing for two things: the pinnacle of his career, and its end. Mayweather is invariably described as polarizing, a word that is as woefully noncomprehensive as it is factual. He is the greatest fighter of his generation. He is also a man whose eagerness to proclaim his own talent -- he calls himself TBE for The Best Ever -- and flaunt his extreme lifestyle have caused a good percentage of those who pay attention to boxing to revile him. His history of violence against women has triggered outright revulsion -- three convictions, including one that landed him a two-month jail term in 2012 for misdemeanor domestic battery and harassment. Those who hate Mayweather don't want to see him lose; they want to see him buried. Easy Money Floyd Mayweather has four of the top five boxing gates in Nevada history. His bout against Manny Pacquiao on May 2 is expected to double his current top gate in a rocket to the No. 1 spot. But as Mayweather and I stand there, watching the Rockets shoot 3s with impunity, the facts of the moment are these: He has just stopped two sparring partners, forcing one to turn his back and take a knee. (Mayweather grabbed him from behind and pulled him to his feet, as if having a man on his knee in his ring were an affront, and immediately called for the next boxer.) He has hit the heavy bag for 15 minutes, the speed bag for 10. He has worked the mitts with his uncle Roger, the nonstop slap of leather on leather like piano notes, and done body work with assistant trainer Nate Jones, a hydrant-shaped man who wore a body protector and still struggled to keep his balance under the weight of the blows. He has taken two 5-pound dumbbells and stood in front of a floor-to-ceiling mirror and rhythmically punched the sky for two sets of three minutes each. He has thrown roughly 8,000 punches in two hours. He then retired to his locker room, where he held court for a few minutes and changed into tights, a sweatshirt and a ski cap to combat the elements of the 83-degree night. He finished off the ensemble by adding a pair of colorful boxers and then ran 5.44 miles in under 37 minutes. "Trains like he's broke," says former world champion and current sparring partner Zab Judah. As I watch over the next three weeks, there will be days when he does not look as sharp, when the reality of his 38 years will infringe on any suggestion of invincibility. But on this day there is only one answer I can give: Yes, he is boxing very well. He lifts his chin in a tight nod and turns back to his money. "That's what I thought." text Nick Laham for ESPN More from the Fight For Perfection Issue Robert Sanchez: The next Michael Phelps? Kate Fagan: Instagram hid reality of struggling track star Wright Thompson: The story of Ted's head From the archives: Mayweather's money From the archives: The last great American prizefighter Subscribe to the Mag March 3, 2015 Team:
This training camp is no different than any other training camp. The one thing that's different is that I have ZERO tolerance for foolishness. I will not entertain anything on any social media for the next 10 weeks. I want to be clear. NO pictures or videos are to be posted of my associates or myself without my prior authorization. I have overlooked things for too long and time is up. I will not accept excuses for any unprofessional behavior this camp. I have been pushed to put these measures in place. A lot of you have gotten too comfortable, and have lost focus on what's truly important. There will be deductions from your salary if I feel that your performance is not up to my standards. This is not anyone's first rodeo, and we all know the drill. I want and need a smooth training camp, and I will achieve that. There is a beginning and an end. I only have two more fights in my career. I've tried to put all of you in the best situation to be successful. It's your choice what you make of it. I can no longer be everyone's savior or problem solver. I'm asking all of you to make better choices. I advise everyone to save and start preparing for the future. I appreciate all of you. I want the best for everyone, but I am finally at my limit. Sincerely,
Floyd Mayweather HE'S FAMILIAR WITH the body's small treasons. Thirty-eight-year-old knuckles abrade easier, and the iodine to fix them burns brighter. The feet don't always respond as reliably. The timing, such a vital part of everything he does, sometimes abandons him. There are days when he cuts his still-epic workouts short, saving his body for another day, and there are other days when those around him raise their eyebrows and look over both shoulders before saying they fear he might be overtraining, peaking too early, because the importance of this fight -- this potentially $500 million fight for his everlasting legacy -- has wedged its way into his brain in a way no others have. Mayweather would agree with none of this. He controls his training as completely as any other aspect of his life. Big Floyd, his father, is ostensibly his trainer, but his instructions must run more toward the telepathic. Often Big Floyd can be found sitting in the gallery, drinking a soda, while his son trains. Mayweather is ready to leave boxing after completing his six-fight contract with Showtime in September for two reasons: He wants to live a "normal life," where he can presumably walk the streets of Las Vegas without nine security guards, a paradoxical notion from someone with such a vainglorious bent, and he wants to leave with his faculties intact, on his own terms, with money in his pockets. It is not, to be clear, because he can no longer perform. "Some people just get better with age," he says. "I don't know why, but I'm one of them." He prepares for Pacquiao while usually wearing a black "47-0" T-shirt. On the back are the names of each of his professional opponents, each name x-ed out, some twice. He has not said much about Pacquiao, no trash-talking or belittling, other than to suggest that someone in Manny's entourage should inform the boxer that he is a terrible singer. He has, however, emphasized Pacquiao's five losses. "If you've lost once, it's in your mind," he said. "If you've lost twice, it's in your mind." Some people just get better with age, I don't know why, but I'm one of them. - Floyd Mayweather But what of the burden that comes with that zero? All those people depending on him, the apron pounders and candle lighters and even the long-haul truckers? "I don't focus on that," he says. "I just focus on going out there and performing well. I always think positive." There is something different about him this time around. Everybody can sense it, feel it. Focused is the word of choice within the gym. But distant and preoccupied might be contenders too, because it's clear he sees Pacquiao as a legitimate threat. Asked how he might handle a loss, Mayweather says, "There ain't no losers when you make nine figures for 36 minutes of work." Yet he has limited outsiders' access to the gym, virtually eliminated interviews and no longer spends large chunks of his workout bantering with guests. There's also none of the unceasing effort he once made to justify himself and his money and his greatness in the ring. "I'm at peace," he says. "I'm happy. You know, I get to spend time with my 14-year-old daughter every day. I'm working hard in the gym. I'm staying focused on my job. It's just growing -- growing as a person. You can no longer grow physically, so you grow mentally. You can't just talk about it, you've got to take action." But perspective, more often than not, comes at a cost. On Dec. 8, Mayweather was on FaceTime with his good friend Earl Hayes, a rapper who was always at the gym during training camps. Hayes was having an argument with his estranged wife, Stephanie Moseley, and Mayweather was attempting to defuse the situation. He was on the line when Hayes shot and killed Moseley, then himself. "Of course it affected me," he says. "It hurt me deeply. I think about it every day. I think about him every day. I think about her every day. At the end of the day, it wasn't right. He took the easy way out, and it wasn't right. If he wanted to take his own life, he should have. He shouldn't have taken that girl's life. It wasn't right. I disapprove of that totally, 100 percent, even though he's my best friend. Right is right and wrong is wrong." Mayweather's jail stint in the summer of 2012 was a two-month stretch of forced introspection. He pleaded guilty to lesser charges after originally being charged with two felony counts of coercion, one felony robbery count, one grand larceny count and misdemeanor counts of domestic battery and harassment after a fight with his ex-girlfriend Josie Harris, the mother of three of his four children. Two of the children witnessed the altercation, and his then-10-year-old son had a security guard call police. Mayweather contends that he was simply trying to restrain Harris, but she contends that she was treated for a concussion, cuts and bruises. According to documents acquired last year by the website Sports on Earth, Mayweather, during his prison sentence, refused to eat meals provided by Clark County and wrote "My mind is not the same" in a note requesting that he be allowed out of his cell for more than five hours a week. Kept in protective custody, the man with the personal chef ate Chili Cheese Fritos and beef jerky. But though the experience may have been as crippling as his most ardent foes could hope, he continues to keep his comments regarding domestic violence defiantly vague, saying, "I have made mistakes, and I've paid for them." It's only slightly more illuminating than his "Only God can judge me" performance on CNN last year. In 2004, a female Clark County judge grew so frustrated with Mayweather's unwillingness to take responsibility for assaulting two women in a casino that she told him, "You may be a terrific and famous fighter, but that doesn't make you a god." I can no longer be everyone's savior. I advise everyone to save and start preparing for the future. - Floyd Mayweather His words do not amount to anything close to an apology -- more of a wish that the topic would disappear altogether, which won't happen before May 2 if Freddie Roach has his way. Pacquiao's trainer told USA Today he sees the fight as "good against evil. I have even thought about bringing a couple of the metro cops from Vegas to tell Manny how many times [Mayweather's] been arrested and how bad of a guy he is, but I decided I can't go that far. He already doesn't like him." Mayweather refuses to respond to Roach's comments; "I can't focus on that" has become Mayweather's utility-knife answer. His focus is clear: training. He's employing different techniques at the urging of strength coach Alex Ariza, who was hired by Mayweather after he trained Pacquiao and Marcos Maidana, who earned two recent X's on Floyd's T-shirt. At Ariza's insistence, Mayweather's meals are being monitored for the first time. Hot yoga is a regular postworkout stop. He had his security guards unload tree trunks in his driveway so he can work on his core strength by swinging an ax. And then there are the 3 a.m. pool workouts in which Ariza puts him through a series of three-minute "bricks" of freestyle swimming. When he struggles, a member of the crew will ask Ariza, "Can't you help him?" "I could," Ariza says, "but I don't want to. He controls everything in his life except this." Mayweather was headbutted in the lip in a March 26 sparring session and decided to take the next day, a Friday, off. Some in his camp were secretly happy -- the cut was minor -- because they'd grown concerned about the strain the camp was taking on his body. There was a collective exhale that he might be taking the smart path. And then the next night, a Saturday, a text went out to the crew at 11:30 p.m.: Get to the gym. Mayweather arrived around 1:30 a.m. and worked out for two hours. This training camp is no different. Don't believe it for a second. text Nick Laham for ESPN THE SECURITY GUARD known only as Jethro surveys the craziness as he stands in front of the gym every afternoon beginning at 2:30, his big drill-instructor face pointed toward |
evsky appears yet to have done, scientists will be reluctant to subscribe to all the conclusions which he sets forth.” Stetson did acknowledge that the mechanism by which ultraviolet radiation is absorbed was still a puzzle biologists had to solve.
The mechanism behind the stimulation of human behavior is still a mystery, but the theories of Georges Lakhovsky may shed some light. He considered his book, The Secret of Life, the extension of a scientific hypothesis of a new theory of life. The Sun is one of Earth’s primary sources of cosmic radiation. While the Sun does produce its own radiations, solar winds actually capture passing cosmic dust and radiation and blow it into the earth’s atmosphere. While it may seem frightening to some, this can actually be considered the Primal Vibration that sets the cells vibrating with Vital Force. This is the Prana, that Cosmic Breath, which is meant to vitalize man, and is the source for our evolution.
Dr. George Crile, a distinguished American surgeon, studied the sun in light of its radiant energy. In the ‘Preliminary Remarks’ to Lakhovsky’s The Secret of Life, Professor d’Arsonval quotes Crile: “It is clear that radiation produces the electrical current which operates adaptively the organism as a whole, producing memory, reason, imagination, emotion, the special senses, secretions, muscular action, the response to infection, normal growth, and the growth of benign tumors and cancers, all of which are governed adaptively by the electric charges that are generated by the short wave or ionizing radiation in protoplasm.” He felt that the entire energy system of living beings is controlled by radiant energy and electrical forces. D’Arsonval points out that Lakhovsky and Crile found that living cells are electrical cells functioning as system of generators, inductance lines, and insulators. The underlying mechanism is the oscillating circuit. An oscillating circuit is a circuit containing inductance and capacity, which when supplied energy from an external source, is set in electrical vibration and oscillates at its natural frequency. D’Arsonval explains further that a conductor is said to possess inductance if a current flowing through it causes a magnetic field to be set up round it. The capacity of a condenser of an isolated body is a measure of the charge of the quantity of electricity it is capable of storing. From such a circuit, energy is readily given off in the form of waves. According to Lakhovsky, the nucleus of a living cell may be compared to an electrical oscillating circuit. The nucleus consists of tubular filaments, chromosomes, mitochondria, made up of insulating material and filled with a conducting fluid containing all the mineral salts found in sea water. These filaments are thus comparable to oscillating circuits endowed with capacity according to a specific frequency.
The cosmic radiation from the Sun is a blessing of Vital Force. As Lakhovsky has postulated, it is the cosmic radiations that give the cells their vibrant oscillations. While the sunspot maxima is occurring, the solar flares and the subsequent geo-magnetic reactions effect the many subtle reactions that take place within our bodies at the atomic level. It has been theorized that this has a direct relationship to the metabolism of the body. We know it is the subtle magnetism of positive and negative charges that pulls certain particles across membranes in cells to produce energy. These magnetic exchanges result in the stimulation of enzymes and the production of energy like ATP. The increase of penetrating waves during a solar storm causes an excitation in these electro-chemical reactions within the body. Tchijevsky also identified correlations between changes in solar magnetic activity with biological processes. In light of Lakhovsky’s theory in his own words, “…with the aid of elementary analogies, that the cell, essential organic unit in all living beings, is nothing but an electromagnetic resonator, capable of emitting and absorbing radiations of very high frequency.” A plausible mechanism is provided to understanding the stimulating effects the radiation from the Sun has on human behavior. In an abstract entitled “Automated Experiment on Macro-fluctuation Monitoring” Bruns A.V. and Visolimsky B.M. also find a close relationship with the solar activity and bio-chemical reactions. “Phenomenologically obtained data could be treated like an effect of the surface (controlled by solar activity) on the physico-chemical kinetics. This effect was realized, evidently through the mechanisms close to nuclear magnetic resonance in geomagnetic field.” In another historical study Suitbert Ertel writes in his article “Synchronous Bursts of Activity in Independent Cultures; Evidence for Extraterrestrial Connections” that evidence has been reported suggesting a link between historical oscillations of scientific creativity and solar cyclic variation. Eddy’s discovery of abnormal secular periods of solar inactivity (Maunders minimum type) offered the opportunity to put the present hypothesis to a crucial test. Using time series of flourish years of creators in science, literature, and painting (A.D. 600-1800) It was found as expected: 1) Cultural flourish curves show marked discontinuities (bursts) after the onset of secular solar excursions synchronously in Europe and China
2) During periods of extended solar excursions, bursts of creativity in painting, literature, and science succeeded one another with lags of about 10-15 years
3) The reported regularities of cultural output are prominent throughout with eminent creators. They decrease with ordinary professionals. The hypothesized extraterrestrial connection of human culture has thus been strengthened The evidence seems to show that during the maxima of sunspot activity human behavior is stimulated.
There is some Russian research that shows an increase in cardiac problems during sunspot maxima. The solar activity probably sets off a preexisting condition and no one is suggesting that people will drop dead in the streets. We could see the stress of solar activity on the biology of living things as an evolutionary agent weeding out the old and sick and strengthening those who can resonate with its radiations. In his Preliminary remarks to Lakhovsky’s The Secret of Life the Professor d’Arsonval gives several examples of research done in the last hundred years that shows the most malefic effects from solar activity come at the sunspot minima. He notes from the British Medical Journal, March 7th & 14th of 1936 that both Colonel C.A. Gill and Dr. Conyers Morrel found increases in pandemics of deadly diseases during the period of minimal sunspot activity. In Gill’s study he showed that every pandemic of malaria since sunspot records were taken had occurred when sunspot numbers were lowest. Similar trends were observed in East Africa and elsewhere with Yellow fever epidemics since 1800 occur during the sunspot minima. Dr. Conyers Morrel also finds that, “...waves of epidemic diseases covering considerable periods exhibit a very close correspondence with the phases of sunspot periods. Diphtheria, Typhus, and Dysentery seemed to prosper when there was an absence of solar activity." We also see an increase in disease in Solco W. Tromp’s study. Without the stimulation from the Sun human health seems to diminish. The immune system seems to grow unresponsive during the solar lull and diseases can more easily gain a foothold in the body. Not only human health but Life itself seems hampered by the lack of solar activity. William Hershel wrote in 1801, “It seems probable analyzing the period between 1650 and 1713, and judging by the normal yields of wheat, that a scarcity of vegetation occurred whenever the sun appeared to be free from spots.” The depressed state of metabolism and lack of food in agricultural centers may have seemed very inviting to the Mongols. Goncharov, in an abstract on the “Asian Nomadic Invasions and Solar Cycles”, said, “From the 4th to the 16th centuries the Central Asian Steppe was the cradle of the series of great nomadic tribal invasions into agricultural regions of Europe, China, and South Asia. Those invasions had similar features. They arose in middle latitudes and recurred every 160-220 years – exactly after solar abatements.” References: Moore, Carol, Sunspot Cycles and Activist Strategy, http://www.carolmoore.net/articles/sunspot-cycle.html
Lakhovsky, Georges, The Secret of Life, BSRF, 1985
Petersen, William, Man, Weather, Sun, John Anderson Publishing Company, Chicago, 1947
Stetson, Harlan True, Sunspots in Action, The Ronald Press Company, New York, 1947
Stetson, Harlan True, Sunspots and Their Effects, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1937
Botezat-Antonescu, L., Predeanu I., “Possible Heliogeophysical Influence on Human Health in Romania” (Abstract), Relations of Biological and Physicochemical Processes with Solar Activity and Other Environmental Factors, 1993
Breus T.K., Halberg F. and Cornelissen G., “Effect of the Solar Activity on the Physiological Rhythms of Human Being” (Abstract), Relations of Biological and Physicochemical Processes with Solar Activity and Other Environmental Factors, 1993
Ertel, Suitber, Solar Activity and Bursts of Human Creativity
Freitas, Robert A., Sunspots and Disease
Goncharov, G.G., “Asian Nomads Invasions and Solar Cycles” (Abstract), Relations of Biological and Physicochemical Processes with Solar Activity and Other Environmental Factors, 1993 Return to Dramatic Changes in Our SunA slew of new Star Trek Beyond photos and some footage taken on the set reveal the presence of a mysterious new alien being in the film.
Screencrush has both the photos and the footage, which were taken during the filming of an outdoor action sequence in Vancouver, where the movie has been shooting for the past month. The most notable element is the alien, played by Sofia Boutella (the girl with knives instead of feet on her legs in last February's Kingsman: The Secret Service), who accompanies Kirk (Chris Pine) as they escape from some sort of damaged ship.
Boutella is said to have a lead role in the film, although her character has not been named, and as far as I can tell she doesn't resemble any alien being seen previously in the films or TV shows. Is she an ally of the Enterprise crew? Also unknown, since the plot is completely top secret at the moment. They're shooting against a green screen here, so we don't even have any idea of the scene's background or context.
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The second major new aspect on view here are the new uniforms worn by Pine and Anton Yelchin as Chekov, who shows up along with Scotty (Simon Pegg, wearing the more traditional outfit). I'm guessing that the outfits are for away missions, since they feature jackets, boots and even kneepads -- not exactly standard gear for manning the bridge, I would imagine (see the full range of photos at the link above).
The costumes and action are fun to theorize about, but it's that creature played by Boutella that I find the most -- pardon the expression -- fascinating. Both Pegg (who co-wrote the script with Doug Jung) and new director Justin Lin have said that the new movie will delve a bit more into the exploration and ethics of the original TV series, so it stands to reason that seeking out new life and new civilizations -- where have I heard that before? -- might be part of the story this time around.
Star Trek Beyond, which also stars Zachary Quinto (Spock), Zoe Saldana (Uhura), Karl Urban (Dr. McCoy), John Cho (Sulu) and Idris Elba as the movie's new adversary, comes out on July 8, 2016. Speculate below on the new alien being, the costumes and what the hell you think they're doing up there in Vancouver...A man dressed as Batman villain the Joker has been shot dead by police in America after pointing a loaded shotgun at them.
The dead man, who was said to be obsessed with the character, was wearing full costume and makeup when he was challenged by officers in a national park in Virginia, according to legal documents.
The FBI named him as army specialist Christopher Lanum, who was wanted as a suspect over the stabbing of a fellow soldier at Fort Eustis, a major army base in the state, several hours before. Lanum's girlfriend, Patsy Ann Marie Montowski, who was with him when he was shot, told investigators that the soldier idolised the Joker, played in the most recent Batman film, The Dark Knight, by the late Heath Ledger.
The events began at the base early on Sunday when Lanum become embroiled in an argument with a fellow soldier, Mitchell Stone, allegedly stabbing him and using a stun gun on him.
Lanum and Montowski fled in her van, which was later spotted around 200 miles away inside Shenandoah national park. Police pursued the pair, who crashed the van after running over a spiked strip laid in the road.
According to the FBI documents, Lanum told Montowski to kill him with the shotgun but she refused. He then pointed the gun at police, his finger on the trigger, and refused orders to drop it, before being shot several times.
Montowski was also shot and taken to hospital. Details of the case emerged yesterday after she was charged in connection with the case following treatment.Story Highlights Parents and grandfather allegedly helped or watched toddler smoke marijuana from a bowl
The toddler and another sibling are now in the care of Child Protective Services
Charges include reckless endangerment and endangering the welfare of a child
MAYVILLE, N.Y. (AP) — Police say a pair of New York teenagers forced their 23-month-old child to smoke marijuana.
The Chautauqua (shuh-TAW'-kwuh) County sheriff's office tells The Buffalo News (http://bit.ly/18rNhgX ) that the toddler's parents and grandfather allegedly helped or watched the toddler smoke marijuana from a lighted bowl on Dec. 5 in an apartment in western New York.
Authorities say 17-year-old Jessica Kelsey, 18-year-old George Kelsey and Jessica's 54-year-old father, Don Baker, were arraigned Friday on charges of second-degree reckless endangerment and endangering the welfare of a child. They are being held in lieu of $10,000 cash or $20,000 bond.
The toddler and another sibling are in the care of Child Protective Services.
No information on attorneys for the three was available.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1bGc77qNikita alum Lyndsy Fonseca has landed a recurring role opposite Hayley Atwell and Shea Whigham on ABC’s Marvel’s Agent Carter. She will play Angie, an aspiring actress who befriends Peggy Carter (Atwell) on the new series, which will bridge the fall and spring editions of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Inspired by the feature films Captain America: The First Avenger and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, along with the short Marvel One-Shot: Agent Carter, the series is set in 1946 and centers on Peggy Carter who, working for the covert Strategic Scientific Reserve, must balance doing administrative work and going on secret missions for Howard Stark. Chad Michael Murray and Enver Gjokaj co-star.
It’ll be a busy season for Fonseca, who also co-stars on Amazon Studios’ comedy pilot Down Dog. Her other credits include the role of Alex on the CW’s long-running series Nikita, How I Met Your Mother, Desperate Housewives and the Kick-Ass features.Share it
The Serg BJJ / Team Marcio Cruz Savannah Academy traveled from Savannah, GA to the 2013 IBJJF Atlanta Open on Saturday, Aug. 31. The team was comprised of eighteen athletes and they brought home eleven medals.
Ultimately, their small group came in tenth place out of a total of 73 teams that were representing at the international championship.
The list of individual athletes:
WHITE / Adult / Male / Rooster Brandon Hunnicutt
WHITE / Adult / Male / Rooster Jakob Williams
WHITE / Adult / Male / Light Feather James Moseley
WHITE / Adult / Male / Feather Parker Sass
WHITE / Adult / Male / Middle Samuel Norton
BLUE / Adult / Male / Light Feather Cody Keers
BLUE / Adult / Male / Light Feather Josh Sipes
BLUE / Adult / Male / Light Aaron Hines
BLUE / Adult / Male / Middle Dag Gay
BLUE / Adult / Male / Ultra Heavy Danny Hellmann
BLUE / Master / Male / Middle Trent Sikes
BLUE / Master / Male / Heavy James Owens
BLUE / Master / Male / Heavy JR Gay
PURPLE / Adult / Male / Heavy Austin Avera
PURPLE / Adult / Male / Heavy Dustin Waters
PURPLE / Master / Male / Feather John Rodgers
PURPLE / Senior 1 / Male / Middle Harry West
BROWN / Senior 1 / Male / Heavy Michael Sergi
In a facebook post addressed to his students, head instructor Michael Sergi said, “I’m proud of the way our guys competed and represented. I was very proud of the poise and confidence that each of you had in your matches. You not only represented well on the mats you represented well off of the mats. Your sportsmanship and respect for the other competitors/spectators deserves just as much attention. There were too many outstanding things that took place competitively for me to mention in this post. Know that your effort and attitude was judged way more than the results of your matches regardless of the outcome.
What must be addressed are the many thanks and words of appreciation for everyone involved. I appreciate the courage and commitment to the guys that competed this weekend. Each of you stepped up big. Without you we wouldn’t have achieved such a level of success. A big thank you to the team members that took the time to travel to Atlanta and support those competing. I want to mention all of your names, but there are too many to list. You guys are the best and your presence meant so much. Another big thank you to the family and friends that supported us back home. You play a big part of our success too. Another big thank you to Professor Marcio Cruz. Your guidance and words regarding your expectations for the team are motivating for all of us to set higher goals and accomplish bigger things.”
Congratulations to the Serg BJJ team, Michael Sergi and Professor Marcio Cruz in leading the team to their victories.
More information about Serg BJJ can be found at www.SergBJJ.comCOMMERCE CITY, Colo. – A familiar and welcome face was back on the field at Colorado Rapids training on Monday.
Midfielder Dillon Powers practiced and looks set to return from a two-game absence with bursitis in his right knee when the Rapids travel to face the San Jose Earthquakes on Wednesday (10:30 pm ET, MLS Live).
“I’m planning on playing Wednesday,” Powers told MLSsoccer.com. “I think [my knee] is pretty close to 100 percent.”
The 2013 MLS Rookie of the Year felt discomfort during the Rapids’ scoreless draw with San Jose in Colorado last month and took the next few days off before practicing for the first time last week. But Rapids head coach Pablo Mastroeni didn’t want to rush Powers, who has also battled knee tendonitis this season, back from injury, so he left him out of his second straight game in Colorado’s 1-0 win over the LA Galaxy on Saturday night.
“I think he’s going to be available for the game,” Mastroeni told reporters after practice on Monday. “His fitness at this point is still up in the air, but I’m excited to have him back as an option, a guy that I think will inject a bit of life into the group.”
While it looks like he’ll be available, Powers might not be ready for a full 90 minutes yet after losing conditioning during his absence. But for a Rapids squad that’ll be without attacking midfielder Vicente Sánchez’s services for Wednesday’s clash (he hurt his right knee in the first half of Saturday’s win), the return of their influential attacking midfielder will be highly welcomed.
“I’ll be ready to go,” Powers said. “I did three full trainings and two [halves]. I’ll be ready to go if I have to.”
Chris Bianchi covers the Colorado Rapids for MLSsoccer.com.To make no-fail yogurt in Instant Pot, or your favorite yogurt maker in just three steps, sanitation, inoculation and incubation. None of these steps can be skipped!
You can use any kind of milk you like, I prefer to use whole cow’s milk. See my tips at the bottom of this page for getting extra-thick yogurt!
Step 1: Sanitation
Ensure that all of the equipment, containers and utensils to be used in the yogurt-making process are carefully cleaned. This ensures that no other bacteria compete with the yogurt starter during the incubation.
If you’re making the yogurt directly in Instant Pot’s stainless steel container, sanitize the cooker by running Instant Pot on the pressure steam program for one minute with 1 1/2 cups of water. Set the valve on the lid to “Sealing” push the [steam] button and then the [-] button until you get down to one minute. When the program is finished, release the pressure and then pour out the water. Then, scald the milk by pushing [yogurt] button and [adjust] until the screen says “Boil” for the DUO model; for the DUO Plus, push the [yogurt] button, until the screen says “Boil” (there is no adjust button); and, for the ULTRA choose the [yogurt] program, and then select the recommended Temperature under “more” (181°F).
For all models, let Instant Pot bring the milk to a boil until the screen says “Yogt”.
If you’re going to make yogurt in little jars, anyway, you can sanitize the jars and scald the milk at the same time (as shown in the video). Add a cup of water and the steamer basket into Instant Pot. Pour the milk in the jars and place the jars in the cooker. Set the valve on the lid to “Sealing” push the [steam] button and then the [-] button until you get down to one minute. When the program is finished push [cancel] to turn off the instant pot and let it cool down naturally.
For both milk that has been scalded in the pot or little jars, wait until the yogurt cools down to at least 115°F/46°C before proceeding to the next step. That can take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour (make sure to take the temperature with a clean thermometer). If you don’t have a thermometer handy, you’ll want to wait until the jars are cool enough to handle.
Step 2: Inoculation
To the scalded milk, add the yogurt inoculate according to package instructions or, use a high-quality plain yogurt with live active cultures. Once you get going, you can use the yogurt from a previous batch to make the next- as long as it’s under two weeks old. Measurements do not need to be exact, but you’ll want to aim for about one teaspoon per cup (250ml) of milk.
Mix the inoculate or yogurt into the milk until it dissolves completely (as shown in the video).
Step 3: Incubation
Close the lid with the pressure valve in any position or place the freshly cleaned glass lid to run the yogurt program by pressing [Yogurt] for the DUO model; for the DUO Plus, push the [yogurt] button, until the screen says “08:00”; and, for the ULTRA choose the [yogurt] program, and then select the recommended Temperature under “med” (107°F).
For all models, the default time is 8 hours, and I’ve had great results with this time but you can adjust the time by pressing the [+] or [-] buttons to get different effects.
Longer time will produce a more tart yogurt. Most yogurt strains will begin to solidify after bout 6 hours – for less tart results check to see if the milk has already solidified after this time.
When the program is finished the letters “Yogt” will appear in the display.
Storage
Top the jars with clean lids, or pour the contents of the inner pot into a clean container, and refrigerate for up to two weeks.
Extra-thick Greek-Style Yogurt
There are three ways to make a thicker yogurt.
Nonfat Milk Powder – add 1/2 teaspoon of milk powder per cup of milk at the beginning of the process. Boil Milk a little longer – during the scalding process, boil the milk for an extra 10 minutes. When scalding milk directly in the stainless steel insert, simply run the scalding program (Boil) one or two extra times depending on the thickness desired. Strain the Yogurt – after the yogurt making process is complete. Pour the yogurt into a cloth-lined fine strainer that is positioned over a bowl. Place the whole set-up in the refrigerator for 4-6 hours depending on the desired thickness.
See Also:The Wall Street Journal's editorial board on Friday advised Republican lawmakers to ignore recent attacks from President Trump and to pursue an agenda independent from the administration.
To keep a majority in 2018, Republicans must "fulfill their legislative promises" with or without Trump's support, the editorial says.
"Republicans in Congress need to think of themselves as governing with an independent President — if they don’t already. This doesn’t mean joining Democrats as 'the Resistance.' But it does mean acting on their own to fulfill their legislative promises with or without the support of Mr. Trump," the Journal's editorial board wrote. "If the President goes his own way, at least Republicans can point to votes for legislation that they put on his desk."
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The editorial comes in light of Trump's stepped up attacks on Republican lawmakers and the looming threat of a government shutdown this fall.
Trump has publicly feuded with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Addison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellWhite House pleads with Senate GOP on emergency declaration Senate Dems seek to turn tables on GOP in climate change fight Pence meets with Senate GOP for 'robust' discussion on Trump declaration MORE (R-Ky.), criticizing him for failing to pass an ObamaCare repeal bill and blaming him and House Speaker Paul Ryan Paul Davis RyanBrexit and exit: A transatlantic comparison Five takeaways from McCabe’s allegations against Trump The Hill's 12:30 Report: Sanders set to shake up 2020 race MORE (R-Wis.) over the coming debt ceiling fight, which Trump called a "mess."
Trump has pointed the finger at Republican leadership for failing to score more legislative victories and added pressure on lawmakers to avoid a government shutdown, raise the debt ceiling and get tax reform — a longtime GOP promise — off the ground.
But Trump also threatened to shut down the government in order to secure funding for his proposed southern border wall while speaking during a rally in Phoenix on Tuesday.
"Build that wall. Now the obstructionist Democrats would like us not to do it, but believe me if we have to close down our government, we're building that wall," Trump said Tuesday.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board said a shutdown fight over the border wall would do nothing to help Republicans and that lawmakers should ignore the added pressure from Trump to ensure a 2018 majority.
"The GOP should pass a budget that has as many of its priorities as possible, and more money for border enforcement ought to satisfy the immigration restrictionists. The physical wall is Mr. Trump’s personal preoccupation. He can veto a bill without it, but then he’d be responsible for the shutdown," the Journal wrote.
"Legislative success—especially on tax reform—is the best way Republicans can protect themselves from any Trump undertow in 2018."In this study we examined associations between young adults' drinking patterns and social status within their natural drinking groups (NDGs) and assessed gender differences in these relationships. Same-sex NDGs (n = 104) on route to a bar district were recruited and completed a peer-nominated measure of within-NDG status. In a follow-up online survey, participants (n = 293; 174 men and 119 women) reported their usual drinking pattern within the past year. Hierarchical Linear Modeling revealed that men who engaged in more frequent heavy episodic drinking (HED) (both for 5 + and 8 + drinks in one sitting) and women who drank more frequently were nominated as occupying higher-status positions within their NDGs compared to their peers who drank less. Further, for both men and women, drinking more than one's peers during one's heaviest drinking occasion in the past year was also associated with higher within-NDG status. These findings suggest that higher social status is associated with riskier drinking patterns and have important implications for prevention programming.The Motorola X Phone is rumored to be the first Android device jointly developed by Google and Motorola in the post-acquisition era, but its existence has been mostly speculation…until now. A job listing posted to LinkedIn by Motorola Mobility is looking for a Senior Director of Product Management to work directly on the X Phone project. And, yes, they indeed refer to it by that name.
Motorola is seeking a qualified individual to head up the development and execution of a “next generation smartphone platform,” but don’t expect to find any details on the phone buried within the text of the listing. The outline of desired skills and experience speaks mostly in generic terms about mobile product development. Sorry, but we aren’t going to learn the processor spec or display size by scouring Moto’s wanted ad.
The odd thing about the listing is it reads as though development of the X Phone is still in the early stages. That wouldn’t necessarily jive with rumors that Google could launch the device as soon as their I/O developer conference, but, again, it’s nearly impossible to glean anything from a basic job description. The fact that they are just beginning the hiring process for a product manager seems rather telling, though.
Check out the listing in its entirety over at the source below.
Update: The listing has been pulled, but here’s a screen grab from LinkedIn:
[via LinkedIn |Thanks, VaxHeadroom!]Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Alvin Greene released this video. Mr. Greene tells us that he did not make this video — but he’s thrilled with it.
“That’s a hit video isn’t it?,” he said when reached at his home in Manning. Asked if he made it, he hemmed and said: “No, we didn’t do that, but it’s good enough to pass on.”
CNN reported that a producer in San Francisco named Jay Friedman made the video, inspired by a group of friends who were “goofing off.”
Update: We’ve just heard from Justin Cass, a 23-year-old freelance copywriter who lives in Brooklyn, who made the Alvin Greene video (he says Mr. Friedman wrote the music). The two are Twitter friends, fascinated by Mr. Greene and what he says is “the big unanswered question” of how he won the Democratic primary.
Another unanswered question: Why so much LeBron James footage in the video? Mr. Cass said he wanted to “fill space” because he couldn’t bring himself to just end it, but he also found the footage a “good contrast to how Greene looks in interviews — vacant and lethargic — and I thought it would be a nice climax.”
Why do the video in Mr. Greene’s name? “I thought it would be amusing,” Mr. Cass said, noting that he tried to match what he called the “do-it-yourself aesthetic” of the Greene campaign.
He told us to “be on the look-out for more great releases” from him and Mr. Friedman. Fair warning!
Alvin Greene, the Democratic candidate for Senate in South Carolina, who emerged at a public campaign event for the first time last weekend, is now out with his first campaign video. The video, called, “Alvin Green Is On the Scene,” is a 3-minute hip-hop mix, featuring extensive footage of LeBron James — perhaps an allusion to how Mr. Greene intends to make the Nov. 2 election a slam dunk.
Mr. Greene credits himself as producer, director and editor, and lists “Dad” as “first camera” and himself as “second camera.” Music, the credits say, is by “MC Grassroots feat, The Real Americans, mixxed by Defeat Demint Posse” (with the double-x in mixed and that reference to his Republican opponent, Senator Jim DeMint).
Warning: “I say ‘Alvin,’ you say ‘Greene,’” may be ringing in your ears for days after tuning in — and Mr. Greene can only hope that if you live in South Carolina, it will remain with you as you go into the voting booth in November.Many open-source developers were happy when Apple announced that it was open-sourcing its popular Swift language. They weren't so happy, however, when Apple claimed it was also "the first major computer company to make Open Source a key part of its strategy."
Ah, I don't think so.
Many older open-source programmers think, with reason, that's nonsense.
True, Apple has used open-source software for years, but that's not the same thing as making open-source development "a key part of its strategy." It would be more correct to say that Apple was the first major company to take advantage of open source.
Historically, Apple grows its software from open-source seeds, but the company's developers rarely contribute much code back.
The prime example of this is the Mac operating system. OS X is based on Darwin, a BSD Unix. Darwin started in 1996 with Steve Jobs' NeXTStep. Along the way to its official first release Cheetah in 2001, Mac OS X picked up a Mach 3.0-based microkernel that incorporated some of FreeBSD.
Instead of encouraging others to work on Darwin, which by itself isn't a working operating system, Apple dumped chunks of code weeks or months after each version of Mac OS X is released. For example, Apple released 10.11 "El Capitan", on September 30, 2015, but the latest OS X source code still isn't available.
This is not how open-source development works.
The result is that the Apple-sponsored group that tried to turn Darwin into a working operating system, OpenDarwin, gave up trying in 2006. Its leaders wrote that the project had failed because of a lack of "availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives, difficulty building and tracking sources" and the resulting lack of interest from its community.
Today, PureDarwin is still trying to get it to work. But, with over a dozen show-stoppers, you won't see it anytime soon... or perhaps ever.
Other projects, such as WebKit, the web browser engine, are true open-source projects, but Apple has done little to support them. For instance, Google forked WebKit with Blink in 2013, and, without Google's developers, WebKit's development pace fell by 60 percent.
The rising tension between IoT and ERP systems The Internet of Things is the new frontier. However, generations of ERP systems were not designed to handle global networks of sensors and devices. Read More
Still other Apple open-source programs, such as CUPS, the Unix network printing system, came from outside the company. In CUPS's case, it was bought by Apple in 2007. At least with CUPS the project is still active and open.
What you get when you put it all together is that Apple is much more of an open-source user than a leader. So, who was the first "major" company to support open source? Well, you can argue it was Red Hat, founded in 1994; German Linux power SUSE, which got its start in 1996; or Corel, which in 1999 unsuccessfully released the first desktop Linux for the mainstream. But if you want to talk about really big companies supporting open-source I think the winner has to be IBM supporting Linux with a billion bucks in 2000. Even if you consider Mac OS X an open-source success, IBM beat Apple to the punch.
Apple, seeing which way the wind was blowing, made a rare public relations retreat. Instead of claiming to be the first open-source leader, it now reads: "'Open-source software is at the heart of Apple platforms and developer tools, and Apple continues to contribute and release significant quantities of open-source code."
That's still an exaggeration, but it's not the whopper that Apple had claimed earlier.
Indeed, Apple, far more so than Microsoft, which is now an open-source believer, is the most proprietary computer company still in business today. Some day Apple may be a real open-source leader, but that day is still far off.
Related Stories:Wendy Davis, Beth Shipp: Bathroom Bills Are Part of the War on Women
It was nearly one year ago that millions of Americans celebrated a milestone in the march toward equality. On June 26, 2015, America became a slightly more perfect union, as our Supreme Court affirmed the constitutional right of same-sex couples to marry. It was a historic moment, one that was celebrated by millions of Americans — a recognition that we were moving forward in the fight for equality for all.
But those celebrations had barely ended when the far right sought to undo these victories at the state and local level. Almost immediately, right-wing activists began to wage smaller wars and incremental battles: launching an onslaught of so-called religious freedom bills, “bathroom bills” and prohibitions on local nondiscrimination ordinances. Our opponents are candid about their goals — groups like the anti-LGBT legal nonprofit Liberty Counsel readily admit that they are looking to roll back advances in equality for LGBT Americans. In fact, that’s exactly what Liberty Counsel and other anti-LGBT groups promise to do in fundraising emails to supporters.
This chipping away at hard-fought gains is a battle tactic that should be familiar to us all, part and parcel of what has propelled the anti-choice movement ever since the court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973. In the choice movement, we see targeted regulations of abortion providers — laws that impose burdensome and unnecessary rules on abortion providers in an attempt to drive doctors out of business and make abortion care more expensive and difficult to obtain —forced ultrasounds, mandatory waiting periods, and insurance limitations. This tactic has been alarmingly successful, making it harder and harder each year for women in numerous states to access their constitutional right to safe, legal abortion procedures.
This piece-by-piece dismantling of constitutional protections, for LGBT Americans and for reproductive rights, is playing out simultaneously almost everywhere we look. In the past few weeks alone, we’ve seen legislation advance on both these battlefronts nationwide. Lawmakers in North Carolina, Mississippi, and Kansas have moved to restrict LGBT rights, while in Indiana, Oklahoma, and South Carolina, |
We set up a new game, enabled commissioner mode, and let ‘er rip. (Want to download the league and continue where it left off? We’ve uploaded it for that purpose. (Warning: The file is over 300MB.))
Keep in mind the fact that just because these players could be on their new clubs all year doesn’t mean that they couldn’t get hurt, they couldn’t have poor seasons, they couldn’t get traded, and so forth. Remember: Anything can happen in baseball.
Final Regular Season Standings
The rejuvenated Toronto Blue Jays powered their way to 93 wins and the best record in the American League, thanks to the second-most home runs in the AL. David Price anchored the rotation with a 17-9 record and a 3.43 ERA. However, the Tampa Bay Rays were nipping at their heels with 92 wins – They flipped the Toronto script with a pitching-heavy strategy led by Nate Karns’ 16-win season.
In the National League, the Los Angeles Dodgers posted Major League Baseball’s best record with 102 wins. Zach Greinke won 17 games while Clayton Kershaw and Alex Wood each accumulated 15 victories. The Chicago Cubs had the second-best record in the NL with 95 wins thanks to a balanced attack, and having Kris Bryant on the roster from Opening Day certainly didn’t hurt Chicago’s chances.
Final Regular Season Stats
The Playoffs
Wild Card Round
The Boston Red Sox carried a 9-5 lead into the bottom of the seventh inning of their Wild Card play-in game against the Tampa Bay Rays and survived a late rally to win, 9-8.
Over in the National League, Madison Bumgarner led the San Francisco Giants to a 4-1 win over the St. Louis Cardinals, pitching six strong innings before turning the game over to the bullpen for three shutout frames. San Francisco’s relievers allowed just one hit and two walks.
Division Series
The Boston Red Sox downed the Toronto Blue Jays, three games to one, in their Division Series, thanks to a pair of wins by Wade Miley. Meanwhile, the Cleveland Indians spotted the Oakland A’s the first game of their series before ripping off three straight victories.
The San Francisco Giants faced their long-time nemesis, the Los Angeles Dodgers, and bested them in five games. The series was a back-and-forth battle that saw Bumgarner again turn in a sparkling performance for one of their three wins, while LA’s Kershaw continued his odd tendency to underperform in the playoffs: He was 0-1 with 14 innings pitched and a 5.79 ERA, despite allowing just one walk and whiffing 16 batters.
The last division contest featured the Chicago Cubs taking care of the Washington Nationals in four games. Jake Arrieta led the way with two wins and a 1.29 ERA in the series.
League Championship Series
Cleveland downed Boston in six games in the ALCS. Corey Kluber was 0-2 with an 8.44 ERA, but Carlos Carrasco hurled 13 2/3 shutout innings in his two starts and Jose Ramirez hit.370 in the series, earning himself MVP honors.
Meanwhile, the Chicago Cubs had their die-hard fans believing the “curse” was finally over as they took a 3-1 NLCS lead against the San Francisco Giants. However, Madison Bumgarner had other plans, tossing eight innings of shutout ball to best Jon Lester and win Game 5, 1-0. He even accounted for the game’s only run with a home run.
In Game 6, San Francisco scored six runs against Travis Wood in the first inning en route to a 10-6 victory, and in Game 7, they broke a 3-3 tie with runs in the sixth and eighth innings for a 5-3 win and a World Series berth. Kris Bryant, Dexter Fowler, and Khris Davis (acquired in a June trade) were retired in order in the bottom of the ninth in front of a stunned Wrigley Field crowd of 40,930.
World Series
The San Francisco Giants thumbed their nose at that “even year, win it all; odd year, miss the playoffs” nonsense and repeated as champions by defeating Cleveland in five games. Bumgarner was 2-0 with a 2.51 ERA, Sergio Romo saved three of the four wins, and Joe Panik and Gregor Blanco both hit over.300 in the series. Corey Kluber turned in a 1.50 ERA in his two starts, but Cleveland’s offense scored only 10 runs in the series.The Norwegian Lundehund is a small rectangular and agile Spitz breed with unique characteristics not found in any other breed. Originating on remote islands of arctic Norway, the dog was used to wrestle and retrieve live puffin birds from the crevices of steep vertical cliffs. To enable the dog to climb, descend, and brake on these cliffs, unique structural characteristics have evolved and must be present as they define this breed: a minimum of six toes on each foot and elongated rear foot pads; an elastic neck that allows the head to bend backward to touch the spine, letting the dog turn around in narrow puffin bird caves; and shoulders flexible enough to allow the front legs to extend flat to the side in order to hug the cliffs. This shoulder structure produces a peculiar rotary movement. Finally, the ears close and fold forward or backward to protect from debris. The temperament is alert but not expected to be outgoing toward strangers.Sauropods like Brachiosaurus and Diplodocus were the biggest beasts to ever roam the Earth. And these dinosaurs had enormously long necks. Which poses an anatomical problem: they needed to move their necks side to side and up and down to graze, but that requires lots of muscles. And muscles are heavy. So how did they keep their heads from dragging on the ground?
It looked like their secret was thin riblike bones—some up to 10 feet long—that ran the length of the sauropods' necks. Because when researchers examined slices of those bones under the microscope, they found that they aren't normal bone at all—they're ossified tendons. That’s according to a study in the journal Biology Letters. [Nicole Klein, Andreas Christian and P. Martin Sander, Histology shows that elongated neck ribs in sauropod dinosaurs are ossified tendons]
The researchers think those long tendons may have allowed the dinos to shift muscle mass from their necks onto their bodies—giving them a sort of "remote control" over their necks, while making the neck lighter and more flexible. Not too different, in fact, from how herons do it today.
And that, the authors say, may have been the sauropods' key innovation. Helping them to graze more efficiently, and stay neck and neck with other dinos.
—Christopher Intagliata
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]Two researchers — Johannes Kopf from Microsoft, and Dani Lischinski from The Hebrew University — have successfully created an algorithm that depixelizes and upscales low-resolution 8-bit “pixel art” into lush vector graphics. The algorithm identifies pixel-level details to accurately shade the new image — but more importantly, the algorithm can create smooth, curved contour lines from only-connected-on-the-diagonal single pixels. Look at the Super Mario World dolphin below, and compare it to the original source sprite below that: the results speak for themselves.
To achieve such beautiful images, the researchers use a complex blend of pixel analysis and spline curves. These approaches in specific, and vectorization of bitmaps in general, are nothing new — Adobe Illustrator does it quite well — but in this case, because the researchers were only working with 8-bit pixel art, they could create a very specialized algorithm. First and foremost, they can assume that every pixel is important: early 8-bit sprites were all masterfully hand-crafted by artists, so it’s safe to assume that every pixel is significant. If a pixel is all alone in a sea of another color, it’s an important feature, not an anomaly. Then the algorithm works out which pixels are connected to each other — in a 2×2 checkerboard pattern, should the diagonals form a line, or not? Finally, these pixel cells (groups) are re-shaped, smoothed with spline curves, and then rendered as edges or shaded areas.
For a better idea of just how accurate their algorithm is, you should look at the other (nearly all Nintendo-related) samples in the Depixelizing Pixel Art research paper. The algorithm isn’t always successful, though — and the paper includes a hilarious version of the “Doom face” to illustrate its shortcomings. The other problem is that the Depixelizing Pixel Art approach always smooths images, even when an object shouldn’t necessarily be smooth. For example, are Space Invaders really meant to be cute and round? Maybe, in the creator’s eye, they had long, angular, razor-sharp mandibles and straight-out antennae!
While the researchers’ conclusion admits that the algorithm is computationally complex, some optimization could eventually lead to emulator that can upscale our our favorite retro games in real time. It’s unlikely — and purists are no doubt nervously tugging at their beards at the thought — but Nintendo could also license the technology for its next-generation console! At long last, we might be able to play Super Mario Bros. on a big screen without stretching our beloved plumber’s pixels to breaking point.
Read more at Depixelizing Pixel ArtQuote
(Yes I know the PTS isn't available to the public at the moment, but given the size of some of the game updates the over the last few months since we last had an open PTS, I'd rather get some of that patched before you decide to only add it to the launcher on the day you re-open it... ) Any idea when there will a button, like in the old launcher to select the PTS server, since it still seems to be an option to be available in the options screen, or are you abandoning open PTS from now on?(Yes I know the PTS isn't available to the public at the moment, but given the size of some of the game updates the over the last few months since we last had an open PTS, I'd rather get some of that patched before you decide to only add it to the launcher on the day you re-open it...I thought Jeffrey Goldberg’s stories on his personal “resistance” to the new TSA dick-measuring machines were pretty funny, and they coincide with my own experiences that I mentioned a couple weeks ago on my flight to Orlando. I mentioned at the time that I had an infuriating run-in with security, and realize now that I forgot to tell you about it.
I actually wasn’t paying attention as I was funneled into the new body imaging device- I was already pissed off after the shuttle service drove me around the Pittsburgh airport for 45 minutes and then more agitated about taking my shoes off, and didn’t even notice that I was going into the new machines. Just as an aside, I can not tell you how much it pisses me off that because one simpleton tried to ignite his shoes, I have to ruin my socks at every god damned airport in the country for the rest of my adult life. But back to the story. Because I was busy fuming internally, I was in the machine before I realized what was going on (always my observant self), and the guy told me I had to raise my hands over my head. Quick problem- I can’t. So I told the guy. “Look, I can lift this arm this high, and I can lift this arm this high, but I had surgery on one and I have tendonitis and a probable rotator cuff tear and need to have surgery in the other, and I just can’t get them both over my head like that.” That pissed him off, and he told me to try, and I asked him “Why can’t I just go through the metal detector (which was no more than three feet to my left.)?” After a few moments, he waved me over to it, at which point three screaming TSA agents freaked the fuck out because I had backed out of the dick-scanning device. “What are you doing? Get back in there! Etc.”
“But the guy told me to come over here”
“What guy?”
“Him!”
After a few seconds of panic, they sent me through the machine, and I had to go through several times because something was setting it off, and we realized it was my belt. Then I got the pat down, which really didn’t bother me that much, and I have discovered that as they near your nuts if you loudly say “Oh baby that’s how I like it” they quickly move on to another area.
At any rate, the entire damned thing was ridiculous and offensive, and I can’t imagine the government really things it is making us any safer. My experience was not that big of a deal when compared to what some went through, but it is just pointless. It really is security theatre. Which makes me wonder. Who makes these machines? Who is profiting from this nonsense? Where is the money going?
And what is crazy is the TSA agents seem more afraid they are not following the rules correctly than they are of actual terrorists. It is all just a big game, a cruel joke on us by Bin Laden.
And btw- my sinus infection and the desire to just avoid flying altogether caused me to just say to hell with it and cancel my San Francisco trip. I don’t want to put up with the nonsense, and I didn’t think it made much sense to fly across the country to pay 200 dollars a night to drink alka seltzer cold medicine. Oh, well.
*** Update ***
And I see if I would read this blog, I would note that Mistermix already has pointed out the money angle. I suck. This whole post is pointless.: Six terrorists, including the nephew on 26/11 attacks mastermind Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, were gunned down in north Kashmir's Bandipora district on Saturday during an encounter. A Garud commando of the Indian Air Force (IAF) was also martyred in the incident.Security forces cordoned off and launched a search operation in Chandergeer village in Hajin area of the district after receiving specific intelligence input about the presence of militants in the area, a police official said.The search operation resulted in an encounter when the militants hiding there fired on the search party of the security forces, who retaliated."Five terrorists have been killed in an ongoing encounter at Hajin," Srinagar-based Defence spokesman Col Rajesh Kalia said in Srinagar.An IAF Garud commando was killed and an Army soldier was also injured in the encounter, he said. The Garud Commando Force is the special forces unit of the IAF.The operation was on and further details were awaited, Kalia said.Transatomic Power, an MIT spinoff, is developing a nuclear reactor that it estimates will cut the overall cost of a nuclear power plant in half. It’s an updated molten-salt reactor, a type that’s highly resistant to meltdowns. Molten-salt reactors were demonstrated in the 1960s at Oak Ridge National Lab, where one test reactor ran for six years, but the technology hasn’t been used commercially.
The new reactor design, which so far exists only on paper, produces 20 times as much power for its size as Oak Ridge’s technology. That means relatively small, yet powerful, reactors could be built less expensively in factories and shipped by rail instead of being built on site like conventional ones. Transatomic also modified the original molten-salt design to allow it to run on nuclear waste.
High costs, together with concerns about safety and waste disposal, have largely stalled construction of new nuclear plants in the United States and elsewhere (though construction continues in some countries, including China). Japan and Germany even shut down existing plants after the Fukushima accident two years ago (see “Japan’s Economic Troubles Spur a Return to Nuclear” and “Small Nukes Get Boost”). Several companies are trying to address the cost issue by developing small modular reactors that can be built in factories. But these are typically limited to producing 200 megawatts of power, whereas conventional reactors produce more than 1,000 megawatts.
Transatomic says it can split the difference, building a 500-megawatt power plant that achieves some of the cost savings associated with the smaller reactor designs. It estimates that it can build a plant based on such a reactor for $1.7 billion, roughly half the cost per megawatt of current plants. The company has raised $1 million in seed funding, including some from Ray Rothrock, a partner at the VC firm Venrock. Although its cofounders, Mark Massie and Leslie Dewan, are still PhD candidates at MIT, the design has attracted some top advisors, including Regis Matzie, the former CTO of the major nuclear power plant supplier Westinghouse Electric, and Richard Lester, the head of the nuclear engineering department at MIT.
The new reactor is expected to save money not only because it can be built in a factory rather than on site but also because it adds safety features—which could reduce the amount of steel and concrete needed to guard against accidents—and because it runs at atmospheric pressure rather than the high pressures required in conventional reactors.
A conventional nuclear power plant is cooled by water, which boils at a temperature far below the 2,000 °C at the core of a fuel pellet. Even after the reactor is shut down, it must be continuously cooled by pumping in water. The inability to do that is what caused the problems at Fukushima: hydrogen explosions, releases of radiation, and finally meltdown.
Using molten salt as the coolant solves some of these problems. The salt, which is mixed in with the fuel, has a boiling point significantly higher than the temperature of the fuel. The reactor has a built-in thermostat—if it starts to heat up, the salt expands, spreading out the fuel and slowing the reactions. That gives the mixture a chance to cool off. In the event of a power outage, a stopper at the bottom of the reactor melts and the fuel and salt flow into a holding tank, where the fuel spreads out enough for the reactions to stop. The salt then cools and solidifies, encapsulating the radioactive materials. “It’s walk-away safe,” says Dewan, the company’s chief science officer. “If you lose electricity, even if there are no operators on site to pull levers, it will coast to a stop.”
The new design improves on the original molten-salt reactor by changing the internal geometry and using different materials. Transatomic is keeping many of the design details to itself, but one change involves eliminating the graphite that made up 90 percent of the volume of the Oak Ridge reactor. The company has also modified conditions in the reactor to produce faster neutrons, which makes it possible to burn most of the material that is ordinarily discarded as waste. A conventional reactor produces about 20 metric tons of high-level waste a year, and that material needs to be stored for 100,000 years. The 500-megawatt Transatomic reactor will produce only four kilograms of such waste a year, along with 250 kilograms of waste that has to be stored for a few hundred years.
Bringing the new reactor to market will be challenging. Although the basic idea of a molten-salt reactor has been demonstrated, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s certification process is set up around light-water reactors. The company will need the NRC to establish new regulations, especially since the commission must sign off on the idea of using less steel and concrete if the design’s safety features are to lead to real savings.
NRC spokesman Scott Burnell says that the commission is aware of Transatomic’s concept but that designs haven’t been submitted for review yet. He says that for the next few years, the NRC will be focused on certifying more conventional designs for small modular reactors. He says the certification process for Transatomic will take at least five years once the company submits a detailed design, with additional review needed specifically for issues related to fuel and waste management.
A detailed engineering design itself may be years away. The company’s next step is raising $5 million to run five experiments to help validate the basic design. Russ Wilcox, Transatomic’s CEO and the former CEO of E Ink, estimates that it will take eight years to build a prototype reactor—at a cost of $200 million. He says that’s less time than it took investors to get a return on E Ink, which was acquired for $450 million 13 years after the first investments in the company.
Even though it could take well over a decade for investors to get a return, venture funding isn’t out of the question, Ray Rothrock says. But he says the company will face many challenges. “The technology doesn’t bother me in the least,” he says. “I have confidence in the people. I wish someone would build this thing, because I think it would work. It’s all the other factors that make it daunting.”
The company’s biggest challenge might come from China, which is investing $350 million over five years to develop molten-salt reactors of its own. It plans to build a two-megawatt test reactor by 2020.Final Fantasy XV is a great game and is finally available on the Xbox One. As a player, you control the game’s main protagonist, Noctis Lucis Caelum. You will guide him as he explores the world around him on foot, using the party’s car “Regalia”, or on chocobos.
Gamers can use both the Regalia and Chocobos in battles if their connection to Noctis is strong enough. You can also use various objects around you to complete your missions.
Final Fantasy XV offers impressive graphics that will transport players into another realm. Unfortunately, not all gamers have been able to enjoy a smooth gaming experience to various technical issues.
Final Fantasy XV game bugs
1. FFXV won’t save data
Gamers report they can’t save game data due to the following error message: “Could not save data. Play will continue, but current settings are not saved.” Neither automatic nor manual saves work. Actions such as reinstalling the game or installing the day one patch don’t solve the problem.
I have the same error, but it’s on Xbox (Plz don’t get mad).
I have heaps of disk space (500GB), but no matter what I do, I cannot get it to save. DON’T DO THIS TO ME SQUARE ENIX, I HAVE WAITED LONG ENOUGH TO PLAY THIS
2. Font size is really small
One player points out that the game’s font size is extremely small, forcing gamers to get closer to their screens. Consoles gamers don’t usually sit near the display and the small font size makes it pretty hard for them to read the phrases and game texts.Donald Trump was mocked for suggesting Sweden had suffered a major terror attack, despite no evidence of one, and was having issues because of immigration, during a February speech.
But while the President was ridiculed for his seemingly misinformed comments, some believe the devastating attack in Stockholm on Friday shows he may have been on to something.
A stolen truck plowed through a crowd of unsuspecting shoppers in the nation's capital, killing four and wounding 15 more on Friday afternoon.
Police arrested a 39-year-old Uzbek national with a Stockholm home address, who had expressed support for ISIS online, for allegedly being involved in the terrorist attack.
Trump's comments were promptly dismissed as Sweden's last terrorist incident happened in 2010, but Friday's attack shows tensions and threats are real in the Scandinavian country.
Scroll down for video
A stolen truck plowed through a crowd in Stockholm, killing four and wounding 15 more on Friday. People were seen running for their lives after the truck crashed into Ahlens, a department store in Klarabergsgatan, at around 3pm local time
A man in scrubs was seen walking along the street with several bodies, which have been covered by blankets, behind him. At least four people have died and witnesses described the scene as a 'warzone'
In February, Trump said at a Florida rally that Sweden was 'having problems' and referenced a terrorist attack that never happened. Now people are wondering if he was right about the tensions and threats the country is facing due to immigration
Around 3pm local time on Friday, a hijacked beer truck plowed down pedestrians on Klarabergsgatan before crashing into a shopping center and bursting into flames.
Following the crash, armed terrorists were seen running into Stockholm's Central railway station and opening fire. Two people were also said to have been stabbed.
Men jumped out from inside the vehicle and opened fire before trying to stab pedestrians, witnesses said.
Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said in a news conference shortly following the deadly attack: 'Sweden has been attacked. This indicates that it is an act of terror.'
Almost seven weeks before, Trump possibly foreshadowed the harrowing events while speaking at a rally in Melbourne, Florida, in late February.
Trump clarified the next day he was referencing a Fox News report on immigrants and Sweden
The president was promptly mocked online for his comments. Former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt tweeted: 'Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking? Questions abound'
Trump said: 'You look at what's happening in Germany, you look at what's happening last night in Sweden.
'Sweden, who would believe this? Sweden. They took in large numbers. They're having problems like they never thought possible.'
He later clarified he was referencing a Fox News report.
Trump tweeted the next day: 'My statement as to what's happening in Sweden was in reference to a story that was broadcast on @FoxNews concerning immigrants & Sweden.'
People were quick to mock the president, as there was no terrorist attack on Sweden the night before he made his comments.
Even Former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt chimed in and tweeted: 'Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking? Questions abound.'
In the Stockholm attack, the back of the truck, sticking out of the shopping center, is seen here moments after ramming several people as they were out shopping
This image shows an injured person being carried from the chaotic scenes at Ahlens, a department store in Stockholm where the truck crashed
Now people have taken to Twitter to ask whether Trump was right all along about Sweden's problems with immigrants and terrorism.
One user wrote: 'How are people "shocked" and "saddened" by this truck attack in #Stockholm? This is nothing new and Trump warned everyone.'
Paul Joseph Watson, a popular British YouTube and radio personality, said: 'It seems that Trump has unfortunately been proven right about Sweden.' Twitter user Deena said: 'People mocked President Trump when he said Sweden was having issues with Radical Islamic terrorism. Turns out he's right again!'
People have taken to Twitter to ask whether Trump was right all along about Sweden's problems with immigrants and terrorism
Paul Joseph Watson, a popular British YouTube and radio personality, said: 'It seems that Trump has unfortunately been proven right about Sweden'
Some boasted that Trump was 'right again' following the harrowing attack
Twitter user Susie mentioned Trump's February comments and how Sweden officials responded to him calling him 'crazy'
Sweden was previously dubbed as the the safest place on Earth by politicians.
The most recent was a failed suicide bomber in 2010.
Trump's outspoken remarks drew a wave of international criticism but prompted renewed debate over Sweden’s refugee policy.
Some politicians say the country has struggled to deal with the huge numbers of migrants who have traveled there to enjoy the high quality of life.
The surge at the peak of Europe’s refugee crisis in 2015 saw a record 163,000 asylum applications in just one year.
The influx, to a country with a population of 10million, prompted officials to put in place additional checks at the country’s borders.
Since 2012 around 300 people have traveled from Sweden to join violent Islamist groups – making the country one of the largest contributors to terrorist cells in Europe.Summary
Update: Redis Configuration with Sidekiq.
Check out the link below for setting the Redis config if you are using Heroku.
https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq/wiki/Using-Redis#using-an-env-variable
You can set the Redis url using environment variables. This makes configuring Sidekiq on Heroku dead simple.
Set the REDIS_PROVIDER env var to the name of the env var containing the Redis server url. (Example with RedisGreen: set REDIS_PROVIDER=REDISGREEN_URL and Sidekiq will use the value of the REDISGREEN_URL env var when connecting to Redis.)
heroku config:set REDIS_PROVIDER=REDISTOGO_URL
You may also use the generic REDIS_URL which may be set to your own private Redis server.
sidekiq.yml --- :verbose : false :concurrency : 10 :pidfile : tmp/pids/sidekiq.pid :queues : - [critical, 2 ] - default - low production: :concurrency : 25 staging: :concurrency : 15
Terminal heroku addons:create redistogo:nano heroku config: set REDIS_PROVIDER=REDISTOGO_URL Create Procfile in web: bundle exec rails server -p $PORT worker: bundle exec sidekiq -e production -C config/sidekiq.yml heroku ps:scale worker=1
/lib/systemd/system/sidekiq.service [Unit] Description =sidekiq After =syslog.target network.target [Service] Type =simple WorkingDirectory =/home/deploy/ 060 -sidekiq- on -production ExecStart =/bin/bash -lc 'bundle exec sidekiq -e production -C config/sidekiq.yml' User =deploy Group =deploy UMask = 0002 RestartSec = 1 Restart =always StandardOutput =syslog StandardError =syslog SyslogIdentifier =sidekiq [Install] WantedBy =multi-user.targetEXCLUSIVE: The X-Files revival is one step closer to becoming a reality.
Fox is close to giving an official green-light to a revival of their iconic science fiction series, which originally aired between 1993 and 2002. Per sources, the network has settled on a “short-stack” order for the revival and while the exact size of the order is yet-to-be-determined, I’m told it will be less than ten episodes (though I can’t confirm the Daily Mail’s report that it will be six). It should be stressed, however, that talks with sister studio 20th Century Fox Television are still on-going.
As TVWise previously reported, the revival is aimed to close out the lingering storylines left by the series proper, which, much to the dismay of fans, were left unresolved by the second feature film I Want To Believe. I’m told that Fox landed on the “short order” for two reasons. The first being story requirements – a conclusion that execs came to after prolonged discussions with Chris Carter.
The second – and an equally important one – was scheduling. The feeling was that it would be easier for the always in demand Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny to schedule a block of time to shoot the revival with a short order. The duo, who were always committed to doing more X-Files, have, sources say, agreed to reprise their roles. It is understood than an offer has also gone out to Mitch Pileggi. Other key cast members will also return.
Still scheduling is a big factor – and one of the few remaining sticking points in getting an official pick up. The fact that Duchovny’s NBC drama Aquarius is an off-cycle Summer series helps, as does the fact that Gillian Anderson’s BBC series The Fall isn’t due to enter production on its just ordered third season until the end of this year. The hope is that production can get underway this Summer, but that is not certain at this stage.
Beyond the cast, Chris Carter is returning to the helm, will pen the scripts and will also serve as an executive producer on The X-Files revival. I have been unable to get a clear read on Frank Spotnitz’s involvement. Sources had indicated that having him return was Carter’s preference, but he recently committed to the third season of Tandem’s Crossing Lines, which is now filming in Europe.
An X-Files revival has been on the cards for months, with Fox finally confirming to reporters at the recent Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour that they were in talks for more X-Files. “Real progress” was made in the last month, after sources previously stated in January that Carter’s camp and Fox were “far apart” on terms. The new X-Files series follows in the footsteps of another key Fox franchise: 24 – which was successfully revived with 12 episode limited series Live Another Day.
It is hoped that the deal with the studio and other key players (including former members of the writing staff) will close soon and the X-Files revival will get that official green-light in the coming weeks. According to sources, Fox is aiming to make a “big announcement” just ahead of their upfront presentation in New York City this coming May. Representatives of both Fox and 20th Century Fox Television did not immediately respond to TVWise’s request for comment.On Wednesday morning, Texas Longhorns linebacker Malik Jefferson was a little bit incredulous that the 2016 recruiting cycle wasn't over yet following the commitment of the nation's No. 4 wide receiver, Devin Duvernay, but the 'Horns may not be done yet, as Baylor Bears offensive line signee Patrick Hudson had an interesting response to a fan's tweet:
The 2016 Under Armour All-American was one of a handful of Baylor signees to request a release from their binding National Letters of Intent when the Baylor scandal broke open with the release of Pepper Hamilton's Findings of Fact, but a report surfaced this week from Horn Sports that Hudson was having second thoughts:
We were told a couple of weeks ago that Hudson was starting to turn towards enrolling at Baylor for the second summer session. In talking to some people this week, we learned that the thought is picking up steam. Hudson might have been a victim of some scare tactics by the Waco staff, because the previous indications we received from his family stated that Hudson had no plans to enroll at Baylor. We are still waiting for official word on the LOI resolution, but it looks like Baylor could have saved themselves here.
Hudson's tweet doesn't exactly count as absolute confirmation of his intentions, but given how quiet he's been throughout his entire recruitment and general disinterest in using Twitter as a means of communicating information about his recruitment, it's hardly insignificant.
Depending on when the 6'5.5, 325-pounder submitted his request for his release, the 30-day period that Baylor has to respond is close to coming up. At that point, he'll know whether he needs to go through the NCAA appeals process in order to secure his release. Or perhaps he will simply decide to enroll in Waco for the second summer session.
Stay tuned, as there will should be some more conclusive movement in the coming days.Rep. Brian Mast: NFL anthem kneelers ‘should already be gone’
U.S. Rep. Brian Mast, R-Palm City, today sided with President Donald Trump and blasted the NFL and players who knelt in protest during the national anthem before Sunday’s games.
The protests were initiated by former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick last year to decry “a country that oppresses black people and people of color.”
They drew heightened attention after Trump in a Friday speech said: “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out. He’s fired. He’s fired!’”
Mast, a decorated Army combat veteran who lost both his legs after an IED blast in Afghanistan, weighed in on the issue in a Facebook post this afternoon.
“The NFL doles out penalties for celebrating a touchdown, but won’t require respect for our flag?” Mast wrote.
“I have taken a knee after jumping out of a helicopter as we looked for the enemy, taken a knee in front of the Soldiers Cross as we mourned a fallen brother and taken a knee in church. Any player who has taken a knee to protest this great country during its anthem should already be gone,” Mast said.
He concluded: “To all my brothers and sisters still serving overseas: we stand with you!”Leandro Damiao: Likely to leave Internacional, says De Moura
Spurs are long-term admirers of the 23-year-old, with Internacional having previously claimed they turned down a bid from the Premier League club in the January transfer window.
The highly-rated Brazil international is also thought to be attracting interest from Italy, with Napoli reportedly targeting him as a potential replacement for Edison Cavani, should he leave at the end of the season.
Damiao is currently contracted at Internacional until 2017 and reports in Brazil suggest the club would only part with him for upwards of €20million.
The Brazilian side's director of football, Luis Cesar Souto de Moura, admits it is expected he will be prised away in the summer due to the amount of interest being shown from abroad.
He told UOL: "Leandro Damiao is indeed the player that is most likely to leave Internacional, especially because foreign clubs are interested.
"Damiao is the player of the moment, everyone is seeing that. He is a great player, he's very special."Former congressman Todd Akin (R-M0.) said Thursday that he used a poor choice of words in 2012 when he suggested "legitimate rape" rarely causes pregnancy, but stood by his argument, asserting that he should have used slightly different wording.
Akin, whose 2012 Senate campaign was derailed by the controversy his remarks set off, argued on MSNBC's "The Daily Rundown" that he was using the language of law enforcement agencies.
"Legitimate rape is a law enforcement term. And it's abbreviation for legitimate case of rape," said Akin. The former congressman added, "If I had been choosing my words better, I should have said legitimate case of rape. And I have acknowledged that it is a poor choice of words."
Akin, as he has done in several media interviews in recent weeks, argued that his words were deliberately distorted.
"This is something that was intentionally misunderstood and twisted for political purposes," he said.
Akin is back in the spotlight promoting his new book, “Firing Back: Taking on the Party Bosses and Media Elite to Protect Our Faith and Freedom." Akin writes that he regrets apologizing for his "legitimate rape" comment in a television commercial.Campaigners cite stop and search as a key reason why 40% of those behind bars hail from BME background – a greater disproportion than in the US
A Guardian analysis of newly released government figures has revealed a shocking increase in the proportion of ethnic minority children and young people being held in the youth justice system.
The figures, issued by |
1Sbz8rtWe asked our contributors to send us their Best of 2016 lists. Many obliged! Thanks to all for doing this. Now onto 2017. -Eds.
Walter Biggins
1) Hugo Pratt, Corto Maltese: The Ethiopian (IDW)
2) Tom Hart, Rosalie Lightning (St. Martin's)
3) Ben Katchor, Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay (D&Q)
4) Michel Rabagliati, Paul Up North (BDang)
5) Moebius Library: The World of Edena (Dark Horse)
Honorable mentions:
John Porcellino, King-Cat #76 (John Porcellino)
Gilbert Hernandez, Garden of Flesh (Fantagraphics)
Lewis Trondheim and Keramidas, Mickey's Craziest Adventures (IDW)
Julie Doucet, Carpet Sweeper Tales (D&Q)
Notes: 3 of my 5 are reissues. Apparently, no women or no nonwhites made my cut until the honorable mentions. I suck. I'll do better next year.
Robert Boyd
2016 Favorites
My favorites from 2016. There are still a few on my “to read” pile that might make it—for example, The Greatest of Marlys would almost certainly have made it if I had read it in time.
They are in order from smallest to largest.
Endless Monsoon IV: Very Pleasant Transit Center by Sarah Welch. 56 pages, two-color risograph, 5” x 7”. This is a very slow-moving series about two young women trying to make their way in a world of somewhat straitened circumstances. The art is transmits the humid, sweaty feel of Houston very well.
Blammo number nine by Noah Van Sciver (Kilgore Books ). 44 pages, black and white comic book. The two long stories in here are classic '90s-style alternative comics stories—one is autobiographical (Van Sciver inadvertently offends a sensitive soul at the Center for Cartoon Studies and flashes back to his Mormon childhood) and the other a short story about a museum guard who starts to paint paintings in the style of long dead abstract painter being shown at the museum. Both stories are really good, and I liked especially have despite working in the museum, the museum guard is clearly doesn’t know the social etiquette of being in the art world. Van Sciver shows how difficult it is to cross the class divide because one must know the rules of the other side—it’s like a mini-lesson in Pierre Bourdieu.
What is Obscenity? The Story of a good for nothing artist and her pussy by Rokudenshiko (Koyama Press) 178 pages, 6” x 8.5” squarebound book combining color and black and white pages. This book combines articles and comics to tell the first-person story of a Japanese artist who spent time in jail for producing obscene art—specifically for providing digital file of her pussy for 3-D printing in a crowdfunding campaign. The comics here are straightforward and highly amusing, and her story is utterly incredible.
American Blood (Fantagraphics Books) 208 pages, 5.9” x 8.6” squarebound paperback book printed with purple ink. This book collects various self-contained stories that Marra self-published in his Traditional Comics line between 2009 and 2013, including The Incredibly Fantastic Adventures of Maureen Dowd. I had never read these comics before but they were an eye-opener. Funny, satirical, etc.—if someone could take the best drawings that male high-school stoners from 1976 until now drew on their desks and make comics out of them, they would approach this book in sheer awesomeness.
Scorched Earth by Tom Van Deusen (Kilgore Books ) 82 pages squarebound, 6” x 9”, black and white). There is a long tradition in narrative art of having utterly reprehensible cads as protagonists: Sebastian Dangerfield in The Gingerman, Harry Flashman in the Flashman books, Withnail in Withnail and I. And now in Scorched Earth, Tom Van Deusen can be added to that immortal parade of assholes. His genius twist on the time-honored genre is to make himself the hateful but hilarious protagonist.
Megg & Mogg in Amsterdam by Simon Hanselmann (Fantagraphics Books) 160 pages, full-color, hardcover. There seems to be a theme with my choices this year—books about self-absorbed partiers. The trip to Amsterdam happens only at the very end, and it’s not any different from their current existence—just colder and wetter. Werewolf Jones descends to new levels of depravity, including making money of his 10-year-old quasi-feral son’s cam shows. But the real annoyance is Owl, the only one who seems to have a job. I find this book repeatedly hilarious.
Demon volume 1 by Jason Shiga (First Second) 176 pages, black-and-white, paperback. The incredibly bloody story of Jimmy Yee, a man who commits suicide over and over. At first it reads like an epic case of gaslighting, but the actual explanation is weirder than I expected. A bizarre concept taken to a logical extreme in a very amusing, violent way.
Founding Fathers Funnies by Peter Bagge (Dark Horse Books) 86 pages, color and black and white, hardcover, 6.5 x 9 inches. I’ve loved Peter Bagge since Neat Stuff (see below) and loved these strips when they first appeared as back-up features in various Bagge comic books. They work best as short stand-alone stories, but I’m very glad to be able to read them collected into a book.
Blubber #2 by Gilbert Hernandez (Fantagraphic Books) 25 pages, 6.5 x 9 inches, black and white. Blubber is Gilbert Hernandez’s one-man anthology of superheroes and monsters fucking. When I read it, I wonder—why hasn’t this been the dominant genre in comics for years? It is my favorite comic book of 2016. I haven’t read issue 3 yet, so I have that to look forward to.
Nod Away by Joshua W. Cotter (Fantagraphics Books ) 240 pages, 7.8 x 10.2 inches, black and white. This ambitious science fiction story (it’s meant to be the first volume of seven) is packed full of ideas and characters and great artwork. Unfortunately it ends on a cliffhanger. Now I kind of wish I had waited until all seven volumes were out before I read it!
The Eltingville Club by Evan Dorkin (Dark Horse Comics ) 144 pages, black and white and color, 8 x 11 inches. These stories have appeared in various anthology comics, including Dorkin’s one-man anthology Dork, since 1994. The Eltingville Club started at the high tide of Wizard magazine, which at the time seemed like the ne plus ultra of degenerate fandom. Dorkin captured that vibe in his dense, hilarious comics. But fandom, if anything, managed to reach new lows, particularly regarding women fans—see “fake geek girls,” Gamergate, and incessant online and IRL harassment—and in bringing his Eltingville Club members to the present, Dorkin drags them even lower than where they started. It’s cruelly fun to read.
Peplum by Blutch (New York Review Comics ) 160 pages, 8.7” x 11.4”, black and white. A picaresque adventure story set on the frontiers of the Roman world, it makes me imagine what David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life would have been like if drawn by Frank Robbins or Alberto Breccia. Peplum is the mysterious story of a young imposter pretending to be a Roman nobleman Publius Cimber is part of an expedition that has recovered a woman frozen in ice. The ice miraculously does not melt despite its long, eventful journey. “Cimber” loves her, which is the source of all his misadventures. Blutch’s chiaroscuro style is breathtaking
Sir Alfred No. 3 by Tim Hensley (Pigeon Press) 40 pages, 9.75 a 13 inches, color. The Adventures of Bob Hope comic book lasted 18 years, and Tim Hensley has aped its format to tell a series of anecdotes about Alfred Hitchcock. A lot of them are familiar stories if you know your Hitchiana, but Hensley rarely just gives you a straight-ahead retellings of them. His humor is oblique; it’s not about a series of gags. That, combined with his pastiche of Harvey Comics drawing style, make this one of 2016’s best.
Neat Stuff by Peter Bagge (Fantagraphics Books). 488 pages, 9” x 11.6 inches, two volumes, hardcover. This one doesn’t completely count since I read every single issue of Neat Stuff when they came out. Bagge describes his readership as falling in the “lone weirdo” demographic. It has his immortal characters, Girly Girl, Goon on the Moon, Studs Kirby, Chet and Bunny Leeway, Junior and the Bradleys. But it also has a bunch little masterpieces that people may have forgotten, like “Do You Know Where It’s At?!?” and like “The Fall and Rise of Zoove Groover.”
The Nib, edited by Mat Bors, featuring a large variety of cartoonists including Tom Tomorrow, Matt Lubchansky, Emily Flake, Rich Stevens, Jen Sorensen, Keith Knight, etc. These are all clever, funny political cartoonists, but what makes the Nib great are its journalistic comics such as Jess Ruliffson’s stories of life in the military, Kate Moon’s story on the Great Barrier Reef, and Ben Passmore’s first person “Letter From a Stone Mountain Jail”. Day after day, the Nib provides amazingly good political and journalistic comics. It’s a brilliantly edited site.
Pat Palermo's Galveston Drawing Diary by Pat Palermo. Daily comics blog. Pat Palermo is a Brooklyn artist who is currently doing a residency at the Galveston Artists Residency in Galveston, TX. Since he arrived in August, he has been drawing a page of comics every day in pencil on lined yellow paper, scanning them, and posting them on his blog. They started off being about a fish out of water—a Brooklyn guy on a sub-tropical Texas island—and that is still a theme he returns to frequently. But his coverage of the presidential campaign and its aftermath slowly grew in importance as time went on. His drawing is fantastic but also has an appealingly casual quality.
Jessica Campbell
Beverly by Nick Drnaso
Someone Please Have Sex With Me by Gina Wynbrandt
Pioneering Cartoonists of Color by Tim Jackson
Libby's Dad by Eleanor Davis
Epoxy Cartoon Magazine by John Pham
RJ Casey
What Am I Doing Here? by Abner Dean
Unwell by Tara Booth
Blammo #9 by Noah Van Sciver
She's Done It All! by Beatrix Urkowitz
One-pagers by Gizem Vural
Rob Clough
1. Rosalie Lightning, by Tom Hart
2. Blammo #9, by Noah Van Sciver
3. Someone Please Have Sex with Me, by Gina Wynbrandt
4. The Unofficial Cuckoo's Nest Study Companion, by Luke Healy
5. Exits, by Daryl Seitchik
Anya Davidson
This is random smattering of books and zines I liked in no particular order. Can I say that I think these kinds of lists are arbitrary, because there is a dizzying number of brilliant books out there that I haven't read, so this is more of a "list of things I read that I greatly enjoyed" than a best of?
a) Dias de Consuelo by Dave Ortega #'s 2 and 3
Beautifully executed serialized biographical comic about Dave's grandmother.
b)Perfect Hair by Tommi PG
Dark and funny painted short stories about sex and loss
c) Crim Coblend's Garage Island #3 by Max Huffman
Snappy strips drawn inventively. Shades of Daniel Torres and Lale Westvind
d) Almost Completely Baxter by Glen Baxter
This is a reprint by New York Review Comics. Absurd and transcendent gags.
e) Beverly by Nick Drnaso
Nick has an uncanny ear for dialogue and is finely attuned to the beauty and pain of the mundane.
Andrew Farago
Rosalie Lightning, Tom Hart
March, Book Three, John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, Nate Powell
Demon, Jason Shiga
Power Man & Iron Fist, David Walker & Sanford Greene
Hot Dog Taste Test, Lisa Hanawalt
R. Fiore
New Comics:
King Baby (Kate Beaton) Patience (Daniel Clowes) Sir Alfred (Tim Hensley) Peplum (Blutch) The Twilight Children (Gilbert Hernandez and Darwyn Cooke) The Boys of Sheriff Street (Jerome Charyn and Jacques de Loustal) Nicolas (Pascal Girard) The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (Sonny Liew)
Old Comics:
What Am I Doing Here? (Abner Dean) Trump: The Complete Collection (Harvey Kurtzman et al.) Mandrake the Magician: The Sundays Volume 1 (Lee Falk and Phil Davis) Tim Tyler’s Luck (Lyman Young and Alex Raymond) Moebius Library: The World of Eden Complete Crepax Volume 1: Dracula, Frankenstein and Other Horror (Guido Crepax Robert Crumb Sketchbook 1964 to 1968 *. Raymond Pettibon: Homo Americanus
In gathering my personal nominations I came across a couple of Amazon orders of forthcoming and just released books I’d made in April that illustrate the sheer profusion of notable comics that came out in 2016. One was for The Adventures of Dieter Lumpen (Jorge Zentner), Providence (Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows), The World of Edena (Moebius), and Alack Sinner: Age of Innocence (Munoz and Sampayo, still forthcoming); the other was for Red Barry Volume 1 (Will Gould), Mandrake the Magician Dailies Volume 1, Corto Maltese: The Ethiopian (Hugo Pratt), Tim Tyler’s Luck, and Dirty Duck (Bobby London, still forthcoming); not to mention another order I made a couple of weeks later including numbers 1, 5 and 6 on my new comics list and number 1 on my old comics list.
The ask was for a Top Five, but I stretched it out to encompass what I consider the First Division; books that stood above the rest, that had some quality of revelation to them. My ground rules were that anything that had its first publication in English in the United States in 2016 was a new book. Numbering is in order of preference, but in the old comics category the order of finish is arbitrary after the top two. The Pettibon is not ranked because quite frankly though I have this brick on the shelf I haven’t tackled it yet, but I can’t imagine this comprehensive retrospective of the Posada of the Los Angeles telephone pole couldn’t be one of the major books of the year.
Getting down to individual cases...
Hundreds of discrete choices each made for its own reasons coalesce one on top of another until they form a way of life, one that none would have imagined if they had set out to design a way of life, and yet compliance is nearly universal. One unit of the crowd sidesteps into an alleyway and says, What Am I Doing Here? In his collection of psychic vignettes Abner Dean blazed not a trail but a road not taken. He turned the cartoon caption from a joke into a poetic provocation that interrogates the image. Drawing his characters naked serves to impose awareness that they are creatures from a natural world, inhabiting their own artificial creation. With no intention to that I can discern he also portrays a segregated society, which only admits one kind of person. Dean doesn’t imply that this is a society on the brink of a social revolution, and yet 30-odd years a pop band would be rephrasing the question: “My God, what have I done?”
I lead with my top vintage pick because my top contemporary pick, Kate Beaton’s King Baby, is very much in the Abner Dean tradition. As it deals with happy things Beaton’s book lacks Dean’s sense of quiet desperation, but it has the same quality of seeing commonplace things with eyes both unsparing and enchanted. Where Beaton’s first venture into children’s picture books The Princess and the Pony seemed to strain a bit to bend its tale to its moral, King Baby is a perfectly executed little gem of observation, capturing something fundamental about the strangeness of infancy in an affluent society, from its say-it-all title to its elegant punchline. I think it can be assumed that any expectant mother with a comics-conscious friend can expect to be receiving this book as a baby shower gift for the foreseeable future. They’ll read it themselves and then read it to their children when time comes.
Running quickly through the rest, Patience turns the wish-fulfillment tale on its head with a passion that disintegrates irony, Sir Alfred is another example of perfect execution of a concept on multiple levels, Peplum is as slashing in its narrative as it is in its artwork, The Twilight Children left you wishing that its creators had just had more time, The Boys of Sheriff Street was a prime slice of Charyn American mythopoetics, Nicolas showed the enduring appeal of the Blechman fleck better than Blechman himself, and Charlie Chan Hock Chye was just a shock in its Maus-like encapsulation of an era.
When the modern era of classic comics reprints began you wondered when the bubble would burst. Was there really a readership for all these fifty dollar books, you’d wonder. Now we are coming to the point where we’re running out of classic comic strips. The Complete Peanuts is complete. Mickey Mouse has donned the Bing Crosby hat, which means the good times are just about over. In Dick Tracy we see the first glimpse of Moon Maid over the horizon, which means it’s about to go out in a blaze of lunacy. Little Orphan Annie is still more or less in the middle of its run, but you feel like you’ve seen about every move Harold Gray has, several times. The number of comic strips with wide name recognition and a ready contemporary readership is quite limited, and it remains to be seen whether a readership can be found deeper dig into the likes of Abbie an’ Slats or Barney Baxter. At the same time the addition of Dover Graphic Novels and New York Review to the ranks of retrospective publishers seems to have been a tipping point, and we’ve never had a wider range of comics of the past at our ready disposal. This does not even take into account the print-on-demand samizdat that is bringing us the high-quality likes of Kim Weston’s The Unavailable Carl Barks.
The icing on the cake of 2016 was the long-promised Trump: The Complete Collection (though a more honest title might have been Trump: Both Issues). It’s an exquisitely produced look at a road not taken, Harvey Kurtzman’s dream of a humor magazine with the full production values of a slick magazine that would be fulfilled fourteen years later by the National Lampoon. It is perhaps more notable for what it promised than what it delivered, but what it promised was tantalizing. I ordered Mandrake the Magician: The Sundays in a spirit of speculation, half expecting a mediocrity on the level of Lee Falk’s other strip The Phantom. Fortunately Phil Davis turns out to be a sort of Alex Raymond Light, and the absurd premise of a stage magician operating in the real world as a genuine wizard, evening clothes and all, in practice turns it into a kind of comic strip Weird Tales.
Do you suppose I might get by with endorsing Mandrake without dealing with Lothar issue? Didn’t think so. Racially demeaning characters might be divided into active and passive. The actively demeaning character acts out racially stereotypical traits, as it might be cowardice, ignorance, hedonism, sloth or superstition in such a way as to imply that they are characteristics of a race. In a passively demeaning character the demeaning characteristics are implicit, and depend on the assumptions of the readership. Mandrake’s enforcer Lothar is of the passive variety. He is capable, courageous, and loyal, yet he is a servant and refers to Mandrake as “Master” for no other apparent reason than that it is the "natural" order of things. Since Americans do not normally require their paid servants to address them as Master, the implication is that it’s Lothar’s idea. Lothar’s speech is pidgin, and yet English is not his native language. His adherence to a comic strip version of native dress could be taken as demeaning, and yet it does have some relation to actual African native dress. Namely, to wear a leopard skin is the particular privilege of a Zulu chief. So, potential dignity points for that, but it raises the question, why is this leader of a fiercely independent people calling this fop Master?
Finishing out my list, in Tim Tyler’s Luck you got to see Alex Raymond become Alex Raymond, The World of Edena is as much a feast for the eye as it is a famine for the mind, Complete Crepax Volume 1 is most notable for giving the first long look at Valentina I’ve been able to get, and Taschen’s Robert Crumb Sketchbook 1964 to 1968 presents these seminal early pages without the reproduction limitations imposed on them the last time around. The coming year has a hard act to follow.
Craig Fischer
In the documentary Cartoon College (2012), Scott McCloud argues that comics is now too vast a world for any single person to understand, metaphorically noting that “parts of comics have dipped beyond the horizon line.” And I’m one person presuming to name The Very Best Comics of 2016. My vision is flawed, I can’t see beyond the horizon, but here’s a handful of books from last year that I found moving, significant, funny, and/or edifying, in alphabetical order:
House of Women #3, Sophie Goldstein (self-published). In bringing her science-fiction rewrite of Black Narcissus to a lusty conclusion this year, Goldstein shows off her growth as an artist beyond The Oven and her other previous comics. When the three issues of House of Women are collected into a single volume by AdHouse, Fantagraphics or Drawn & Quarterly—it’s only a matter of time—will the publisher replicate the attention to design and printing (those lavish die-cut covers and molasses-thick spot blacks) that Goldstein put into her self-presentation of the material? I hope so.
Providence #7-11, Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows (Avatar). Almost a year ago, I wrote a long TCJ article analyzing the first six issues of Providence, and now I’m including the five issues that came out during 2016 on this Best-Of list. It’s remarkable, a deep dive into H.P. Lovecraft that also shows off Moore’s ability to structure a dense literary story in visual form. Providence #11 switches time and space between panels as much as Gilbert Hernandez’s most experimental work and still provides a carefully-planned, satisfying conclusion to the tale of protagonist Robert Black. One final issue awaits us in 2017, and I have no idea what’s going to happen next. I wish I could say that about other comic books.
Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, Sarah Glidden (Drawn & Quarterly). Very early in Blackout, Glidden asks an independent reporter (also named Sarah) to define journalism, and she replies, “anything that is informative, verifiable, accountable, and independent.” Makes sense, until the rest of the book reveals how messy and complicated the practice of journalism can be, in ways that are bracing, mature correctives to simple-minded Trumpist post-factualism. Further, Glidden’s tight focus on a tiny cadre of reporters allows them to emerge as fully-formed characters, especially a veteran and defender of the Iraq War who confronts people and places forever changed by 21st-century American foreign policy. “Maybe the question really is: what is journalism FOR? What’s the point?”
Rosalie Lightning, Tom Hart (St. Martin’s Press). Obviously, the drama of Lightning circles around the incomprehensibly sad death of Tom Hart and Leela Corman’s three-year-old daughter, but it has so much more to offer than tragedy and despair. As I re-read the book, I found myself warmed by the gymnastics Tom and Leela go through to sell their New York apartment—they function as a close-knit, loving unit before and after their disaster—and the cascade of allusions (to The Vault of Horror, Louis, Astro Boy, My Neighbor Totoro) Hart uses to represent and process his feelings testify to the power of art to give our lives meaning and hope.
Sick, Gabby Schulz (Secret Acres). I have a friend named Toney who’s a horror film connoisseur, who’s brought movies like Audition (1999) and Martyrs (2008) into my life. When I gave him Schulz’s Sick for a Christmas present, he replied, “This book is almost too pessimistic and grim, even for me.” I get that. It’s harrowingly painful to watch Schulz’s physical illness—his unrelenting fever, his bloody shits—spiral into mental illness, into an anhedonia so black that Sick reads like (to paraphrase Cioran) a barely postponed suicide. But boy, can Schulz cartoon. His drawings of a child choked by a ghoul (a metaphor for domestic abuse) and a tableau of “all the beautiful people enjoying this beautiful world” (a Hell worthy of Bosch) are beautiful in their craft and directness of purpose. Toney again: “It is a singular example of an artist’s angry fist-wave at the cosmos…a totally original work.”
Best book about comics: Hellboy’s World: Comics and Monsters on the Margins, Scott Bukatman (University of California Press). Hellboy’s World is an examples of academic comics criticism that is both full of intellectual insight and a blast to read. In lucid, often funny prose, Bukatman describes Hellboy as “a Howard Hawks movie set in an H. P. Lovecraft universe with art direction by Jack Kirby”; traces Mike Mignola’s love of literary occult investigators and characters who deny preordained destinies (like Pinocchio’s refusal to be a puppet); and discusses how Mignola’s bibliophilia influences Hellboy stories and the packaging of those stories into gorgeous library editions. (Bukatman even fruitfully compares Mignola with Yasujiro Ozu.) Hellboy’s World is pretty lavish itself, with full-color illustrations that raise the bar for future scholarly monographs.
Runners-Up:
Bacchus Volume Two, Eddie Campbell (Top Shelf/IDW) / Casanova: Acedia # 5-7, Matt Fraction, Fábio Moon, Michael Chabon and Gabriel Bá (Image) / Comic Book Creator #11-13, edited by Jon B. Cooke (especially #11, devoted to Gil Kane) / Criminal 10th Anniversary Special, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips (Image) / Critical Chips: 10 Contemporary Comics Essays, edited by Zainab Akhtar (self-published) / Corto Maltese: The Ethiopian, Hugo Pratt (IDW) / Epoxy Cartoon Magazine, John Pham (self-published) / Frontier #11 (“BDSM”), Eleanor Davis (Youth in Decline) / Hellboy in Hell #10, Mike Mignola (Dark Horse) / Laid Waste, Julia Gfrȍrer (Fantagraphics) / Patience, Daniel Clowes (Fantagraphics) / Sir Alfred #3, Tim Hensley (Pigeon Press) / Talk Dirty to Me, Luke Howard (AdHouse) / The Weight #4-5, Melissa Mendes (serialized online/self-published).
Shaenon Garrity
1. March: Book 3 by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell
2. Rosalie Lightning by Tom Hart
3. Demon by Jason Shiga
4. Otherworld Barbara by Moto Hagio
5. Patsy Walker a.k.a. Hellcat! by Kate Leth and Brittney Williams
Richard Gehr
Der Räuber, Tilo Steireif & Robert Walser (Haus am Gern)
Smoke Signal #25
Megg and Mogg in Amsterdam and Other Stories, Simon Hanselmann (Fantagraphics)
Underworld: From Hoboken to Hollywood, Kaz (Fantagraphics)
Patience, Daniel Clowes (Fantagraphics)
R.C. Harvey
Best comics-related (history, biography) books: Tim Jackson’s Pioneering Cartoonists of Color, a much-needed resource; The Life and Art of Wesley Morse, the "lost" artist who produced engagingly rendered 8-pagers and nightclub illustration.
Comics collections: Gag on This: The Scrofulous Cartoons of Charles Rodrigues.
Graphic novel: Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (shows how the form can be expanded and exploited).
Best comic books (in descending order, so you can use the first, which is 5th on my list, and drop the rest; or not): Cage (revitalizing and re-energizing the drawing part of comics), Strange Fruit (no lines in the art; just color—a painted book), Lady Killer (simply outrageous but superbly drawn).
Biggest Disappointment: Tokyo Ghost (brilliantly drawn, but the story is tepid stuff)
Anne Ishii
Bas Jan Ader by Kevin Czap, Ley Lines 8 (Czap Comics)
Fatherson by Richie Pope, Frontier #13 (Youth in Decline)
Yes, Roya by C. Spike Trotman and Emilee Denich (Iron Circus)
Gorgeous by Cathy G. Johnson (Koyama)
Libby's Dad, Eleanor Davis (Retrofit)
Monica Johnson
1. Rosalie Lightning, Tom Hart
2. The Complete Wimmen's Comix
3. Disaster Drawn, Hillary Chute
4. Blackbird, Pierre Maurel
5. Don't Come in Here, Patrick Kyle
John Kelly
We Told You So: Comics As Art, by Tom Spurgeon with Michael Dean
Krazy: George Herrriman, a Life in Black and White by Michael Tisserand
The Complete Neat Stuff by Peter Bagge
More Heroes of the Comics, by Drew Friedman
Underworld: From Hoboken to Hollywood, by Kaz
Robert Kirby
1. Rosalie Lightning by Tom Hart (St. Martin's)
2. Turning Japanese by MariNaomi (2dcloud)
3. Our Mother by Luke Howard (Retrofit)
4. Band for Life by Anya Davidson (Fantagraphics)
5. Wendy's Revenge by Walter Scott (Koyama)
Fave self-published minicomics are (a tie) The Warlok Story by Max Clotfelter & Zebediah Part III by Asher Z. Craw
MariNaomi
Rolling Blackouts by Sarah Glidden
Trying Not to Notice by Will Dinski
Rosalie Lightning by Tom Hart
Virus Tropical by Powerpaola
Handbook by Kevin Budnik
Chris Mautner
Sir Alfred #3 by Tim Hensley
Peplum by Blutch
Laid Waste by Julia Gfrorer
Big Kids by Michael DeForge
Ganges #5 by Kevin Huizenga
Joe McCulloch
10. Hellboy in Hell #10 (Mike Mignola, Dave Stewart, Clem Robins)
9. Puke Force (Brian Chippendale)
8. š! #25 (eds David Schilter, Sanita Muižniece, Berliac)
7. Ding Dong Circus (Sasaki Maki, Ryan Holmberg translation)
6. Ganges #5 (Kevin Huizenga)
5. Laid Waste (Julia Gfrörer)
4. Carpet Sweeper Tales (Julie Doucet)
3. Peplum (Blutch, Edward Gauvin translation)
2. Sir Alfred No. 3 (Tim Hensley)
1. Rosalie Lightning (Tom Hart)
Jason Miles
These are the 2016 comics that hit me hardest, stayed with me, nagged me.
In no particular order:
Blubber by Gilbert Hernandez
What me worry? These have been the most important comics to me.
Patience by Daniel Gillespie Clowes
Painfully good.
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Annie Murphy
Annie does that Alan-Moore-thing; illuminating the most curious and the most common injustices... crimes that we're all vaguely aware and actively ignoring. Elemental detective work at its finest.
The Future of Art 25 Years Hence by Gary Panter
Beautiful, beatific absorbant. Humbling.
Love and Rockets vol. IV #1 by Beto + Xaime
Love and Rockets is my favorite thing made by humans. It's more than that. The characters are real. I'm constantly wondering what Hopey's up to or if I'll ever find Palomar. Sometimes I hear people complaining that they don't know where to start. Just jump in! Keep going if you like it and fuck off if you don't. This is comics.
Providence by Alan Moore + Jacen Burrows
Brilliant unpacking and resetting of H.P. Lovecraft, trauma, denial and xenophobia.
Urstory by Amy Kuttab
Conjures the timeless dustlight of childhood.
Late Bloomer by Maré Odomo
Holistic record of life. Euphoric.
Ancestor by Malachi Ward + Matt Sheean
Turned me inside out.
Sunny by Taiyo Matsumoto
Heartbreaking.
Super Powers by Tom Scioli
Comics and psilocybin. What's the difference?
#25 and Mr. A #18 by Steve Ditko
New Comic Day.
Scab County by Carlos Gonzalas
I love the way this guy tells a story.
Mostly Saturn by Michael DeForge
I think this may be the first DeForge comic I've read all the way through. Obviously his stuff is visually brilliant, but to my eyes, all his comics (the ones I've tried to read) amount to a chromatic tribute to ennui... which isn't my thing. I may reread Mostly Saturn and see it as another tedium trophy, but honestly I've been too scared because the result of that first reading was ecstatic! I feel this comic is the first true "Literary Comic." It's got this braided, experiential abstraction thing going on that transcends all the usual comic language bullshit. This may be a complete game changer.
Brian Nicholson:
Top five comics of 2016, offered unranked
Big Kids by Michael DeForge, Drawn And Quarterly
There are a couple of things that reoccur in Michael DeForge comics. The first is plots about bodily transformation. The second is that, from story to story, there are changes in the formal language, not just of the storytelling, but in the approach to a figure, working through new ways to cartoon that most identifiable form. Even though the overwhelming majority of these comics have been very very good, the minor breakthrough of Big Kids is that, by focusing on a narrative of the transformation of the narrator's perception, the trend in DeForge's art, towards a more two-dimensional sense of the picture plane, away from depictions that feel grounded in three-dimensional space, can here dive even deeper into abstraction while the narration remains present in intimate emotional reality.
If DeForge's other comics can be considered body horror, or likened to early Cronenberg, this comic is more like a queer take on the 1998 film Pleasantville, by way of They Live. While those films use color and black-and-white to refer to different levels of "reality," DeForge sticks to color throughout, but instead uses a more distended and abstracted cartooning of the human figure as a metaphor for coming to terms with a deeper and stranger world. It's a narrative of self-acceptance, about growing into a mature person rather than remaining a stunted child. While the narrative feels like a metaphor for hallucinogen-induced revelations, drugs, alongside sex and anarchist anti-cop politics are present as plot elements from the very beginning. The arc doesn't begin at a place of presumed "innocence," but rather an adolescent's cynicism. The shift in the drawing is about going beyond the recognizable, the understood and agreed upon, to depict fresh feeling, a new awakening. Through the narrator's lens, we see things we haven't seen before, and are told they are depictions of everyday occurrences. It's a new way of being alive to the commonplace. The conclusion of the book, the narrator's caption of "I felt a lot of things," should be echoed in the understanding reader.
Band for Life by Anya Davidson, Fantagraphics Books
One of the immediate pleasures of comics is their accessibility, both in the easy understanding they offer to a reader, and for how the cheapness of the materials needed to make a comic allows for underrepresented viewpoints to be heard. Occasionally, a comic comes along that is funny and true in a way that nothing else has been allowed to be, depicting a worldview unarticulated elsewhere. Anya Davidson's Band for Life is both indebted to her own autobiography in the noise-rock underground and extends a deep literary and comedic empathy towards all marginalized people. The cartooning language is rooted in John Stanley, Milt Gross, Archie comics, the most accessible work there is. It's a character-driven comedy for people who are not going to see themselves and their struggles depicted anywhere else.
In collecting a strip originally serialized online, it becomes clear how many characters there are in the narrative, how distinct they are from each other, and how much thought has been put into giving everyone a consistent backstory, and showing how these fully realized figures can be in conflict but still be depicted sympathetically. Using a Simpsons-like approach to building strips around people previously depicted as incidental supporting characters, in time it depicts a world of music-making more inclusive than most arts scene within the real world, an act of utopian idealization that's a testament to Davidson's imagination in the face of a widespread lack of it.
Shortly after publication |
. "These laws have nothing to do with what most Russians want. Putin was in power for a dozen years and had no need of such laws."
"So, why now? Because the economy is stalling, people are getting fed up with corruption, low pensions, bad housing, awful roads and so on," Mr. Davidis says. "So, the goal here is to focus public anger on gays, blasphemers and foreign-inspired agitators, to create the feeling that Russia is a besieged state. This is not going to last very long but, the sad thing is, a lot of innocent people may suffer before it all unravels."poster="http://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201705/1523/1155968404_5449707146001_5449696632001-vs.jpg?pubId=1155968404" true Gianforte apologizes for body slam incident
Shortly after winning the race for Montana's lone congressional seat, Greg Gianforte apologized to the reporter he was charged with assaulting a day before.
The Republican candidate's campaign was rocked after he was cited on misdemeanor assault charges for a Wednesday altercation in which a reporter for The Guardian newspaper, Ben Jacobs, claimed Gianforte "body-slammed" him, an incident caught on audio tape and witnessed by other journalists.
Story Continued Below
Gianforte, whose official victory against Democrat Rob Quist was called by the Associated Press shortly after midnight on Friday EST, gave Jacobs a personal apology.
“When you make a mistake, you have to own up to it," he said at a victory party in Bozeman, Montana. "That’s the Montana way. Last night I made a mistake and I took an action that I can’t take back and I’m not proud of what happened. I should not have responded in the way that I did and for that I am sorry."
"I should not have treated that reporter that way and for that I am sorry Mr. Ben Jacobs," he said.
The comments served as a sharp reversal for Gianforte and his team, who remained mum on the subject for most of Thursday, and who shortly after the incident released a statement calling Jacobs' actions in seeking to interview the candidate "aggressive."
Morning Media Your guide to the media circus — weekday mornings, in your inbox. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time.
"Tonight, as Greg was giving a separate interview in a private office, The Guardian's Ben Jacobs entered the office without permission, aggressively shoved a recorder in Greg's face, and began asking badgering questions. Jacobs was asked to leave," Gianforte spokesman Shane Scanlon said.
He added: "After asking Jacobs to lower the recorder, Jacobs declined. Greg then attempted to grab the phone that was pushed in his face. Jacobs grabbed Greg's wrist, and spun away from Greg, pushing them both to the ground. It's unfortunate that this aggressive behavior from a liberal journalist created this scene at our campaign volunteer BBQ."
Jacobs had called for an apology from the GOP candidate during an appearance on CNN earlier Thursday.
"[Apologizing] would be the civilized thing to do when one adult acts -- physically assaults someone else, an apology would be in order," he said early Friday morning, adding that physical altercations were "not an appropriate way for human beings to interact with each other."
Gianforte stressed to his supporters that his recent behavior would not be reflected in his upcoming work in Washington.
"That’s not the person I am, and that’s not the way I’ll lead this state," he said. "Rest assured, our work is just beginning, but it does begin with me taking responsibility for my own actions.”Perhaps you haven’t heard the news, but Rep. Allen West (R.-FL) has a bombshell to share with you: Up to 80 House Democrats are actually Communists. I hope you’re as shocked as I am by this revelation; I had no idea anyone was still crazy enough to use Communists as a boogyman to scare up political support. I mean, he even used a kind of vague-but-still-oddly-specific number (81, in case you missed it) that Senator Joe McCarthy used in his infamous Wheeling speech: “The State Department is infested with communists. I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department,” which was amended down to, you guessed it, eighty-one “security risks” a few days later. As Charles Siefe states in his insightful book, “Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception,” It didn’t really matter whether the list had 205 or 57 or 81 names. The very fact that McCarthy had attached a number to his accusations imbued them with an aura of truth. Would McCarthy make such specific claims if he didn’t have evidence to back them up? Even though White House officials suspected that he was bluffing, the numbers made them doubt themselves.” It seems that Rep. West is not just making history rhyme, he’s doing a straight up copy/paste out of the Chief Witch Hunter’s playbook, right down to having the t-ball question coming from an almost certain plant using the phrase “card-carrying Marxists or International Socialists.” Have you heard anyone refer to anyone as a “card-carrying” anything in the last decade or three, outside of a history lesson about McCarthyism?
As an explanation of the Rep. West’s comments, his office released the following statement: “The Congressman was referring to the 76 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The Communist Party has publicly referred to the Progressive Caucus as its allies. The Progressive Caucus speaks for itself. These individuals certainly aren’t proponents of free markets or individual economic freedom.” (emphasis mine) The justification of West’s alarming accusation is that the Communist Party has referred to the Progressive Caucus as its allies, and that is enough guilt by association for him to go ahead and refer to the Progressive Caucus as “card-carrying” members of the Communist Party in at least two public speaking engagements. With this standard of “proof”, how is anyone accused of the high crime of having Communist sympathies supposed to defend against this withering attack?
I have an idea.
This is addressed directly to the Communist Party of America, if any of you have connections to this organization, please pass this along to them, I think my idea could really work. OK, Communists of America? I want you to comb through Rep. West’s political statements and platform, and I want you to find as many completely non-controversial statements and positions as you possibly can. I understand that he is kind of a lunatic, but even a broken clock is right twice a day, right? OK, West is ex-military, he probably runs on 24-hour time, so his clock’s only going to be right once a day, but still, the guy says enough stuff in public, you have got to be able to find something you can agree with the man on. Found it yet? I’ll give you a minute, take your time... all right, now that you’ve found something to agree with him on, I want you to make as public a statement as you possibly can that you support Rep. West in that position (or positions, I’m nothing if I’m not an optimist), 110%, and you consider him one of your strongest allies on this matter.
I mean, if he’s made a passing reference to being in favour of having dogs licensed and leashed in cities, that’s good enough, just run with it. Talk about how Rep. West understands that dog leashing and licensing isn’t such a serious issue for rural families, that dogs in the heartland are hard-working, dependable members of many farming operations, the furry soul of America. It’s those semi-wild urban dogs you need to keep tabs on, make sure they’re registered with the proper authorities and kept on a short leash whenever they’re let out in public so they won’t present a menace to decent families by roving around in untamed packs. Go on to express your strongly held belief that responsible dog ownership as outlined by Rep. West is at the very core of Communist philosophy and politics, and unequivocally voice your support and dedication to his political career.
By doing this, either you will convince Mr. West to shut the hell up about hunting down Communists in Congress, or in an absolute best case scenario, you will break his mind and convince him that he is actually a Communist himself because he can’t escape the feedback loop of his own twisted logic, and that would just be awesome.
AdvertisementsBigIntegers for Delphi
An up-to-date version of this and other files can be found in my DelphiBigNumbers project on GitHub.
BigIntegers
The trouble with integers is that we have examined only the very small ones. Maybe all the exciting stuff happens at really big numbers, ones we can’t even begin to think about in any very definite way. Our brains have evolved to get us out of the rain, find where the berries are, and keep us from getting killed. Our brains did not evolve to help us grasp really large numbers or to look at things in a hundred thousand dimensions. — Ronald Graham
On many occasions, I missed a BigInteger type in Delphi. I wanted to have a type with which you could do simple things like:
var A, B, C, D : BigInteger ; begin A := 3141592653589793238462643383279 ; B := 1414213562373095 shl 10 ; C := 2718281828459045235360287471352 ; D := A + B * C ; Writeln ( D. ToString ) ;
Many programming languages, for instance Java, C#, Python, Lisp, Ruby, Smalltalk, Scala, Haskell, Kotlin, etc. have an arbitrary precision integer type. But in Delphi, there is no proper BigInteger type that
is easy to use,
can handle very long integers,
is optimized for speed and precision,
can handle different numeric bases (binary, hex, decimal, etc.) and
can do more than basic arithmetic.
I have been thinking of using the GNU multi-precision library, but that has one big problem: it is GPL-licensed, which makes it unsuitable for my needs. So I decided to write my own, using assembler where appropriate, but also thus that pure Pascal routines would be optimal too. It works well and, as far as I know, faultless.
I initially modelled it after the.NET System.Numerics.BigInteger type, but took up influences from other languages with built-in BigIntegers, like Common Lisp, Python and Java. And yet I think I managed to make it as “Delphi-like” as possible. It is described below.
In the course of writing this, I had to implement a few other things, which can be useful on their own too. For the most up-to-date version, download from GitHub. Take a look at my BigDecimal implementation too. It uses BigIntegers for most of the hard work. It can also be found on GitHub.
Note that I wrote this all on my own. I did not use any code from other implementations, but I did implement algorithms described in papers from, for instance, Burnikel and Ziegler, Karatsuba, etc.
Caution
If you are using Andreas Hausladen’s IDE Fixpack, which also installs the newest 64 bit CompilerSpeedPack, the Win64 assembler might not work properly. The generated 64 bit code may be completely unusable. If you have problems compiling and running the test program with a Win64 target, try to uninstall the CompilerSpeedPack64. Uninstalling can be done by removing the CompilerSpeedPack64.dll entry from the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Embarcadero\BDS\20.0\Experts key in the registry (use regedit.exe). Alternatively, you can compile code for the Win64 target with a PUREPASCAL define by adding following code in Velthuis.BigIntegers.pas: { $DEFINE PUREPASCAL} {$IF not defined(PUREPASCAL) and defined(WIN64)} {$DEFINE PUREPASCAL} {$IFEND} Without this speedpack, the assemblers all work fine and there is no problem.
The BigInteger type
Unlike the integral types in Delphi, the BigInteger type uses a sign-magnitude format, i.e. the magnitude (or absolute value) is always unsigned, and the sign is an extra bit. A Delphi Integer -1000 is stored as 32-bit value of $FFFFFC18, which is called two’s complement. A BigInteger −1000 is stored as an always positive magnitude (or absolute value) of 1000 (or hex $000003E8 ) and a sign bit. This has some implications for bitwise operations, but more about that later.
The magnitude is stored as a dynamic array of UInt32. I, and as it turned out, also others, call such a single large digit a “limb” (a term you will see being used later on too). This is because in his book series “The Art of Computer Programming” (a.k.a. TAOCP), Donald Knuth, who describes a few base case algorithms for multiple precision math in TAOCP Volume 2, calls them so. I also like another term I have seen lately, “bigit” (biginteger digit).
BigInteger is a record type. This allows it to be used as a value type, like normal integers, i.e. there is no need to worry about the lifetime, and it also allows the use of operators like *, div, mod, +, -, and, or, xor (and some others), as well as a big number of methods.
The main thing about a BigInteger is that there is a very low chance (virtually nil) that it will overflow, since it will simply grow if more bits are needed. It can hold enormously huge integer values, theoretically — given enough memory is present — in the order of approximately 24,000,000,000 or 101,290,000,000, in other words, an integer consisting of more than 1 billion digits. The total number of particles in the known universe is estimated as 1080 or even 1085, so a BigInteger can theoretically hold a vast multitude of that number.
Initialization
Unfortunately, there is no way to define a large integer literal like:
B := 3141592653589793238462643383279 ;
But yet, there are several ways to get values into a BigInteger. You can use constructors, like
A := BigInteger. Create ( 17 ) ;
or (implicit or explicit) conversion operators like
B := '3141592653589793238462643383279' ; // string C := - 17 ; // integral type E := BigInteger ( 6e30 ) ; // floating point type
or functions and expressions like
D := 6 * BigInteger. Pow ( 10, 30 ) ; // 6 * 10^30 exactly, unlike the floating point // value 6e30 which is only an approximation.
Constructors
Although BigInteger is a record type and record constructors are no real constructors, and the syntax used can deceive you into thinking a new instance is allocated somewhere, I think records should have them, for initialization. But note that it doesn’t matter if you do:
A := BigInteger. Create ( 17 ) ;
Or just:
A. Create ( 17 ) ;
Both will do exactly the same and initialize A with the value 17.
The constructors defined are:
constructor Create(const Limbs: array of TLimb; Negative: Boolean); overload; Sets up a BigInteger using the Limbs array as the (unsigned) magnitude and Negative as the sign constructor Create(const Data: TMagnitude; Negative: Boolean); overload; Sets up a BigInteger using the Magnitude array as the (unsigned) magnitude and Negative as the sign constructor Create(const Int: BigInteger ); overload; Sets up a BigInteger with the value of the given BigInteger constructor Create(const Int: Int32); overload; Sets up a BigInteger with the value of the given signed integer constructor Create(const Int: UInt32); overload; Sets up a BigInteger with the value of the given unsigned integer constructor Create(const Int: Int64); overload; Sets up a BigInteger with the value of the given 64-bit signed integer constructor Create(const Int: UInt64); overload; Sets up a BigInteger with the value of the given 64-bit unsigned integer constructor Create(const ADouble: Double); overload; Sets up a BigInteger with the value of the given Double. How this is done depends on the setting of the property BigInteger.RoundingMode (see below) constructor Create( const Bytes: array of Byte); overload; Sets up a BigInteger using the bytes in Bytes as a two’s complement value. The opposite of the function ToByteArray. constructor Create(NumBits: Integer; const Random: IRandom); overload; Sets up a BigInteger with a random value, with a size of NumBits bits and a value determined by the given IRandom interface (see below)
Byte array parameter
The bytes in the byte array are considered to be in little-endian two’s complement format. That means that if the top bit of the most significant byte is set, then the value in the bytes is interpreted as negative. Say you want to pass a value of 129. Then your array must contain two bytes: $81, $00, because a single $81 is interpreted as -127. Likewise, if you want to pass -129, you must pass $7F, $FF, because $7F is interpreted as +127.
Note that this is like in C#, which also accepts a byte array in little-endian order, but unlike in Java, which requires a big-endian byte array.
RoundingMode
The global RoundingMode property governs how a Double is converted to a BigInteger. It can have the following values.
rmTruncate Any fraction of the Double is discarded. This rounds toward 0 and is the default. rmSchool How I learned to round in school: any absolute fraction >= 0.5 rounds “up” (away from 0). So 1.5 rounds to 2 and -1.5 rounds to -2. But 1.49999 rounds to 1. rmRound Rounds the same way as the System.Round function. Any (absolute) fraction > 0.5 (this excludes 0.5 itself) is rounded away from 0. So 1.5 rounds to 1, but 1.50001 rounds to 2.
Note that, due to the fact that floating point values can only have a limited precision, the results may not always be what you expect. A double value like 6e30 will not result in a BigInteger with an exact value of 6000000000000000000000000000000 (a 6 with 30 zeroes), because the Double is not precise enough to hold such an exact value. The result is actually 5999999999999999556357795610624, which is the conversion of the closest a Double can get to 6e30. If you want exact values, do not use floating point values as input. Use strings or functions like BigInteger.Pow instead (see below). To obtain exactly 6e30, you can use 6 * BigInteger.Pow(10, 30).
IRandom
I was not sure how to generate a random BigInteger. Other languages seem to use separate Random classes for this. I wanted to avoid any manual memory management for random numbers, so I declared an interface (called, you guessed it, IRandom ) with a few suitable methods and two implementations, the first being TRandom, using the simple algorithm Knuth proposes and which Java seems to use (using an 48 bit seed) and the second, TDelphiRandom, which uses the built-in System.Random functions to generate random values. Both classes can be found in unit RandomNumbers.pas, included in the download. If you want to create your own, inherit from TRandom and override the virtual parameterless function Next().
Implicit conversions and class functions
To get a value into a BigInteger, you don’t have to use constructors. There are implicit operators that allow you to assign several integer types directly, for instance:
var A, B, C : BigInteger ; begin A := - 1 ; B := 200 * 1000 * 1000 ; // My usual way to write a literal like 200,000,000 C := - $8000000 ; D := BigInteger ( Pi * 1e20 ) ;
Another way is to use functions like Pow(), e.g.
var A : BigInteger ; begin A := BigInteger. Pow ( 10, 85 ) ; // 10^85
The most convenient way, however, to get a well defined big number into a BigInteger is to use its string parsing capabilities, which also allow you to assign a string, like so:
var A, B : BigInteger ; begin A := '671998030559713968361666935769' ; B := '-$2940C583C5C79C8A70261FEE080A73B5B23556A5CF802BAB81DB08546F3623D5' ;
Numeric base
Beside parsing simple decimal numbers like the ones in the code snippet above, the parser can do a bit more. But I will first have to explain the numeric base. This is the base used for text input as well as text output of a BigInteger. I guess everyone knows decimal (base 10) numbers like 1000 or -17. But in Delphi, we know hexadecimal numbers (base 16) too, like $7F00. Some languages, like C or Java, also know octal (base 8), in the form 017 which is the same as 1*8 + 7, or decimal 15. The BigIntegers unit knows a bit more. It can have any default base from 2 to 36 (where base 36 has the “digits” 0..9 and A..Z, where A=10 and Z=35). You can set or query the default base by accessing the BigInteger.Base class property. That it is a class property means that it is the same for all BigIntegers.
The default numeric base affects input and output. So if you do:
var A, B : BigInteger ; begin BigInteger. Base := 16 ; A := '100' ; BigInteger. Base := 10 ; Writeln ( 'A in decimal is: ', A. ToString ) ;
The output is:
A in decimal is: 256
BigInteger knows a few shortcut methods for the most usual base values, so instead of writing
BigInteger. Base := 16 ;
you can write
BigInteger. Hex ;
The convenience methods are:
Name Base value Binary 2 Binary, e.g. '01011010' Octal 8 Octal, e.g. '377' Decimal 10 Decimal Hexadecimal 16 Hexadecimal, e.g. '12BEEF34' Hex 16 Short for Hexadecimal
Parsing
The methods Parse, TryParse and the implicit conversion operator (which allows you to assign a string to a BigInteger ) allow for a few tricks to make it easy to enter numbers.
class function TryParse(const S: string; Base: TNumberBase; out Res: BigInteger): Boolean; overload; static; Tries to parse the specified string into a valid BigInteger value in the specified numeric base. Returns False if this failed. class function TryParse(const S: string; out Res: BigInteger): Boolean; overload; static; Tries to parse the specified string into a valid BigInteger value in the default BigInteger numeric base. Returns False if this failed. class function Parse(const S: string): BigInteger; static; Parses the specified string into a BigInteger, using the default numeric base. Raises an exception if this is not possible. class operator Implicit( const Value: string): BigInteger; Implicitly (i.e. without a cast) converts the specified string to a BigInteger. The BigInteger is the result of a call to Parse(Value).
There are a few things to know about the strings that can be valid BigIntegers:
To make it easier to increase the legibility of large numbers, any ‘_’ or ’ ‘, anywhere in the numeric string, will completely be ignored, so ’1_000_000_000’, ‘1 000 000 000’ and ‘1000000000’ are exactly equivalent.
or, anywhere in the numeric string, will completely be ignored, so, and are exactly equivalent. The string to be parsed is considered case insensitive, so ‘$ABC’ and ‘$abc’ represent exactly the same value.
and represent exactly the same value. The number can be prefixed with a sign, either ‘+’ or ‘-’ with the usual meaning, i.e. a prefix of ‘-’ will result in a negative number, the prefix ‘+’ in a positive one. If a sign prefix is omitted, ‘+’ is assumed.
Usually, the string that is parsed is assumed to be in the base that is set with BigInteger.Base. But there are a few overrides that disregard the default base and give the number a specified base. Like in Delphi, this is done with a prefix:
Prefix Base $ 16 Hex, like in Delphi, e.g. '-$8000' for decimal -32768 0x 16 Hex, like in C and C++, e.g. '-0x8000' for decimal -32768 0d 10 Decimal, e.g. '0d1234' for decimal 1234 0b 2 Binary, e.g. '-0b11001010' for decimal -202 0o 8 Octal, e.g. '0o377' for decimal 255 0k 8 (Better readable) alternative form for octal, e.g. '0k377' for decimal 255 %nnR nn nn stands for one or two decimal digits and gives the base (or radix) to be used. So '-%36rRudyVelthuis' is a valid BigInteger number in base 36
I made sure that simple numbers starting with a ‘0’ are not automatically regarded as octal, like they are in C. Any of the valid prefixes starting with ‘0’ has an alphabetic second character.
An example:
procedure Test ; var A : BigInteger ; begin BigInteger. Decimal ; A := '-%36r Rudy Velthuis' ; // Yes, that's my name Writeln ( A. ToString ) ; BigInteger. Base := 36 ; Writeln ( A. ToString ) ; BigInteger. Base := 35 ; Writeln ( A. ToString ) ; end ;
The output is:
-3664889415200015812 -RUDYVELTHUIS -12XJI7QCQ4S0C
Note that the three lines above represent the exact same number, but each output in a different base.
Examples of valid BigInteger strings:
String Decimal value '0' 0 '1' 1 '01' 1 '0x123' 291 '$0123' 291 '-$17' −23 '12340' 12340 '%10r12345678901234567890' 12345678901234567890 '0d12345678901234567890' 12345678901234567890 '$12345678901234567890' 85968058271978839505040 '%16R12345678901234567890' 85968058271978839505040 '0x12345678901234567890' 85968058271978839505040 '-17234' −17234 '+17234' 17234 '0O7771234567' 1071987063 '0k7771234567' 1071987063 '%8R7771234567' 1071987063 '-0b000100100011010001010110011110001001101010111100' −20015998343868 '0b0001_0010_0011_0100_0101_0110_0111_1000_1001_0000' 78187493520 '$7fffffff9876543289abcdef01234567' 170141183428425841568023956577411351911 '$7fffffff_98765432_89abcdef_01234567' 170141183428425841568023956577411351911 '%16R 7FFFFFFF 98765432 89ABCDEF 01234567' 170141183428425841568023956577411351911 '$1234567898765432FFFFFF80' 5634002667517048507802320768 '%36rRudyVelthuis' 3664889415200015812 '%35rRudyVelthuis' 2690686858144915658 '$DEADBEEF' 3735928559 '%16r_DEADB_EE_F' 3735928559 '$ De ad Be ef' 3735928559 '%26rDead_Beef' 108863310779 '%36rDeadBeef' 1049836114599 '-$cc'−204 '+0X0' 0 '-0X00000000000000d' −13 '%36rABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ' 8337503854730415241050377135811259267835 '-%36Rabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz' −8337503854730415241050377135811259267835
Seeing 'RUDYVELTHUIS' as a valid big integer still needs some getting used to. <g>
Output
There are two simple output routines.
function ToString: string; overload; Returns a string representation of the BigInteger in the current default numeric base function ToString(Base: Byte): string; overload; Returns a string representation of the BigInteger in the given numeric base
The second version, ToString(Base) accepts only Base values in the range 2..36.
I also implemented a few convenience methods for this:
function ToBinaryString; Shortcut for ToString(2) function ToOctalString; Shortcut for ToString(8) function ToDecimalString; Shortcut for ToString(10) function ToHexString; Shortcut for ToString(16)
UPDATE (7 Feb 2016)
The classic ToString(Base) method (which is still available as ToStringClassic ) simply did a DivMod by 10, turned the remainder into a digit and then repeated this with the quotient until the value of the BigInteger was 0. That worked fine, but when I wanted to turn the currently largest known prime, 274,207,281 − 1, into a string, I thought my computer had hung up. Well, the result is a 22 million digit string, and (what is now) ToStringClassic simply repeatedly divided that huge number by 10, leaving a still huge quotient, with one digit less each time. This was, of course, even with Burnikel & Ziegler’s division algorithm, dead slow.
To improve things, I came up with a divide-and-conquer algorithm which divides the huge number by a power of ten that more or less splits it in half, and then recursively calls itself for the remainder and the quotient, so on each recursion, only half of the number has to be converted. Very small values are then converted using an optimized version of ToStringClassic. This cut the time for ToString(10) to form a 22,338,618 digit string down to approx. 150 seconds.
I really came up with this algorithm myself, although it turned out I was not the first. :-(
For what it’s worth, I also modified ToString(Base) for bases 2, 4 and 16 to take advantage of the fact that these only have to shift limb-wise, in a simple nested loop, to get the digits. The same huge number was converted using ToString(16) in – hold on, hold on… 133ms, in other words, more than 1,000 times as fast as ToString(10). This shows that base conversions can be quite slow, and that it makes sense to treat different bases differently.
I intend to do something similar for the parser, but note that this is not a priority, at the moment.
Arithmetic operators and functions
The following functions and operators are defined for arithmetic with BigIntegers:
class operator Add( const Left, Right: BigInteger): BigInteger; Adds two BigIntegers, operator + class function Add( const Left, Right: BigInteger): BigInteger; static; Adds two BigIntegers class operator Subtract( const Left, Right: BigInteger): BigInteger; Subtracts two BigIntegers, operator - class function Subtract( const Left, Right: BigInteger): BigInteger; overload; static; Subtracts two BigIntegers class operator Multiply( const Left, Right: BigInteger): BigInteger; overload; static; Multiplies two BigIntegers, operator * class function Multiply( const Left, Right: BigInteger): BigInteger; overload; static; Multiplies two BigIntegers. class function MultiplyBaseCase( const Left, Right: BigInteger): BigInteger; overload; static; Multiplies two BigIntegers using base case or “schoolbook” multiplication. This may be called internally by Multiply and MultiplyKaratsuba. class function MultiplyKaratsuba( const Left, Right: BigInteger): BigInteger; overload; static; Multiplies two BigIntegers using the Karatsuba algorithm. This may be called internally by Multiply and MultiplyToomCook3. class function MultiplyToomCook3( const Left, Right: BigInteger): BigInteger; overload; static; Multiplies two BigIntegers using the Toom-Cook 3-way algorithm. This may be called internally by Multiply. class operator Multiply( const Left: BigInteger; Right: Word): BigInteger; Multiplies a BigInteger with a Word, operator * class operator Multiply( Left: Word; const Right: BigInteger): BigInteger; Multiplies a Word with a BigInteger, operator * class operator IntDivide( const Left, Right: BigInteger): BigInteger; Divides two BigIntegers, operator div class function Divide( const Left, Right: BigInteger): BigInteger; static; Divides two BigIntegers. class operator Modulus( const Left, Right: BigInteger): BigInteger; Returns the remainder after the division of the given BigIntegers, operator mod class function Remainder( const Left, Right: BigInteger): BigInteger; static; Returns the remainder after the divison of two BigIntegers class procedure DivMod( const Dividend, Divisor: BigInteger; var Quotient, Remainder: BigInteger); static; Returns quotient and remainder after the integer division of Dividend by Divisor. They are the result of the same internal operation. Is called internally by Divide and Modulus. class function DivModBaseCase( const Left, Right: BigInteger): BigInteger; static; Divides two BigIntegers using simple “schoolbook” division. My be called internally by DivMod. class function DivModBurnikelZiegler( const Left, Right: BigInteger): BigInteger; static; Divides two BigIntegers using the Burnikel-Ziegler algorithm. May be called internally by DivMod. class operator Negative( const Int: BigInteger): BigInteger; Returns the negation of a BigInteger, unary operator -
Bitwise operators
The following bitwise operators are defined for BigIntegers. Note that these have two’s complement semantics, so before any bitwise operations are performed, the internal format is converted to two’s complement. Aftwerward, the result is converted to sign-magnitude again.
class operator BitwiseAnd( const Left, Right: BigInteger): BigInteger; Returns the result of the bitwise AND operation.
Operator and. class operator BitwiseOr( const Left, Right: BigInteger): BigInteger; Returns the result of the bitwise OR operation.
Operator or. class operator BitwiseXor( const Left, Right: BigInteger): BigInteger; Returns the result of the bitwise XOR operation.
Operator xor. class operator LogicalNot( const Int: BigInteger): BigInteger; Returns the result of the bitwise NOT operation.
Operator not. The following shift operators perform, unlike usual in Delphi, arithmetic shifts. This means that the sign bit is preserved, so negative numbers remain negative. class operator LeftShift( const Value: BigInteger; Shift: Integer): BigInteger; Shifts the specified BigInteger value the specified number of bits to the left (away from 0). The size of the BigInteger is adjusted accordingly.
Operator shl. class operator RightShift( const Value: BigInteger; Shift: Integer): BigInteger; Shifts the specified BigInteger value the specified number of bits to the right (toward 0). The size of the BigInteger is adjusted accordingly. The sign is preserved, so -128 shr 8 does not end up as 0, but as -1 instead.
Operator shr.
Relational operators and function
The following relational operators and functiond are defined for BigIntegers.
class operator Equal( const Left, Right: BigInteger): Boolean; operator = class operator NotEqual( const Left, Right: BigInteger): Boolean; operator <> class operator GreaterThan( const Left, Right: BigInteger): Boolean; operator > class operator GreaterThanOrEqual( const Left, Right: BigInteger): Boolean; operator >= class operator LessThan( const Left, Right: BigInteger): Boolean; operator < class operator LessThanOrEqual( const Left, Right: BigInteger): Boolean; operator <= class function Compare( const Left, Right: BigInteger): Integer; static; Returns -1 if Left < Right ; 1 if Left > Right ; 0 if Left = Right
Conversion operators and functions
The following conversion functions perform a conversion to built-in Delphi types. If the value of the BigInteger is too large, an EConvertError is raised.
function AsDouble: Double; Converts the BigInteger to a Double if that is possible. Raises an exception if not. function AsInteger: Integer; Converts the BigInteger to an Integer if that is possible. Raises an exception if not. function AsCardinal: Cardinal; Converts the BigInteger to a Cardinal if that is possible. Raises an exception if not. function AsInt64: Int64; Converts the BigInteger to an Int64 if that is possible. Raises an exception if not. function AsUInt64: UInt64; Converts the BigInteger to a UInt64 if that is possible. Raises an exception if not.
The following implicit conversion operators (the conversions generally do not require a cast) perform a conversion from built-in Delphi types to a BigInteger.
class operator Implicit( const Int: Integer): BigInteger; Implicitly converts the specified Integer to a BigInteger. class operator Implicit( const Int: Cardinal): BigInteger; Implicitly converts the specified Cardinal to a BigInteger. class operator Implicit( const Int: Int64): BigInteger; Implicitly converts the specified Int64 to a BigInteger. class operator Implicit( const Int: UInt64): BigInteger; Implicitly converts the specified UInt64 to a BigInteger.
The following explicit conversion operators, (conversions requiring a cast) from BigInteger to built-in Delphi types do not raise exceptions, but truncate or sign extend the values to make them fit, just like Delphi does.
class operator Explicit( const Int: BigInteger): Integer; Explicitly converts the specified BigInteger to an Integer. class operator Explicit( const Int: BigInteger): Cardinal; Explicitly converts the specified BigInteger to a Cardinal. class operator Explicit( const Int: BigInteger): Int64; Explicitly converts the specified BigInteger to an |
colouring, particularly for the “big two” publishers, Marvel and DC, and whether palettes are tightly regulated at the top. “That’s really interesting actually,” she says. “Because, especially when I started working for DC, I wondered if they would have all these colour coded things that you need follow. But no, none of that’s there. Even now when I’m colouring Batman, I expected things to be a lot of [restrictions] like, “No, he always has to have this shade of purple”, but it’s not like that at all. You’re allowed to do what you want, freely and openly. “But I really just try to approach each book differently, like a film. Like with Declan Shalvey I often think about David Fincher, and Gabriel Walta I think about the Coen brothers. And with Greg Smallwood we always talk about Stanley Kubrick. Those are people I genuinely think about, and if I can link an artist to a filmmaker, it’s all the better because I can just channel that love and it all comes out.” The marquee is nearly empty now. Jordie is late for her dinner reservation. Red-shirted volunteers keep stopping by the table, encouraging us to leave. But, even though I can guess the answer, I need to ask: “So, what is the biggest issue in comics right now?” “I know my big thing is women,” she says. We’re hovering on the street outside the tent. The redshirts can finally leave. “But it’s not just women now, it’s representation. We need more representation, with black writers being able to write non-black characters, who [can] maybe write black characters if they want to. And I love Marvel so much, but we only just had two female black writers come in in the last year. “We don’t have enough trans creators feeling like they can be empowered and be trans while also not being tooted around like, “Hey, look I have a trans writer or a trans artist!” which is bullshit. They need to be able to choose, and the problem is that we’re not gonna reach that point until we correct the balance, so there is gonna be some tokenism at first, but people need to be able to choose what they’re getting. So you just don’t give a woman a woman character; we need to make it so that a woman feels confident that she’s being hired because she’s a good writer, not because she’s got a vagina. “So I think representation is the most important thing, and publishers need to stop making excuses for why they’re not doing it or how they are doing it, because how they’re doing it is normally marginalised bullshit.” Steff Humm Back to top Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie on collaboration in The Wicked + The Divine The Wicked + The Divine creators talk Thought Bubble, working together and representation within the industry. Kieron Gillen: Anyway, I’m rambling. Steff Humm: Kieron, you used to be a journalist. What would you ask Kieron Gillen? KG: [Laughs] Where do I get my ideas from? Jamie McKelvie: Which superhero do you want to write? KG: I always end up over-analysing interviews. I’m quite an easy interviewee because I’ve done the job, and especially in comics criticism a lot of people are inexperienced. I think you have just one question to prove to the person that you’re not an idiot. You’re normally interviewing so many people in one day, so your first or second question needs to show that you know their work. I was never a good interviewer. I was always a bit too soft. I liked to be liked too much. I would probably interview myself badly. SH: In that case, we need hard-hitting questions about the work. Serena Grasso: You play with formalism a lot in the art and storytelling of The Wicked + The Divine (WicDiv). Why? The Remix issue comes to mind. KG: “Why be boring?” is my basic answer. JM: The origin of the Remix issue came from when we were doing Young Avengers, which was sort of our first experience with tumblr culture and fan-edits of our pages. That made us think, we have 32 pages to fill every month; we can do whatever we want with them thanks to Image. Why not do something interesting? KG: It sounds really banal, but I like comics as a medium. I want to write for comics; I’m interested in what the medium can do that others can’t. By definition, in almost any medium, the most interesting and powerful works are the things that can only be told in that medium. WicDiv is aggressively comic. The idea of WicDiv is to take readers on this journey through comics. It's kind of a four-year degree course. JM: And by the end, you’re massively in debt. KG: And you’ve got no future prospects. We like the idea of being able to pick up a comic and be unsure about it. The thrill of the new is underestimated. For a real indie book, we’re not that experimental at all. We work in a very classical story tradition, but why be boring? Pop culture is about the new, the idea that you could hear a beat in a slightly twisted way or with a stylistic flourish. SH: You’ve talked before about how you deliberately made WicDiv commercial. KG: We try. JM: We’ve joked before that this is our commercial project. KG: People were saying this is a really weird idea, but we were trying to sell out! SH: I’m just wondering where the line is. Have you found, when you’ve tried more experimental stuff, that you really couldn’t do that? JM: No, you’re sort of aware of your limitations and what’s going to work. KG: Nothing that we do is outside of our aesthetic. Even at WicDiv’s weirdest, there’s still a beat to it. There was this line about the Pet Shop Boys - “They’re the Smiths you can dance to” - and we’re a bit like that: the Watchmen you can dance to. SH: There’s a soundbite for you. KG: Did I really just say that? I don’t think Watchmen’s quite right… JM: But it is something you can dance to. One of the great things about a team like ours is that everyone has input. Everyone listens to each other. Matt [Wilson], I think, feels quite valued as he’s quite involved in the storytelling. KG: We often say that colour is the lead instrument in some issues of WicDiv. There are a lot of teams who don’t have their colourist on their table. I think we put a lot of value in our structure. SH: It makes a huge difference in terms of each character. I’m interested in how you all work together to create these characters from the inside out. JM: Every god has their own colour. Baal started wearing purple when he was in mourning, and now he’s going back to red. And that was Matt’s idea, not ours. Kieron had this bible at the beginning that showed where he wanted all the characters to go. I don’t do a lot of pre-page designs; the characters are pretty much in my head. It’s not formalised, really. We’ve been working together for 10 years, so a lot of it is based on mutual understanding. We don’t necessarily need to have those conversations. KG: There’s a lot of very soft counterpunching. It’s like dance partners. If Jamie takes a line that way, I’m able to see and understand what he’s doing. Occasionally, we need to have longer conversations, but that’s for long-term structural stuff. JM: Same with Matt and Clayton [Cowles] too. SH: Clayton’s lettering is sublime. JM: He’s brilliant. Storytelling through lettering - that’s the kind of thing he does. For Kieron’s 40th birthday, we made a poster of him surrounded by his characters, and they’re all talking. And for every one of them, their speech bubble was in the style of their book, which is the kind of thing that’s not always noticed. It was incredible. Clayton would come up with around 10 different versions of what the lettering might be like. KG: We talk about the options and what the actual aesthetic effect is. Lettering isn’t just words, it’s visual. SH: WicDiv is diverse in many ways, but the characters are all quite traditionally attractive in shape and body type. How do you feel about that? JM: I think we could’ve done a better job with it. The thing about comics is because they come out so frequently, you’re developing in public. You’re always aware that you could do a better job with something the next time. KG: Perfection is the opposite of good, in some ways. We could’ve done better. Pop star archetypes have different body types, but we ask ourselves, “Which body types could we have pushed further?” We could’ve made Baal a bigger guy. Morrigan is easily read as non-neurotypical, so having them be a larger character would’ve immediately opened another fucking can of worms. We did things like swap Beth out of the Norns and replaced her with a less traditional physique character. We were thinking, “How can we get a different fucking silhouette in this book?” We try really hard and we follow stuff through, but at the same time we occasionally make traps for ourselves. Yeah, we “mea culpa” that. SH: You could have all the reviews in the world, but you guys ultimately know what the strengths and weaknesses are with your own project. I find it interesting that you’re aware of that. KG: The dominant culture through history ends up reinstating the stereotypes through history. That’s one of the problems with historical stuff and that’s also built into the book: problematic people doing problematic things, including us. What I’m doing next involves a different selection of people and I’ve talked to the artist early on about what we’re doing with the characters. We’ll see how it goes. Head to our website to read the rest of our interview with WicDiv creators Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie. This interview has been edited for clarity. Steff Humm & Serena Grasso Back to top Five minutes with Brian K. Vaughan The creator of Saga and Paper Girls talks about comics fame and being a gateway drug. Ink: What’s your favourite thing about Thought Bubble? Brian K. Vaughan: That’s a good question. I love any excuse to come to the UK, so getting a free trip here is pretty badass. I think it’s just a chance to catch up with creators I love - I got to hang out with Sy Spurrier, and I went to dinner with Frank Quitely last night, which is amazing. He’s one of my favourite artists on the planet. So yeah, just getting to hang out with those guys is great and then everyone is so nice here. I love doing shows like San Diego Comic Con, but those conventions have become very movie and TV-focused. This is just a pure comics convention: people who love this medium. So that’s really the best part. Ink: We’ve talked a lot about being ‘comics famous’. Being the biggest name in comics doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re known on a wider level. What’s that level of celebrity like? BKV: That Z level of celebrity is the absolute best, because on the convention floor you get a small taste of what it’s like to be famous and then the second you set foot outside, you’re back to being anonymous. So it’s like all of the good parts of experiencing fame with none of the horrible parts. I cannot recommend being ‘comic book famous’ enough. Ink: Saga has been such a long journey already in the five years since you started writing it. So much has happened to the characters. Do you have any favourites that you’ve been sad to say goodbye to, even though you felt like the story needed it? BKV: I once threatened to do something bad to Lying Cat and Fiona [Staples] was like “Nope! I’m not going to draw that.” It seems like that’s the one bridge we’ll never be able to cross. It was really hard seeing the first image of The Stalk that Fiona drew. She was one of the most beautifully designed characters that’s ever been in a comic book, and I knew that I was going to be killing her off in just a couple of issues. That was a particularly brutal one. I started writing Saga right after my daughter was born, and she’s been aging almost in real time with Hazel in the book. So Hazel will always be my favourite character, and the story’s from her perspective so she will hopefully be around for a while. She’s my favourite. Ink: How do you write the voices of young people? Is Hazel’s quite close to your daughter’s? BKV: She’s sort of an amalgamation of my son, my daughter and their friends, I guess. I steal pretty liberally from all of them. Ink: What about in Paper Girls? Obviously the characters are a little bit older; they seem so mature and yet still 12. BKV: When I told my mum I was working on this book set in 1988, which is when I turned 12 years old, I asked her if she had a photo or two from back then. She sent me this creepy dossier she had saved of every paper I wrote when I was 12, and it was really interesting to go back, because I think of 12 as being really, really young. I read some of my writing from back then, and looking at some of the homework I had to do, I was like, “12-year-olds are badasses.” You learn a lot when you’re 12, and we’re more sophisticated at that age than adults give us credit for. I just try to write the girls to the top of my limited intelligence and it comes out, I think, hopefully sounding like a 12-year-old. Ink: When did you start writing? Have you always been a writer? BKV: Probably when I was about 12. That’s another reason why that age is a big part of Paper Girls. I don’t know when you guys discovered comics, but when I was 12 I read Watchmen for the first time and that’s when I realised, “Oh, there’s actually a person behind these comic books that I love” and I wanted to start doing that too. I started writing plays and short stories. At 12 I just did it as kind of a hobby and then by the time I was in college, I knew I wanted to find a way to trick someone into paying me to do this. Ink: You’ve said before that, as a writer, you’re working in service to the artist, and that’s the most important thing to remember when writing comics. How do you collaborate with Fiona Staples when creating characters? In Saga, Fiona designs the most astounding creatures. How much say do you have in that process before she takes it and runs with it? Early on, during that first arc, I was maybe a little more descriptive. But even then, I was pretty vague; I said Marko was a guy with horns and Alana was a woman with wings, and Fiona was the one that said, “Do they need to be white?” and that it would be much more interesting to write characters of mixed ethnicity, and I loved that. It’s obviously brought so much to the book. I think it was after those first couple of issues that I realised Fiona is just a machine; just get out of her way and give her the loosest descriptions so she can have the space to put herself in each character. It’s almost 100 percent her. Ink: How does it feel to be so many people’s entry into comics? BKV: It feels very nice to be a gateway drug. When I started dating my now-wife, who’s a playwright, I was so eager for her to share in my interests. I just wanted to write comics that she would enjoy that don’t require years of history, aren’t complicated to follow from panel to panel, and are just accessible. So when that works out, it’s very heartening. Support us on Patreon and you'll receive full access to our unabridged interview with Brian K. Vaughan, as well as other exclusive content. Steff Humm & Josh Franks Back to top If your name is featured here, it means you’ve supported us on Patreon. And THAT means that you’re an amazing person. Pledging your support on our Patreon page entitles you to all sorts of rewards, including special mentions below and on the Ink website, exclusive bonus content, and the chance to tell us the comics issues that you want us to talk about in future issues. For more details and to join our community, head to our creator profile. Ink’s supporters: Derek Coward
C.A. RileyNew Year Brings New Hope For Magic
With 2017 upon us many of the Orlando Magic players have been making new year’s Resolutions. For some it is simply eating healthy and exercising more. However, there are some resolutions we would like to see from the players and coaches. Here is our list of resolutions for 2017:
Nikola Vucevic
Win the NBA’s 6th Man of the Year Award if the Magic continue to use Vucevic off the bench. So far the big man has thrived in his new role averaging over 16 points in his last 7 games. What has helped his cause is that he has been playing starter like minutes, often playing more than starting center Bismack Biyombo. Of course it couldn’t hurt if Vucevic continues to work on his defense, which has improved from a few years ago.
Elfrid Payton
Become a more consistent offensive threat. In his last five games Payton has scored as many as 25 points against the Lakers, only to score just a single bucket two games later against the Pacers. Payton’s ups and downs on offense is really what is holding him back from being a solid starting point guard in this league.
Frank Vogel
In his first year with the Magic Coach Vogel has struggled to find a happy medium with is players. Either they are struggling to put points on the board, or their defense looks like a bull fighter as they are letting guys just go right past them. Now that Orlando’s offense is finally starting to show some life, they need to get back to their stingy defense from the beginning of the season in 2017.
Consistent 3-point Shooting
As a team the Magic have been hit or miss from beyond the arc. The team has a habit of falling in love with the 3-point shot even when it’s not falling. For instance, both Serge Ibaka and Aaron Gordon took 5 three pointers each in a loss to the Pacers, connecting on 1 of 10. This cannot happen if you are going to have any chance of winning in the NBA. Gordon and Ibaka should have the green light from beyond the arc, but only if they are open. It also doesn’t help that both Jodie Meeks and Jeff Green can be streaky shooters from downtown. If the shots are not falling the Magic need to get it done inside the arc.”G-BOMBS” is an acronym that you can use to remember the best anti-cancer, health-promoting foods on the planet. These are the foods that you should eat every day, making up a significant proportion of your diet. They are extremely effective at preventing chronic disease, including cancer and promoting health and longevity.
G – Greens
Raw leafy greens contain only about 100 calories per pound, and are packed with nutrients. Leafy greens contain substances that protect blood vessels, and are associated with reduced risk of diabetes 1-3
Greens are an excellent tool for weight loss as they can be consumed in virtually unlimited quantities.
Leafy greens are also the most nutrient-dense of all foods, but, unfortunately are only consumed in minuscule amounts in a typical American diet. We should follow the example of our closest living relatives—chimpanzees and gorillas—who consume tens of pounds of green leaves every day.
The majority of calories in green vegetables, including leafy greens, come from protein, and this plant protein is packaged with beneficial phytochemicals. Green vegetables are also rich in folate (the natural form of folic acid), calcium, and contain small amounts of omega-3 fatty acids.
Leafy greens are also rich in antioxidant pigments called carotenoids, specifically lutein and zeaxanthin, which are the carotenoids known to promote healthy vision. 4 Also, several leafy greens (such as kale) and other green vegetables (such as bok choy, broccoli, and brussel sprouts) belong to the cruciferous family of vegetables.
Also, several leafy greens (such as kale) and other green vegetables (such as bok choy, broccoli, and brussel sprouts) belong to the cruciferous family of vegetables. All vegetables contain protective micronutrients and phytochemicals, but cruciferous vegetables have a unique chemical composition—they contain glucosinolates, and when their cell walls are broken by blending, chopping or chewing, a chemical reaction converts glucosinolates to isothiocyanates (ITCs)—compounds with a variety of potent anti-cancer effects.
Because different ITCs can work in different locations in the cell and on different molecules, they can have combined additive effects, working synergistically to remove carcinogens, reduce inflammation, neutralize oxidative stress, inhibit angiogenesis (the process by which tumors acquire a blood supply), and kill cancer cells.5
B – Beans
Beans (and other legumes as well) are a powerhouse of superior nutrition, and the most nutrient-dense carbohydrate source.
Beans act as an anti-diabetes and weight-loss food because they are digested slowly, having a stabilizing effect on blood sugar, which promotes satiety and helps to prevent food cravings. Plus they contain soluble fiber, which lowers cholesterol levels. 6
Beans are unique foods because of their very high levels of fiber and resistant starch, carbohydrates that are not broken down by digestive enzymes. Fiber and resistant starch not only reduce the total number of calories absorbed from beans, but are also fermented by intestinal bacteria into fatty acids that help to prevent colon cancer. 7
Eating beans, peas or lentils at least twice a week has been found to decrease colon cancer risk by 50%.8 Legume intake also provides significant protection against oral, larynx, pharynx, stomach, and kidney cancers.9
O– Onions
Onions, along with leeks, garlic, chives, shallots, and scallions, make up the Allium family of vegetables, which have beneficial effects on the cardiovascular and immune systems, as well as anti-diabetic and anti-cancer effects.
Allium vegetables are known for their characteristic organosulfur compounds, similar to the ITCs in cruciferous vegetables, organosulfur compounds are released when onions are chopped, crushed or chewed.
Epidemiological studies have found that increased consumption of Allium vegetables is associated with lower risk of gastric and prostate cancers. These compounds prevent the development of cancers by detoxifying carcinogens, halting cancer cell growth, and blocking angiogenesis. 10
Onions also contain high concentrations of health-promoting flavonoid antioxidants, predominantly quercetin, and red onions also contain at least 25 different anthocyanins.11-12 Quercetin slows tumor development, suppresses growth and proliferation and induces cell death in colon cancer cells.13-15 Flavonoids also have anti-inflammatory effects that may contribute to cancer prevention.16
M – Mushrooms
Consuming mushrooms regularly is associated with decreased risk of breast, stomach, and colorectal cancers.
In one recent Chinese study, women who ate at least 10 grams of fresh mushrooms each day (about one mushroom per day) had a 64% decreased risk of breast cancer. Even more dramatic protection was gained by women who ate 10 grams of mushrooms and drank green tea daily—an 89% decrease in risk for premenopausal women, and 82% for postmenopausal women, respectively. 17-20
White, cremini, Portobello, oyster, shiitake, maitake, and reishi mushrooms all have anti-cancer properties—some are anti-inflammatory, stimulate the immune system, prevent DNA damage, slow cancer cell growth, cause programmed cancer cell death, and inhibit angiogenesis.
In addition to these properties, mushrooms are unique in that they contain aromatase inhibitors—compounds that can block the production of estrogen. These compounds are thought to be largely responsible for the preventive effects of mushrooms against breast cancer. In fact, there are aromatase-inhibiting drugs on the market that are used to treat breast cancer.
Regular consumption of dietary aromatase inhibitors is an excellent strategy for prevention, and it turns out that even the most commonly eaten mushrooms (white, cremini, and Portobello) have a high anti-aromatase activity.21 Keep in mind that mushrooms should only be eaten cooked: several raw culinary mushrooms contain a potentially carcinogenic substance called agaritine, and cooking mushrooms significantly reduces their agaritine content.22-23
B – Berries
Blueberries, strawberries, and blackberries are true super foods.
Naturally sweet and juicy, berries are low in sugar and high in nutrients – they are among the best foods you can eat. Their vibrant colors mean that they are full of antioxidants, including flavonoids and antioxidant vitamins—berries are some of the highest antioxidant foods in existence.
Berries’ plentiful antioxidant content confers both cardio-protective and anti-cancer effects, such as reducing blood pressure, reducing inflammation, preventing DNA damage, inhibiting tumor angiogenesis, and stimulating of the body’s own antioxidant enzymes. Berry consumption has been linked to reduced risk of diabetes, cancers and cognitive decline. 24-29
Berries are an excellent food for the brain—berry consumption improves both motor coordination and memory.30-31
S – Seeds
Seeds and nuts contain healthy fats and are rich in a spectrum of micronutrients, including phytosterols, minerals, and antioxidants.
Countless studies have demonstrated the cardiovascular benefits of nuts. In addition, nuts in the diet aids in weight maintenance and diabetes prevention. 32-35 The nutritional profiles of seeds are similar to nuts when it comes to healthy fats, minerals, and antioxidants, but seeds are also abundant in trace minerals, higher in protein than nuts, and each kind of seed is nutritionally unique.
The nutritional profiles of seeds are similar to nuts when it comes to healthy fats, minerals, and antioxidants, but seeds are also abundant in trace minerals, higher in protein than nuts, and each kind of seed is nutritionally unique. Flax, chia, and hemp seeds are extremely rich sources of omega-3 fats. In addition to the omega-3s, flaxseeds are rich in fiber and lignans.
Flaxseed consumption protects against heart disease by a number of different mechanisms, and lignans, which are present in both flaxseeds and sesame seeds, have anti-cancer effects. 36-38
Sunflower seeds are especially rich in protein and minerals. Pumpkin seeds are rich in iron and calcium and are a good source of zinc.
Sesame seeds have the greatest amount of calcium of any food in the world, and provide abundant amounts of vitamin E. Also, black sesame seeds are extremely rich in antioxidants. 39
The healthy fats in seeds and nuts also aid in the absorption of nutrients when eaten with vegetables.
You can learn more about the health benefits of G-BOMBS in my New York Times best-selling book Super Immunity, which discusses how to naturally strengthen the immune system against everything from the common cold to cancer.In the minds of most Indians, a hijra is an annoyance. A man with long hair, typically dressed in a sari, who seems to always and miraculously know when a child is being born or a wedding taking place. A hijra arrives just in time to beg, and if you don’t acquiesce, you will be cursed. The same hijra waits at traffic lights and peers into the windows of stopped cars, once again to ask for money. Hijras, who can be trans, intersex, or eunuchs, were historically revered in ancient India, but over the past two centuries, have become one of the country’s most misunderstood and marginalized communities. Other Indians often won’t speak to them, but will instead pass on a string of unsubstantiated myths relating to the group, spawning prejudice generation after generation. Anthropologists have tried in the last few decades to study hijras, but there is almost no literature about the community from within.
In recent years, however, one hijra, Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, has made it her mission to fill this silence. As India began to grapple with HIV in the 1990s, she was one of the earliest activists to demand that the government’s anti-AIDS program include hijras as a distinct category. Tripathi first traveled outside India in 2006 to attend the World AIDS Conference in Toronto and has since become a familiar face at the UN and other international forums on HIV. Her nonprofit, Astitva, aims to support and empower hijras in her home city of Thane, just outside Mumbai. And in 2012, she published an autobiography in Marathi; its English translation was released in February of 2015. The title, Me Hijra, Me Laxmi, is meaningful in both languages—me, pronounced “mee,” is Marathi for “I am.”
Tripathi also played a key role in the movement in India to recognize transgender people as members of a third gender on official government documents. In 2014, the Supreme Court ruled that “it is the right of every human being to choose their gender,” granting legal sanctity to a gender classification that is neither male nor female, but a neutral third category. In India’s most recent federal elections, hijras and other transgender people were permitted to publicly declare their gender identities when voting.
Tripathi may belong to a largely ostracized group, but years of chasing the limelight on television shows and dogged activism on HIV has turned her into a celebrity. She was the star of Between the Lines, a 2005 film about the lives and struggles of hijras. When the film screened in Amsterdam in 2007, she ran dance workshops in the city, and the next year performed traditional dances from across India at the Amsterdam India Festival with a troupe of hijras. When I arrived at her apartment on a warm afternoon last month, she was lounging on her bed in an ankle-length black nightgown accented with red embroidery. Her long, glued-on nails were painted with glittering black and white stripes. She did not want to be interviewed—and made no bones about telling me as much—because she had just returned from traveling, and was leaving again the next day for Bangkok.
“At times I have the right to be a diva, no?” she asked, her voice like honey on gravel, half-apologizing for the countless interruptions—answering phone calls, chatting with her mother and boyfriend, brushing her teeth, snuggling her black Labrador. One of the calls came from a hijra living a few hours outside Mumbai who had been told she couldn’t buy a house. Tripathi advised her to complain to the police, but added, “If the police is not acting, I will help you out.” When she put down the phone, she looked up at me and sighed: “I get soooo many calls like this from all over the country.”
“You’re getting to see me without makeup,” Tripathi said, a rare privilege. But, as she detailed over the course of our conversation, behind her usual flamboyance—the sequined saris and heavy jewelry, the ringlets of waist-length blond-streaked hair—is a story of pain and survival, one that she isn’t afraid to tell.
—Shanoor Seervai for Guernica
Guernica: “Hijra” is a loaded term. What does it mean to you?
Laxmi Narayan Tripathi: A hijra is [someone who has transitioned from] male to female, but we don’t consider ourselves female because culturally we belong to a completely different section of society. Many hijras are castrated, but it’s not compulsory. They say it’s the soul which is hijra. We feel we are neither man nor woman, but we enjoy femininity. I enjoy womanhood, but I am not a woman. It’s very confusing.
We are not hypocrites. We live our sexuality openly, being truthful to our souls and our bodies. Science and doctors assigned something else to us when we were born—which they didn’t have the authority to—but we choose what we are and we are very truthful about it.
The biggest misery in the world, I believe, is the feeling of being unloved.
Guernica: Historically, hijras were highly respected in Indian society. But that changed under British rule, and since then, they have been feared and excluded. Can you tell me more about the evolving place of hijras in Indian culture?
Laxmi Narayan Tripathi: I’ll start with the Manu-smriti [one of the earliest Hindu texts on social order]. Then in the Vedic period [1750–500 BC], we were known as the Kinnars. We were very highly regarded people. We were at the court, we were cooks, the keepers of the queen’s palace. When the Muslim nawabs [nobility] came, we were the harem keepers, the advisers, responsible for guarding the queens. We were in all the sectors of life, considered special people, nobles, even divine.
Our status changed after the British came to India. They saw us as a threat to their rule because we were very loyal to the courts and the kingdoms we served. They took away our lands, because they thought inheritance had to be through blood, and they never understood our structure. They didn’t allow our land to be inherited by our chelas [disciples]. Our possessions were taken away from us, and we were left with nothing. The British brought in laws like the Criminal Tribes Act [a colonial-era law restricting Indian tribal communities], and Section 377 [a colonial law that criminalizes sexual activities “against the order of nature”].
After independence, nothing happened. The British mentality was still very deeply rooted in society, and 200 years of British rule had totally discarded our existence. Not any government, nobody took heed of our situation.
When we started our activism, we had to tell people, “We exist, we are humans. Please give us nothing but our basic dignity.” The biggest misery in the world, I believe, is the feeling of being unloved, and that this community faces a lot. You’re not even considered to be human. You’re considered transparent.
We were ignored until we started organizing, when HIV first became a factor. Even in the HIV world, people could not believe that hijras have sex. And then also we were put in the category of men having sex with men, the gay community. I said, “We are not men”—way back in 1999.
Guernica: How do you feel when hijras are lumped into the general category of “transgender,” or mistakenly categorized as “gay”?
Laxmi Narayan Tripathi: Being called gay is worse. I remember when I started fighting way back in 1999, and I said the state doesn’t have the right to use my gender to club me into “gay.” If I say I am not a man then who are you to question it? Being called gay or a man really upsets me.
When somebody asks me, “Who are you?” I tell them, “I am the oldest ethnic transgender community in the world, which has its own culture and own religious beliefs.” And we are in four countries in South Asia: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Terai region of Nepal.
What binds us hijras together is the same pain that has gone through our lives, which is much thicker than blood. That’s why in our community we don’t have old-age homes. Our guru may be horrible, but at the same time, we take care of the guru till the last breath.
Guernica: I’m curious about your childhood, and how you came to recognize your identity as a hijra.
Laxmi Narayan Tripathi: As a child, you’re so confused. I thought, “I’m so feminine; why does everyone call me a boy?” I always wanted to dress in frocks. I hated my school uniform, I liked the girls’ uniform. I thought, “Bitches are wearing those beautiful frocks.” I had to wear shorts. I always hated it.
My femininity started to be targeted at a very young age. Whenever I had a chance, I used to dance and dress up. I started learning dance in our hobby class at school, and I was the only boy in the dance class.
I was first sexually exploited when I was seven, by a distant cousin at a family wedding. Even after that I was routinely molested by older cousins and their friends. See, my innocence was taken away and I became mature at one bloody incident. I believe I never had a childhood. I grew up as an elderly person. And that’s what my femininity brought upon me. Of course, in a patriarchal society, hijras’ bodies are thought of as toys.
I learned dancing because I loved dancing. It took away the pain, it took away everything, I was happy when I was dancing. I got a lot of respect when I was dancing: people respected my art, they didn’t only respect my body.
Guernica: Did you ever think to tell anyone about the abuse?
Laxmi Narayan Tripathi: No. I was a sick child, I was scared, and honestly speaking, I never thought about why I didn’t tell anyone. Abuse victims don’t have all the answers, and I never thought it was abuse, do you understand? My generation was totally different. Now a small child knows many things, much more than what we knew. When I understood it was not right, it was much later.
I was recently chief guest at a function, and one of the boys who had exploited me was there. He could not even look at me, but I was kind to him. I have not forgiven, but I believe that what you do to me is your karma and what I do to you is my karma. What is gone is gone. I have lived it, I have overpowered it. I don’t carry any baggage with me. It’s done, it’s finished, it’s over. You can’t change the past, but you can make the future much more beautiful.
Guernica: I understand you belong to an upper-caste family |
€œthe government has made it clear by what they have said and done that they want to make an example of me.â€Â
“What example do they think they’re making by putting Glick in jail while corporate criminals remain largely unpunished?†asked Tidwell.
According to District of Columbia law regarding the Capitol Grounds, Glick violated two sections.
Engaging in disorderly or disruptive conduct on Capitol Grounds:
To utter loud, threatening, or abusive language, or to engage in any disorderly or disruptive conduct, at any place upon the United States Capitol Grounds or within any of the Capitol Buildings with intent to impede, disrupt, or disturb the orderly conduct of any session of the Congress or either House thereof, or the orderly conduct within any such building of any hearing before, or any deliberations of, any committee or subcommittee of the Congress or either House thereof.
Parading or assemblages on Capitol Grounds:
It is forbidden to parade, stand, or move in processions or assemblages in said United States Capitol Grounds, or to display therein any flag, banner, or device designed or adapted to bring into public notice any party, organization, or movement…
Glick wrote for support in numbers at the hearing, while also seeming to realize that an unfavorable outcome could result in a teachable moment:
“If you are in the greater DC area, can you be with me next Tuesday AT 12 PM NOON, when I’m sentenced? Or if you’re not in this area are there people you know that you could reach out to? It could make a difference to the judge if he sees a full courtroom. And it will also be a way of our collectively saying that the time is long overdue for action by our federal government on the climate crisis.â€Â
The Senate has still not passed a bill regarding the climate crisis.
Allen McDuffee is a New York–based journalist. He recently launched a blog called Think Tanked.Zappos COO Alfred Lin enlightens us on how to become 37 times more productive in only one year! Can it be? Let’s hear him out:
Make at least one improvement [every day] that makes Zappos better. It sounds daunting, but remember improvements don’t have to be dramatic. Think about what it means to improve just 1% per day and build upon that every single day. Doing so has a dramatic effect and will make us 37x better, not 365% (3.65x) better at the end of the year. Wake up every day and ask yourself not only what is the 1% improvement I can change to make Zappos better, but also what is the 1% improvement I can change to make myself better personally and professionally — because we, Zappos, can’t grow unless we as individual people grow too. Imagine yourself making 1% changes every day that compounds and will make you and Zappos 37x better by the end of the year. Imagine if every employee at Zappos was doing the same. Imagine how much better you, Zappos and the world will be next year.
At first glance it’s inspiring. At second glace it’s poppycock. At third glance you wonder how it’s possible for someone to use the word “Zappos” so frequently.
Being 37x more productive is impossible, and I’ll show you why. But along the way it will become clear how becoming 2-3x more productive might be within reach.
His math isn’t the problem per se. It’s true that if you improve 1% each day over the previous day, that’s a 1% compounding rate. My question is: Is it possible to increase your daily productivity by an entire percent every day?
To answer that, I want to give you a fun math puzzle. Yeah, I know, “fun” is relative… Okay look if you don’t like word problems just take a random guess at the answer. If you’re up for the challenge, try to solve it without pen and paper. You know, just to prove your MIT education wasn’t for nothing.
Here’s the puzzle: You get in your car at home and head out towards your mother’s house 60 miles away. (Your mom likes this word problem, I can already tell.) You hit traffic during the first half of the trip, so after 30 miles you’ve averaged only 30 miles per hour.
Now the traffic opens up and you can go as fast as you want. The question is: How fast do you have to go during the second half of the trip such that you’ve averaged 60 mph over the entire trip?
If you’re not using pen and paper, maybe you guessed 90? 120?
Actually it’s impossible! To average 60 mph you need to travel the whole 60 miles in a single hour. But it’s already been an hour! Even if you went 1000 mph during the second half, it would have taken just over an hour to complete the 60 miles, therefore your average is still less than 60 mph.
It’s amazing how periods of low velocity wash away gains of high velocity. In the puzzle, if you doubled your speed in the second half it would increase your trip average from 30 to 40 mph. If you quadrupled your speed in the second half, your trip average would still be only 48 mph.
Once you’re behind, you can’t make up ground no matter how fast you go.
This puzzle illustrates the weird math of velocities, and what applies to “miles” per hour also applies to emails per hour or writing code or writing prose or any other “gettin’ stuff done” per hour.
The problem with improving your productivity is that so much of your day is occupied by low-velocity activity — dealing with emails you didn’t really need to see, dawdling in a meeting that hasn’t started yet, or spending too much time reading blogs. (Present company excepted.)
When half your day moves at 30 mph, it’s impossible to make up the time during the other half.
This is the problem with Lin’s 1% idea — the low-velocity stuff makes it too difficult to improve even 1% overall, at least not every day of the year. Even with 37x improvement in some areas, you still might not be 2x more productive overall.
There’s good news here, however! Once you realize that the low-velocity stuff is responsible for most of the drag on your productivity, you realize that the thing to do is eliminate the low-velocity stuff. Yes it’s good to learn to type faster, but cutting down on the time it takes to process useless email might help even more.
Ready for more good news? There are free tools that help you identify what the low-velocity stuff is. I use one called RescueTime. To show you how useful this is, consider this example of my stats for one week:
Whoa — almost eight hours of email. That’s a solid, uninterrupted, full day of nothing but email I’m blowing through every week. Is that really the way I should be spending the majority of my time?
Even the long tail can be instructive. Notice the 45 minutes of “Calendars.” A drill-down bears out the awful conclusion — yes I spent almost an hour in Google Calendar. It’s true this week was completely packed with events, but still.
Another realization: I had an averaged 5.5 hours of activity per day. I was in the office for over 8 hours every one of those days — the rest is sopped up with meetings, office chatter, and lunch. Here’s the mythical eight-hour workday quantified — I’m starting with 5-6 and even then I spent much of it fielding email.
Once you see the numbers it’s easy to correct. I now notice more when I’m in an office conversation that’s past the point of being productive. There’s millions of tips for how to process email more efficiently.
So if you’re serious about wanting to increase productivity by, say, 2x, you can. Identify the biggest perpetrators of low-velocity activity and eliminate them, then do a little surgery on your high-value tasks.
The best part is, none of this means working late or working harder. Just stop averaging down!
What are your tips for increasing productivity?
Leave a comment. It will be fun.Robin Garnett, whose son Matthew has spent six months in a secure mental health unit, says he is still waiting for explanation
The father of a 15-year-old boy with autism who has spent six months in a secure mental health unit because of a lack of space in specialist care has said the family has yet to receive an explanation from health service officials.
Robin Garnett, who says his highly vulnerable son, Matthew, believes he is being held in prison, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he had been unable to track down who might be in charge of the situation, with consultants refusing to provide names.
“It seems they’re not really interested in talking to parents in cases like these,” he said.
Matthew, who been diagnosed with autism, ADHD and an anxiety condition, physically attacked his father in September and was sectioned to a short-term mental health treatment unit in Woking, Surrey, which the family said was the only option given at the time.
“Our assumption was that was a temporary holding measure, probably for a matter of days, weeks at most,” Robin Garnett said.
A place has been found at St Andrew’s Healthcare in Northampton, which specialises in patients with autism, he said, but Matthew had yet to be moved. The move was agreed months ago, he said. “The fact he’s going there is not in dispute, it’s just that the beds are blocked.”
His son, Garnett said, was “a hulking 15-year-old young adult, but he sees the world like a five-year-old”. As such, he explained, a secure psychiatric unit was deeply distressing. “The only way he can make sense of a building he doesn’t want to be in, with the doors locked, is as a prison. He sees it as a punishment for what he did six months ago.”
An online petition started by the family to pressure the Deparment for Health to move Matthew has received almost 200,000 signatures and considerable media coverage. The petition was a last, desperate measure, Garnett said: “We felt we had to do something after half a year.”
At the weekend, NHS England said it hoped the teenager would be moved soon.
A spokesman for NHS England told the BBC: “We have every sympathy for Matthew and his family and we understand that this has been a very difficult time. It has been confirmed that Matthew will be moved to St Andrew’s, where he will be able to receive the specialist care that he needs. We anticipate this will happen in a matter of weeks but cannot confirm an admission date at this point.”By Joseph Solomon,
AIFF Media Team
DAMMAM (SAUDI ARABIA): The Indian U-19 National Team will face hosts Saudi Arabia in their opening encounter of Group D of the AFC U-19 Championship qualifiers at the Prince Mohammad bin Fahad Stadium in Dammam, Saudi Arabia tomorrow (November 04, 2017). The kick-off for which is slated at 9:35 PM IST.
Riding on the “positive experience” of the recently concluded FIFA U-17 World Cup 2017 India, Head Coach of the Indian U-19s, Luis Norton de Matos said in the Official Pre-Tournament Press Conference that India will be looking to make an impact, whilst continuing the process of “building football in the next generation”.
“It is very important to continue the process of developing football in the set of boys that have been provided post the World Cup. We will be looking forward to give all the teams a tough fight and aim for a win”, Matos said.
“We will fight till the very end in our upcoming matches, but at the same time we respect our opponents and we know that our opponents have the necessary tools to hurt us. We will have to be focused and stay on our toes throughout the entirety of the matches”
“We aim to play against the best and we are drawn in a group that have some of the best youth teams in Asia. Against Saudi Arabia, it will be a very tough clash and the fact that they will be playing at home will add to that”, he added.
Comprising of a mixture of players from Indian U-17 World Cup Team and India’s U-19 team which played in the SAFF U-19 Championship in Bhutan, the Indian U-19 National Team has been pitted in Group D alongside hosts Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Turkmenistan.
“The set of players that we have are special and some of the boys who were part of the FIFA U-17 World Cup are in the Indian U-19s, which make it a very special experience of them of playing against some of the best youth teams of Asia”
“We are preparing for the future and through the process the players are bound to grow with the experience that they will get throughout”, Matos quipped. “The FIFA U-17 World Cup proved that the new generation can follow football and we wish to capitalize on this growth”
In their preparation for the AFC U-19 Championship Qualifiers, India had an exposure tour of Qatar wherein the colts played against Qatar U-19s and Al-Gharafa Club, losing 1-0 against the former and defeating 3-1 the latter. “The exposure tours helped us in our preparation for the Qualifiers as they gave us time for team chemistry to build both on and off the field. Our strength is our unity and if we aim to play as a single unit in the upcoming matches”, Matos informed.
Meanwhile, the Head Coach of Saudi Arabia Khalid Alatawi gave credit to India and said, “India are one of the teams that have evolved good with time and they (India) have made good progress. They (India) are quick on the ball and will be tough opponents tomorrow”
Posted on : Friday November 03, 2017Since this article was published, the Myanmar military has escalated its attacks on Rohingya villages, spurring more than hundreds of thousands Rohingya to flee their homes as of September 11 and stream toward the overcrowded refugee camps in Bangladesh. On Aug. 25, Rohingya militants attacked security forces, killing at least a dozen. The army has responded in brutal fashion, according to refugee accounts, burning villages and killing hundreds.
“Dance!” shouted the army officer, waving a gun at the trembling girl. Afifa, just 14 years old, was corralled in a rice paddy with dozens of girls and women—all members of Myanmar’s Rohingya minority. The soldiers who invaded her village that morning last October said they were looking for militants who had carried out a surprise attack on three border posts, killing nine policemen. The village’s men and boys, fearing for their lives, had dashed into the forests to hide, and the soldiers began terrorizing the women and children.
After enduring an invasive body search, Afifa had watched soldiers drag two young women deep into the rice paddy before they turned their attention to her. “If you don’t dance at once,” the officer said, drawing his hand across his throat, “we will slaughter you.” Choking back tears, Afifa began to sway back and forth. The soldiers clapped rhythmically. A few pulled out mobile phones to shoot videos. The commanding officer slid his arm around Afifa’s waist.
“Now that’s better, isn’t it?” he said, flashing a smile.
The encounter marked only the beginning of the latest wave of violence against the estimated 1.1 million Rohingya who live, precariously, in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state. The United Nations considers the Rohingya one of the world’s most persecuted minorities. Muslims in a nation dominated by Buddhists, the Rohingya claim that they are indigenous to Rakhine, and many are descended from settlers who came in the 19th and early 20th century. Despite their roots, a 1982 law stripped the Rohingya of their citizenship. They are now considered illegal immigrants in Myanmar as well as in neighboring Bangladesh, the country to which as many as half a million have fled.
Five years ago, clashes between Buddhist and Muslim communities left hundreds dead, mostly Rohingya. With their mosques and villages torched, 120,000 Rohingya were forced into makeshift camps inside Myanmar (also known as Burma). This time the assault was unleashed by the Burmese military, the feared Tatmadaw, which ruled over Myanmar for five decades before overseeing a transition that led last year to a quasi-civilian government.
View Images Early in the morning, family members warm themselves around a fire in an alley in Kutupalong. Refugees construct their huts from branches, leaves, and black plastic sheeting. Many of these flimsy shelters were ruined in May by a cyclone. Photograph by William Daniels, National Geographic
What began ostensibly as a hunt for the culprits behind the border post attacks turned into a four-month assault on the Rohingya population as a whole. According to witnesses interviewed by the UN and international human-rights groups, as well as National Geographic, the army campaign included executions, mass detentions, the razing of villages, and the systematic rape of Rohingya women. Yanghee Lee, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, believes it’s “very likely” the army committed crimes against humanity.
The full extent of what happened in northern Rakhine state is not yet known because the government has not allowed independent investigators, journalists, or aid groups unfettered access to the affected areas. Satellite imagery at the time showed Rohingya villages destroyed by fire. Amateur video appeared to show charred bodies of adults and children lying on the ground in the torched villages. Rights groups say hundreds of Rohingya have been killed. One incontrovertible truth is that the army assault triggered the exodus of more than 75,000 Rohingya into overcrowded refugee camps across the border in Bangladesh. Nearly 60 percent are children. (An estimated 20,000 or more Rohingya have been displaced within Myanmar’s borders.)
View Images With no access to Bangladesh’s health facilities, Rohingya women with a malnourished baby wait to be seen by medical professionals who work for international non-profits. Photograph by William Daniels, National Geographic
Before the soldiers left Afifa’s village that day, she says they set fire to the harvest-ready rice fields, looted houses, and shot or stole all of the cattle and goats. The devastation and fear compelled Afifa’s parents to split the family into two groups and escape in different directions—to improve their odds of survival. “We didn’t want to abandon our home,” Afifa’s father, Mohammed Islam, told me five months later, when five of the family’s 11 members staggered into Balukhali, a refugee camp in Bangladesh. “But the army has only one aim: to get rid of all Rohingya.”
It wasn't supposed to turn out this way. More than a year ago, Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi became Myanmar’s de facto leader, and international human-rights groups—as well as many Rohingya—hoped she would help move Rakhine toward peace and reconciliation. The daughter of Myanmar’s independence hero and martyr, General Aung San, she is celebrated for her fearless resistance to the country’s military dictatorship. After enduring more than 15 years under house arrest, Aung San Suu Kyi led her National League of Democracy to a sweeping electoral victory in 2015. (A clause in the military-drafted constitution prevented her from becoming president, so a loyal underling serves as president while she runs the government as “state counselor.”)
“We had a very big hope that Suu Kyi and democracy would be good for us,” says Moulabi Jaffar, a 40-year-old Islamic cleric and shop owner from a village north of Maungdaw, sitting in his shack in Balukhali camp. “But the violence only got worse. That came as a big surprise.”
View Images Men pray at a mosque being built from bamboo at Balukhali, a refugee camp in Bangladesh. The Rohingya are Muslims, while Buddhism is the dominant religion in Myanmar. Buddhist firebrands have stirred up hatred for the minority Rohingya. Photograph by William Daniels, National Geographic
Despite her reputation as a human-rights icon, Aung San Suu Kyi has seemed unwilling or unable to speak about the violence against the Rohingya, much less bring perpetrators to justice. When reports of army atrocities emerged late last year, she broke her silence—not to rein in abusive soldiers but to scold the United Nations and human-rights groups for stoking “bigger fires of resentment” by dwelling on the testimonies of Rohingya who had fled to Bangladesh. It doesn’t help, she said, “if everybody is just concentrating on the negative side of the situation.” Aung San Suu Kyi has yet to visit northern Rakhine. But in a BBC interview in April, she said, “I don’t think there is ethnic cleansing going on.”
Aung San Suu Kyi remains an immensely popular figure in Myanmar, where 90 percent of the population is Buddhist and the military still wields enormous power. But her role in shielding the army from scrutiny in Rakhine has tarnished her global reputation, even prompting a letter from 13 Nobel laureates upbraiding her for failing to protect the rights of the Rohingya. “Like many in the international community, we expected more of Suu Kyi,” says Matthew Smith, co-founder of Fortify Rights, a Bangkok-based human-rights group. “She is operating in a delicate situation politically, but that doesn’t justify silence or wholesale denials in the face of mountains of evidence. The army launched an attack on a civilian population, and nobody has been held accountable.”
Myanmar set up three commissions to look into the turmoil in Rakhine state, but none is independent. The army’s report, released in May, proclaimed its innocence—except for two minor incidents, including one in which a soldier borrowed a motorbike without asking. A member of the main government inquiry dismissed reports of atrocities and contended that Burmese soldiers couldn’t have raped Rohingya women because they are “too dirty.” That commission’s final report, issued in early August, was another blanket denial, contending that “there is no evidence of crimes against humanity or ethnic cleansing.” Aung San Suu Kyi says her government will accept outside guidance only from an international commission chaired by former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan. Its report is also due this month, but its mandate is to make policy recommendations—not to investigate human-rights abuses.
View Images Young boys study the Quran inside a madrassa in one of the older parts of the Kutupalong camp. Most Rohingya children in Bangladesh do not have access to formal schooling because they are unregistered refugees. Most attend the many madrassas found throughout the camps. Photograph by William Daniels, National Geographic
In June, when a newly formed UN fact-finding mission sought to investigate human-rights violations in Myanmar, including Rakhine, Aung San Suu Kyi’s government refused to grant visas to the team members. “We don’t accept it,” she said, arguing that the mission could exacerbate divisions between Buddhists and Muslims. When Lee, the UN special rapporteur, returned to Myanmar in July, she and Aung San Suu Kyi shared a warm embrace—before Lee excoriated the government for blocking her access and intimidating witnesses, the same tactics used by the military junta. “In previous times, human rights defenders, journalists, and civilians were followed, monitored, and surveyed, and questioned—that’s still going on."
Afia, her father, and siblings spent five months on the run inside Myanmar, sticking mostly to the forests to avoid the military, often going days without food. On their first attempt to cross the Naf River, which separates Myanmar and Bangladesh, a Burmese patrol boat opened fire, capsizing their boat and killing several refugees. It would be three months before they risked the crossing again.
I met Afifa in March on the day that half of her family finally reached Balukhali camp, where more than 11,000 new arrivals have turned the forested hills into a dusty hive of bamboo huts and black tarpaulins. Afifa wore the same soiled brown shirt she wore the day she danced for the soldiers five months before. “It’s all I have,” she says. Another family from their home village of Maung Hnama offered food to eat and a safe place to sleep, but Islam wept quietly. His wife and their five other children were still in hiding in Myanmar.
The refugee camps that line Bangladesh’s border are a short drive from the Bangladeshi resort of Cox’s Bazar. Tourists there cavort on the wide beach, taking grinning selfies in the surf, while a few miles away, hundreds of thousands of refugees marinate in grief and neglect. In Kutupalong, a sprawling camp with some 30,000 Rohingya refugees, the wood and bamboo dwellings radiate from the center like rings on a tree, each layer marking a wave of violence the Rohingya have fled.
Rozina Akhtar, 22, has lived here since she was seven years old. With no real hope of leaving—“we have no passports, no ID cards, so what can we do?”—she tries to help new arrivals adjust to their lives as refugees. “We can’t reject them,” she says. “These are our sisters and brothers.” Akhtar helps newcomers get medical care, plastic tarpaulins, and food rations, but what they really need are jobs. Men can occasionally get day jobs, fishing, harvesting rice, or laboring in the salt flats for a dollar or two a day, but many of the women beg for money along the road outside the camp.
Under a sprawling fig tree in Kutupalong, new arrivals gather to talk about the atrocities they endured in Myanmar. Nur Ayesha, 40, pulls back her headscarf to reveal bleached-white burn scars across her forehead; soldiers set fire to her house while she was still inside, she says. Residents of Kyet Yoe Pyin say the Burmese soldiers who firebombed their houses also gunned down six women and a man who had stayed behind to attend the birth of a baby—the mother included.
Minara, an 18-year-old in a black burqa, speaks about her missing family members before revealing that Burmese soldiers gang-raped her and several other young women in her village. Her voice barely rises above a whisper. As we talk, Minara, who, like many victims, didn’t choose to reveal her last name, bites the edge of her sleeve, pulling it over her face. By the end, only her eyes, darting back and forth, are visible. “We’re too scared to go back,” she says.
View Images Molia Banu, 60, arrived at Kutupalong about two months before this photograph. She and her daughters fled when the military began burning a house next to theirs. Still suffering from an operation to remove a tumor, Banu supports her family by begging on the main road. Photograph by William Daniels, National Geographic
On a hill back in Balukhali camp, I meet a 14-year-old boy, Ajim Allah, getting his hair combed by a friend. Ajim shows me his shriveled left arm, shattered, he says, by a police bullet when he emerged from a madrassa last October; three of his friends died of gunshot wounds that night, he says. In a hut nearby, Yasmin, 27, recounts how soldiers burst into her home in Ngan Chaung village and took turns raping her at knifepoint in front of her five-year-old daughter. “When my daughter screamed, they pointed guns at her and told her they’d kill her if she made any more noise,” she says. The worst moment came after the soldiers left. Yasmin says she went out to look for her eight-year-old son, who had fled when the soldiers came into the village. She found him lying in a rice paddy, a bullet hole in his back.
The Rohingya are caught between two countries—and welcome in neither. More than 500,000 Rohingya now live in Bangladesh. Only 32,000 are officially registered, however, and no new Rohingya refugees have been registered since 1992—an apparent attempt to dissuade more Rohingya from seeking refuge in Bangladesh. That strategy hasn’t worked, but it means that there are close to half a million undocumented Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh with no right or access to employment, education, or basic health care.
View Images Toward the end of day, a boy walks along a path past houses in through a more established section of Kutupalong camp toward a playground that attracts many children. Photograph by William Daniels, National Geographic
Bangladesh, already poor and overpopulated, shows no enthusiasm for hosting the Rohingya. Conditions in the camps are miserable, but the government has declined many offers of humanitarian aid. It has even floated a plan to move the refugees to a remote island in the Bay of Bengal. The radical proposal seemed designed to keep Rohingya away from the tourist hub of Cox’s Bazar—and to push refugees to return to Myanmar. Many Rohingya, however, are too traumatized to go back to Rakhine, an area historically known as Arakan. One rape victim I spoke to recalled the chilling words of her army attacker: “He kept saying, ‘This kind of torture will continue until you leave the country.’”
View Images Children push a child in a wheelchair along a path in Kutupalong where enterprising refugees have set up shops and cafes. Almost two-thirds of the refugees who recently fled Myanmar for Bangladesh are children, raising concerns that they are at increased risk of being forced into child labor, early marriage or the sex trade. Photograph by William Daniels, National Geographic
A few years ago, many Rohingya men, including Yasmin’s husband, risked a perilous sea journey to seek construction work in Malaysia or Indonesia. With no citizenship and no passport, travel had to be undertaken illegally. Smugglers packed the refugees onto unregistered ships and cycled them through secret jungle camps, beating or starving to death the ones whose families didn't pay exorbitant smuggling fees. A crackdown on human trafficking in Southeast Asia has closed off that route, leaving a lot of Rohingya men languishing in the refugee camps without any way to make a living. The mixture of despair and marginalization, experts warn, is a recipe for radicalization. Many refugees seek solace in religious faith. In the camps, clusters of young men armed with holy Korans go door to door, urging refugees to pray more devoutly. Out of sight, locals say, is something more ominous: A newly formed militant group, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, is reportedly trying to recruit refugees to join a nascent insurgency against the Burmese army and its local government collaborators.
The last time I saw Afifa, she was sweeping a rectangular patch of dirt on a hill near the refugee camp’s edge—the site of the family’s new shelter. Her father had borrowed $30 from a fellow refugee to buy a horse-cart full of bamboo poles and strips, and he’d already erected the thickest poles at the corners. Islam, a former Arabic teacher, was dressed in a white skullcap and a clean cream-colored tunic, getting ready to attend midday Friday prayers—the jumu’ah—for the first time since he left his village five months before.
Just down the sandy path from their plot, barefoot men in sarongs scrambled to secure the bamboo scaffolding of Balukhali’s new mosque. It would be another week before the structure was finished, with palm fronds as the roof, but the muezzin sounded the call to prayer and dozens of bearded men in white caps gravitated to a small carpet in the center of the mosque. Islam found a spot in the first row and bowed in front of the imam, who stood on a red plastic stool. Later, as Islam walked back from the mosque, he smiled: “I feel better now.”
The misery, however, has continued. In late May, a cyclone ripped through southern Bangladesh, destroying the family’s shelter and thousands of others in the camps. Nobody died in Balukhali, and Afifa’s mother and other siblings have since made it to Bangladesh, easing the girl’s anxiety. Still, food remains scarce, the monsoon rains continue, and there are troubling reports of renewed violence in Rakhine from both sides—military operations by the Burmese army and occasional attacks by Rohingya militants. In this predicament, it’s unclear when, or if, Afifa and her family will ever have a place to call home.
View Images Some Rohingya live outside the camps near Cox’s Bazar. This man lives in a settlement on the Bay of Bengal, near trees planted to prevent erosion and close to a hotel catering to tourists drawn by the beach. Photograph by William Daniels, National Geographic
As one neighbor lamented: “Bad days for us never end.”Story highlights Cargo ship is being towed away from the French coast, Atlantic Maritime Prefecture says
Ship started listing last week; all crew have been rescued
(CNN) A badly listing cargo ship has successfully been towed away from the coast of France in a last-ditch attempt to keep it from running aground, according to regional officials.
A ship is towing the Modern Express at between 2 and 3 knots, making it certain the ship won't be stranded on the French coast, a statement from the Atlantic Maritime Prefecture said. Spanish authorities will welcome the ship at the port in Bilbao.
The cargo ship began listing off the southwest coast last Tuesday and could not be righted because of gusty winds and 20-foot waves, Vice-Admiral Emmanuel de Oliveira told reporters earlier.
Photos: Righting attempt planned for listing cargo ship Photos: Righting attempt planned for listing cargo ship The Modern Express, a Panamanian-registered cargo ship, began listing last Tuesday. Hide Caption 1 of 7 Photos: Righting attempt planned for listing cargo ship The ship's current position is 50 nautical miles (57 miles) from Arcachon, near Bordeaux, on France's Atlantic coast. Hide Caption 2 of 7 Photos: Righting attempt planned for listing cargo ship All 22 crew members were airlifted to safety by Spanish rescue helicopters. Hide Caption 3 of 7 Photos: Righting attempt planned for listing cargo ship The cargo does not present an environmental hazard, Vice-Admiral Emmanuel de Oliveira, of the Atlantic Maritime Prefecture, told reporters. Hide Caption 4 of 7 Photos: Righting attempt planned for listing cargo ship Given prevailing currents, if Monday's rescue fails, the ship is expected to run aground on the Landes coast, in the southwest of France, some time between Monday and Tuesday night. Hide Caption 5 of 7 Photos: Righting attempt planned for listing cargo ship It is hoped that the righting operation can take place once conditions are calmer. Previous efforts to right it have been unsuccessful. Hide Caption 6 of 7 Photos: Righting attempt planned for listing cargo ship Several ships are standing by in attempt to right the ship. Hide Caption 7 of 7
The ship's position had been 50 nautical miles (57 miles) from Arcachon, near Bordeaux, on France's Atlantic coast. If Monday's rescue had failed, the 538-foot ship had been expected to run aground on the Landes coast in the southwest of France some time between Monday and Tuesday night.
Trouble strikes
Read MoreNEW DELHI: Oil-rich Saudi Arabia may have averted a coup with the arrest of key members of the Royal family who were allegedly planning the removal of current King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.The Princes were arrested on charges of corruption but ET has learnt that the arrests were made to foil plan of a coup. King Salman was tipped off regarding the plan by a key ally when he moved swiftly to arrest some of his family members hatching the plan, top officials and diplomats from West Asia told ET.Among those now holed up at the Riyadh’s Ritz Carlton hotel is Prince Miteb bin Abdullah, who is head of the powerful National Guard and Crown Prince Mohammed’s cousin. Others held include Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who is chairman of international investment firm Kingdom Holding and also a cousin of Prince Mohammed, and Prince Turki bin Abdullah, former governor of Riyadh province and a son of the late King Abdullah.All these princes, according to officials, have been opposed to Mohammed’s elevation as the Crown Prince. The arrested princes were allegedly behind the plan to remove current King and Crown Prince, persons familiar with the developments said.Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is widely known in Saudi Arabia by his initials MBS, had said openly in interviews that he would investigate the kingdom’s endemic corruption and would not hesitate to go after top officials to prepare the country’s economy for modern times. Saudis will see that their princes are tried for corruption for first time ever, officials pointed out.Trouble in Saudi Arabia could push world oil prices and impact the international economy. West Asia is already the melting pot and current state of instability would spell disaster, officials feared.At stake is political stability in the world’s largest oil producing country and India’s number one destination for crude import. The country also has the highest number of Indian expatriates who send back millions in remittances. It is not just the anti-corruption drive but the fate of Lebanese PM Saad al-Hariri, an erstwhile close ally of Riyadh, that could be deepen schisms in the already divided region.The developments in Saudi Arabia and resignation of the Lebanese PM during a visit to Riyadh may push region towards turmoil as diplomats and officials from the region do not rule out an armed conflict between Saudi-led alliance & Iran & its allies.The leader of Lebanon's Hezbollah Hassan Nasrallah has accused Saudi Arabia of declaring war on his country days after Lebanese PM al-Hariri announced his resignation in the Saudi capital. Hassan Nasrallah alleged Saudi Arabia was holding Hariri against his will. He also accused the Saudis of inciting Israel against Lebanon. Hezbollah Shia movement is an ally of Iran.“A war in the region cannot be ruled out in the present circumstances and this conflict may also touch Israel,” claimed a senior official from West Asia.There are fears Lebanon could become embroiled in a wider regional confrontation between Saudi Arabia and Iran. But US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned against Lebanon being used for a proxy conflict, adding that the US strongly backed Lebanon's independence.Saudi Foreign Minister Adel bin Ahmed al-Jubeir has described allegations of restrictions on Hariri as "nonsense" and blamed Hezbollah for Hariri's resignation."Hezbollah did (that) by its actions. Hezbollah did by hijacking the political system in Lebanon. Hezbollah did by threatening political leaders. Hezbollah did through a series of assassinations that they committed of over the years," he told CNN in an interview Monday.'I Still Can't Believe The President, Vice President, Speaker |
To eventually obtain her Ph.D. in Systems Engineering, she had to overcome her earlier experiences with failing math, and forced herself to develop a framework in which to succeed. Her book and the course include advice and techniques on how to study well, and–as importantly–how to avoid bad, detrimental study habits.
Below are Professor Oakley’s “10 Rules of Bad Studying”, adapted from the book. We hope apply them to your studies on Coursera!
Ten Rules of Bad Studying
Excerpted from “A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel in Math and Science, Even if You Flunked Algebra, by Barbara Oakley. Penguin, July 2014.
Avoid these techniques—they can waste your time even while they fool you into thinking you’re learning!
Passive rereading. Sitting passively and running your eyes back over a page. Unless you can prove that the material is moving into your brain by recalling the main ideas without looking at the page, rereading is a waste of time. Letting highlights overwhelm you. Highlighting your text can fool your mind into thinking you are putting something in your brain, when all you’re really doing is moving your hand. A little highlighting here and there is okay—sometimes it can be helpful in flagging important points. But if you are using highlighting as a memory tool, make sure that what you mark is also going into your brain. Merely glancing at a problem’s solution and thinking you know how to do it. This is one of the worst errors students make while studying. You need to be able to solve a problem step-by-step, without looking at the solution. Waiting until the last minute to study. Would you cram at the last minute if you were practicing for a track meet? Your brain is like a muscle—it can handle only a limited amount of exercise on one subject at a time. Repeatedly solving problems of the same type that you already know how to solve. If you just sit around solving similar problems during your practice, you’re not actually preparing for a test—it’s like preparing for a big basketball game by just practicing your dribbling. Letting study sessions with friends turn into chat sessions. Checking your problem solving with friends, and quizzing one another on what you know, can make learning more enjoyable, expose flaws in your thinking, and deepen your learning. But if your joint study sessions turn to fun before the work is done, you’re wasting your time and should find another study group. Neglecting to read the textbook before you start working problems. Would you dive into a pool before you knew how to swim? The textbook is your swimming instructor—it guides you toward the answers. You will flounder and waste your time if you don’t bother to read it. Before you begin to read, however, take a quick glance over the chapter or section to get a sense of what it’s about. Not checking with your instructors or classmates to clear up points of confusion. Professors are used to lost students coming in for guidance—it’s our job to help you. The students we worry about are the ones who don’t come in. Don’t be one of those students. Thinking you can learn deeply when you are being constantly distracted. Every tiny pull toward an instant message or conversation means you have less brain power to devote to learning. Every tug of interrupted attention pulls out tiny neural roots before they can grow. Not getting enough sleep. Your brain pieces together problem-solving techniques when you sleep, and it also practices and repeats whatever you put in mind before you go to sleep. Prolonged fatigue allows toxins to build up in the brain that disrupt the neural connections you need to think quickly and well. If you don’t get a good sleep before a test, NOTHING ELSE YOU HAVE DONE WILL MATTER.
We hope these rules will help you study better on Coursera. Join Professor’s Oakley and UCSD’s course “ Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects ”, starting August 1st, for more studying and learning wisdom.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 and Mitt Romney put their differences aside for a handshake Saturday, as Romney arrived for a meeting with the president-elect.
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Romney greeted Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence Michael (Mike) Richard PencePence meeting with Senate GOP ahead of vote to block emergency declaration 'And the award for best political commentary by an Oscar nominee goes to...' UN nuclear watchdog: Iran maintains compliance with 2015 pact MORE outside Trump's golf course in Bedminster, N.J.
The two have fought bitterly in the past. Trump endorsed Romney in 2012, but railed against him for losing the presidential election to Barack Obama Barack Hussein ObamaWith low birth rate, America needs future migrants 4 ways Hillary looms over the 2020 race Obama goes viral after sporting black bomber jacket with '44' on sleeve at basketball game MORE.
Romney harshly criticized Trump during his presidential campaign, lambasting him as a "phony" in a speech during the GOP presidential primary.
But in the wake of Trump's election victory, reports have emerged that he is considering appointing Romney to be secretary of State.Two state legislators and several rabbis were among more than 40 people arrested yesterday in New Jersey
With the right ingredients of salaciousness and scandal, the news appeared to be straight out of a Hollywood screenplay: corrupt politicians, money laundering, people being arrested by the busload, raids on synagogues, an Apple Jacks cereal box stuffed with $97,000 in cash, and rabbis trafficking organs. Allegedly, one paid $10,000 to an impoverished Israeli for his or her kidney and tried to sell it for upward of $150,000 in the United States. The criminal complaint quotes the rabbi as saying he was in the organ business for a decade. (And in a you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up twist, it wasn’t even the day’s only story on Israelis trafficking human body parts.)
The rabbis’ organ trafficking was only one of their many indiscretions. In addition to being against the law, it raises a complex bioethical issue for Jews, one laced in a culture of moral imperatives. Is illegally buying an organ really wrong if it’s saving someone’s life? Is paying for altruism, by definition, counterintuitive? Jews have been battling this quandary for a long time, especially when you consider how little they themselves actually help the cause of transplantation.
“Jews don’t like to donate organs,” says Rabbi Michael J. Broyde, one of the founding members of the Beth Din of America, the equivalent of the Supreme Court of the Jewish justice system. “They don’t donate at the rate of other social groups.” This imbalance—of taking more from organ banks than they are putting in—has put Jews around the world at odds with transplant technology. Israel has suffered for years with an organ shortage, forcing its residents to engage in “transplant tourism” in places across Europe and, most notably, in China. According to statistics from Israel’s transplant authority and the United Network of Organ Sharing, the number of people who hold an organ donation card in Israel is at a paltry 8 percent. Most Western countries hover closer to 35 percent.
In an attempt to repair the disparity, Israel passed a law last year that made it easier to become an organ donor. But it took a while. Earlier versions of the bill failed because people feared it would lead to “rabbinical supervision” of the time of death: They thought doctors and rabbis might conspire to hasten a patient’s death if they knew they could harvest organs. An Israeli organization called Adi, formed by a family who lost their son while he was waiting for a kidney transplant, has worked tirelessly to try to promote awareness among the Israeli populace of the moral imperatives of being an organ donor. But for a religion that prides itself on being a “light unto the nations,” it’s an oddly uphill battle. Some in the ultra-Orthodox community oppose the Adi initiative so fiercely that they have actually created “life cards” that state explicitly that the cardholder does not want to donate organs under any circumstances.
There are a whole host of reasons why Israelis—and Jews in general—don’t wish to part with their anatomy even after they die. For some, it’s simply taboo, yet another guilt-laden stigma in an already guilt-laden religion. Others believe it is a biblical commandment to be buried whole without any missing organs.
Judaism is riddled with hundreds of laws that dictate our daily existence. Interestingly, the Torah itself rarely, if ever, connects a specific commandment to a specific reward; the logic being, if you knew the “value” of each commandment, it would be easy to pick and choose which ones to obey. Only twice in the entire Old Testament are rewards mentioned—by the commandment to shoo away the mother bird before taking her chicks (a mere flick of the wrist) and the commandment to honor your parents (an often lifelong difficult task). The Bible states that the reward for both those commandments is exactly the same: long life. In a sense, what Moses was teaching was that the value of the seemingly simplest commandment and of one of the hardest are actually in the same.
But Jewish law, just like secular legal theory, is filled with judicial loopholes. A major one is that for the sake of saving a life, a Jew is allowed to break just about any commandment. For example, if a Jew is injured on the Sabbath, he is certainly allowed to go to the hospital even though he normally doesn’t drive on Saturday. Life or death matters trump all but a handful of commandments. And as far as organ donation goes, two biblical verses are trotted out to quell the uneasiness among Jewish donors. “You shall surely heal” (Exodus 21:19) and “You shall not stand by the blood of your neighbor” (Leviticus 19:16).
While this all sounds well and good, there’s another Jewish law that can put a hamper in that artery you were about to donate: the prohibition against desecrating a dead body. Is posthumously donating an organ considered desecrating? Complicating this is determining what actually constitutes “dead”—does brain-dead count? Doctors might say one thing, while some rabbis might say another. Taking a Jew off life support can fast become an exercise in intellectual gymnastics once rabbis are consulted.
But most mainstream American rabbis agree on one thing: Organ donation is not only allowed but is considered something to strive for. Enter the Halachic Organ Donor Society, a nonprofit whose mission is to dispel the myth that Jewish law opposes organ donation. Their rabbinic advisory board, a veritable who’s who of the spiritually elite, is promoted on their Web site next to the HODS version of an organ donor card. Even the HODS cards can’t seem to define death perfectly: Carriers choose whether their organs may be harvested after “[i]rreversible cessation of autonomous breathing (as confirmed by brain-steam death)” or “[i]rreversible cessation of heartbeat.”
Rabbi Broyde, a professor of law at Emory University and himself a member of HODS advisory board, favors making posthumous organ donation mandatory to provide a surplus of organs. “The real question is, Why is there a shortage? Why do people go out and buy kidneys? Because they desperately need kidneys and there aren’t any,” he says matter-of-factly. “There’s no black market for feces,” he adds. “There’s no black market for things that nobody wants.”
A 62-year-old friend of mine is the recipient of two organ donations—a kidney and a pancreas. It’s why he’s still alive and breathing. I asked him what he thought about the rabbis trafficking organs. Surely, he must be upset. After all, these rabbis were cheating the very organ bank system that had saved his life. His response surprised me: He said he had no problem with it. For him, it’s all about saving lives.
On that level, it actually doesn’t surprise me to find out rabbis were trafficking organs. It’s salacious, yes, but not far-fetched. They sincerely felt they were not hurting anyone; indeed, by giving life to another, they probably felt they were mimicking the divine. They were in the business of saving lives. It certainly doesn’t justify their illegal activities, but it does help explain it. As Broyde put it bluntly, “They probably wouldn’t deal heroin.”The 11Alive Investigators uncovered the state agency responsible for regulating asbestos doesn’t regularly ensure licensed inspectors are used to remove the cancer causing material.
Georgia victims and litigators say the lack of enforcement potentially puts Georgia resident’s at risk.
One them includes Dan Pearson. Like the tools on his work bench, Pearson feels like he’s getting a little rusty.
Instead of working six days a week at his Ellijay Heating and Air Conditioning Company for the past five years, he’s sidelined by a disease which will soon take his life.
“The last time we talked to [doctors], they gave me six to eight months,” said Pearson.
In 2015, his physician diagnosed him with mesothelioma, a cancer almost exclusively caused by asbestos exposure.
According to a lawsuit Pearson filed in October against building material and boiler manufacturers, the father of two believes he was exposed working in homes in the Atlanta metro area more than 20 years ago.
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“There is no getting away from this disease. You’re gonna die from it. No cure at all,” said Pearson.
Almost every home built before 1978 used asbestos joint compound in its wallboards. It’s impossible to know if you’ve inhaled it because asbestos has no smell or taste.
Drive through many Atlanta neighborhoods, and you’ll likely see dozens of older homes under renovation – potentially exposing its workers and those living next door by inhaling the dangerous material.
Rob Buck says he’s filed more asbestos related litigation than any attorney in the state. “There is no recognized safe levels of asbestos exposure in science or in medicine,” said Buck.
To help keep the public safe, Georgia law requires contractors to hire licensed asbestos inspectors to identify and safety remove the material before performing renovations or demolition. An 11Alive Investigation uncovered the state agency responsible for policing the law, rarely checks to make sure people are following it.
On paper, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources operates an asbestos abatement program, but state lawmakers completely defunded the program in 2011 to save money after the recession.
Before then, state inspectors used to identify dozens of asbestos abatement related violations a year. According to agency records, DNR has not cited anyone in seven years.
Jeff Cown is the head of the Land Protection Division at DNR. Cown says that doesn’t mean no one is violating asbestos abatement laws.
“What that means, is that in 2009, due to budget redirection, we transferred the enforcement program for asbestos abatement to federal EPA,” said Cown.
That’s half true. The EPA enforces asbestos abatement for commercial buildings in Georgia, but the state still over-sees residential homes.
Over the past three years, the city of Atlanta issued more than 6,700 permits to demolish or renovate old homes.
In nearly all of those cases, DNR admits it never looked into whether a licensed inspector checked for asbestos before the demolition started.
Cown says DNR only checks ahead of time if someone from the public submits a complaint about possible abatement violations.
The DNR administrator says it also utilizes lead paint inspectors, who are also licensed in asbestos abatement. If a state lead paint inspector identifies an asbestos violation, it can cite the contractor.
“Even when we had inspectors, I’m not sure we got everybody. You can never get everybody,” said Cown.
Cown says county and municipal governments can enact stricter guidelines, but many local governments in Georgia don’t require confirmation before demolition or renovations start. Atlanta’s permitting office doesn’t require contractors to prove it either.
“It’s an honor system at this point,” said Buck. “So, contractors that are well intentioned are releasing asbestos into homes where they are doing work whether they know it or not,” said Buck.
At check, DNR says it has no plans to ask the state legislature to return the funding of its asbestos program.Although Meow Chat has been on the scene for around a year, its popularity suddenly exploded this week.
Chatting to complete strangers and friends through the web has proven to be a timeless and unrelenting force, moving from the likes of MSN to WhatsApp and Snapchat.
But what does Meow Chat have that the others don't and why should you download it? Digital Spy explains everything you need to know about the overnight phenomenon that is Meow Chat.
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What is Meow Chat?
The app describes itself as a "fun way to chat and meet new friends", but essentially it's a cross between matchmaking apps Tinder and Grindr, coupled with the instant chat leaders WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
How does it work?
You link up Meow Chat with your Facebook profile and hey-presto, you can chat to existing friends by inviting them to join or find new buddies around the world.
As soon as you enter, clicking 'Random Chat' throws you into a random chat room where you can talk publicly and eventually get to know people for a private chat.
There is also an 'Explore' feature to see what people nearby are up to and see their pictures, which you can like or comment on.
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Is Meow Chat for me?
While some may feel like innocent chatter, the chat rooms are inundated with people on the lookout for some fun, so Meow Chat is not something you want your kids using.
There is a lot of pouting and a sizeable amount of abs and boobs on display too, which is not to everyone's taste.
What makes it different from Tinder?
Tinder focuses purely on hooking people up by location, whereas Meow Chat goes one step further and finds people with the same interests as you.
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Is it popular?
Meow Chat claims to be the "fastest growing social network with millions of members from every country".
Its Google Play page states that it has been downloaded between 5 million and 10 million times for Android alone. The app is available on iOS but its download numbers are unknown.
When users sign up, the first thing it asks is if you would like to invite Facebook friends to join, which has also helped increase its numbers of late.
What if I'm having issues with Meow Chat?
Meow Chat promotes respectful conversations and warns users that their account will be suspended for inappropriate behaviour.
To report another user, go on their profile by tapping their image and tap 'Report User'. You can also click 'Block User' to stop them from communicating with you.
There is also an email address to contact Meow Chat: hello@meow.me.Disney will be pulling out of Netflix in 2019, which means you'll have to subscribe to yet another service if you want to watch "Moana."
Young people are happy to shell out for online TV: Nearly 80% of Millennials said they watch or have access to streaming services, according to eMarketer, a digital research firm.
But if other media companies follow the lead of Disney (DIS) (and HBO and CBS), we could be up to our eyeballs in streaming subscriptions. That could get really expensive really fast.
Tell us: How much do you spend on news and media?
Streaming services are appealing to young viewers because they're so cheap compared to traditional cable and satellite bundles.
"It's such a low cost, it's almost overlooked," said Nick Barber, an analyst with technology research and advisory firm Forrester.
But they add up quickly. $10 for Netflix, $10 for Amazon (AMZN) Prime, $12 for Hulu, $7 for CBS, and however much Disney or ESPN's service will cost... it could one day cost consumers more to get the content that they want than by buying cable.
Media analysts don't expect people to empty their wallets for more than a few subscription services, though.
"When you layer in additional services, it just gets harder for people to support that," said Paul Verna, principal video analyst at eMarkerter.
One of the beauties of digital is that consumers could easily cancel subscriptions without paying initiation or installation fees, Verna said.
Once people start to choose from a sea of content, they reach a point of exhaustion. They eventually end up cutting back services, said James McQuivey, leading analyst tracking the development of digital disruption at Forrester Research.
Additionally, Disney is unique in a sense that it offers such desirable content that it could leverage its own streaming service. Not many networks are able to do the same.
Overall, the trend is still toward networks licensing content to aggregators, such as Netflix (NFLX). Consumers only want to buy services they want from one or two hubs, experts say, and this is why Amazon and Netflix are aggressively pushing for more original content.
Does this sound familiar? Ironically, we are getting back to the TV bundle.Image: Shutterstock
While November's Paris attacks prompted US and European governments to revisit the debate over back-door policies to soften data encryption, the Netherlands lower house has voted to fund projects to strengthen it.
In total, the Dutch lower house agreed to spend €500,000 ($547,000) to support the open-source OpenSSL, LibreSSL, and PolarSSL web-security projects.
A security back-door policy would require websites to give governments a way of accessing otherwise encrypted data. But this new spending project signals that the Netherlands is more interested in improving existing security tools than developing new ways of weakening them.
Kees Verhoeven, who sponsored the bill, believes better data encryption is essential for protecting people's basic right to privacy.
"Encryption allows private communication... and enables journalists, researchers,lawyers and others... to protect their sources, customers or partners," Verhoeven told the Dutch cybersecurity website Security.NL.
OpenSSL is the security protocol that developers use to protect internet users from data theft. It is an open-source project that provides web developers the coding tools to implement the Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) security protocols as well as a coding library that creates crypto-tools.
LibreSSL and PolarSSL also provide libraries with code to implement TLS and SSL protocols, and developers can use these as alternatives to OpenSSL. All three projects rely on volunteers to maintain the open-source coding libraries, and donations, like the one that the Dutch lower house has agreed to give, sustain their work.
OpenSSL's widespread popularity can make websites more vulnerable to cyberattacks. Most mainstream websites use OpenSSL, like Pinterest, and Tumblr, who were attacked by the Heartbleed bug last year.
The same code secures Facebook's and Twitter's sites. Once familiar with infiltrating one site's OpenSSL setup, hackers could replicate the damage on other sites that implement OpenSSL.
Supporting work on alternative projects, such as LibreSSL and PolarSSL, can prevent Heartbleed-like attacks by preventing developers from using a homogeneous solution for protecting data.
Read more about encryptionEUGENE, Ore. - A fire forced more than 200 people from a Eugene homeless center overnight Wednesday, fire department officials said.
Four people received medical treatment for some minor injuries, but a police spokesperson said no one else was hurt.
Firefighters were called out to a 2-alarm fire at the Eugene Mission on West 1st Avenue overnight Wednesday. They arrived to find smoke coming from the two-story building.
The Eugene Fire Department said the 212 people inside made it to safety after hearing the fire alarms.
The fire did extensive damage to the Mission's kitchen. Fire investigators estimate the total damages to be around $300,000.
"Luckily, EWEB (Eugene Water & Electric Board) just donated a large supply of heated, ready to eat meals so we'll be serving those over the course of the next couple of meals. We've reached out to the red cross as well," said Jack Tripp, Executive Director for the Eugene Mission.
Tripp said they'll to serve people while the kitchen is repaired. He added that they could be out of service for a while, depending on the extent of the damages.
Investigators are still working to determine the cause of the fire. At this point they don't consider the fire to be suspicious.Some commentators expected that the Union Budget 2017-’18 would craft a sharp departure from earlier budgets of this government. This it would do to mitigate the immense suffering of millions of casual workers, farmers and small traders caused by the “shock and awe” of the astoundingly callous and ultimately pointless decision to withdraw 86% of the country’s currency overnight.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Bharatiya Janata Party President Amit Shah, the government and its supporters continue to put up a brave face while talking about the demonetisation move in public, claiming that the vast majority of Indians support it. But behind closed doors, there are signs of unease in the ruling establishment.
With a fifth of the country’s voters going to polls in the days after the budget – elections to five states are being held between February 4 and March 8 – the ruling party felt compelled to shed its image of being uncaring of the poor and allied to the interests of the super-rich.
This year’s Budget was therefore one of exceptional interest and expectations, with some commentators believing it would contain dramatic and high-visibility measures for welfare and developmental equity.
No yield for farmers
However, a careful study of the Budget reveals that it gives away little to India’s long-suffering poor and takes away even less from its super rich. It hopes instead that rhetoric alone will suffice to convince the mass of India’s workers and farmers that their government is committed to their well-being.
Take firstly the claim, repeated for a second year in a row, that this is a farmers’ budget and that it will double their incomes by 2022. The route by which farmers’ incomes will double has of course not been clarified – as in the last budget – neither has the government specified if it is speaking about real income adjusted for inflation.
But the severe reality remains unchanged that although agriculture still employs more than 50% of the country’s workforce, it is allotted a miserly and shocking 2.38% of Union government expenditure.This amounts to just 0.3% of the Gross Domestic Product. Even if we combine allocations to the Ministry of Rural Development and Ministry of Water Resources, this is still as little as 0.98% of the GDP – even below the level of 1.07% of the GDP in Arun Jaitley’s first budget of 2014-’15.
Much was also made by the finance minister of the “record level” of Rs 10 lakh crore in 2017-’18 for farm credit. “For a good crop”, Jaitley declared, “adequate credit should be available to farmers in time”. But as with much else he claimed to do for India’s poor, this announcement was somewhat disingenuous.
Firstly, farm credit is not funded from the budget from tax resources: it is a target set for banks. Second, this target is not much higher than the revised one of Rs 9.5 lakh crore in 2016-’17. And there is no roadmap for bringing in small, marginal and tenant farmers, who constitute more than eight out of 10 farmers, into the formal banking sector. These farmers depend mainly on usurious private money-lending. Interest subvention also bypasses this mass of vulnerable farmers – many of who are women farmers with the growing feminisation of agriculture – as they are unable to access bank loans.
It is once again these small and tenant farmers who are excluded substantially from crop insurance under the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana. Government admits that only about a quarter of farmers have been covered under the scheme and aims to increase this to 40% in the current year.
But, as pointed out by Yogendra Yadav, former Aam Aadmi Party leader who founded the Jai Kisan Andolan, it is not clear how the government will do this because the Budgetary provision for the scheme has come down to Rs 9,000 crore in the coming financial year, from Rs 13,240 crore in the last budget.
Moreover, these percentages exclude a majority of tenant farmers and sharecroppers who are most vulnerable but rarely recorded. We also need careful studies on whether the premium under this central scheme is benefiting insurance companies or if it is actually being extended to farmers and what the business model of this insurance scheme is.
Most of all, the claims of this being a farmers’ budget rings hollow because it side-steps three major requirements of farmers. The first is for effective farmer income protection, either through a minimum support price guarantee or a subsidy for every acre cultivated. The second is to repair the near-broken system of agricultural extension (educating farmers in the latest scientific developments in the field) and public-funded research and development for sustainable agriculture. The third is the massive need for watershed development and other measures for raising productivity of rain-fed small and marginal farmers.
Instead, the Budget announcement supporting the advance of contract farming, wherein the farmer enters into an agreement with a buyer on what to produce and how much, can also deepen the disquiet of small farmers, with another threat – of corporate takeover – adding to their multitude of everyday challenges for survival.
Krishnendu Halder/Reuters
Rural employment
There was another dubious claim of “record” allocations in this Budget speech, regarding the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. The irony of the government boasting of making the “highest” allocation to a programme that Prime Minister Modi had famously lampooned in Parliament as a “living monument” Congress’ misrule is hard to miss. But there’s another paradox in this claim too.
Last year’s initial budget allocation for NREGA was Rs 38,500 crore. At first glance, this seems like a significant 25% increase. However, the reality is that after a series of raps by the Supreme Court, the total allocations in 2016-’17 were raised to Rs 47,500 crore. Therefore, the effective increase this year is just by 1%. And we factor in inflation, this year’s allocation does not even match the previous year’s.
There have been widespread reports of job losses in the informal sector and many people are turning to MGNREGA to tide over these bad times. The Right to Food Campaign comments that the allocations are “woefully inadequate” to cope with the fall-out of demonetisation. They noted in a statement:
“The Economic Survey suggests that the number of migrant labour is to the extent of nine million. If we presume that 25% percent of them have been adversely affected and are unlikely to be absorbed in labour market in near future, they need support through MGNREGA. The additional minimum requirement would be for Rs 4,500 crore. Therefore total minimum allocation for MGNREGA should have been not less than Rs 60,000 crore keeping in view annual wage increase with commitment for need based extra allocation, if not Rs 80,000 crore as was demanded by concerned citizen groups. The budget therefore fails to ensure food security of tens of lakhs of poor migrant labour who have been adversely affected by the demonetisation exercise. By allocating Rs 48,000 crores and projecting this as highest ever the finance minister has misled the nation.”
Under-nourishing children
The claim of the budget serving the interests of the poor could have carried some credibility if the government had made significantly higher allocations in sectors other than agriculture, such as education, health-care and social protection. But here again, there is a stagnancy, and in real terms even a decline in allocations.
The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan sees a 4% rise in allocations this Budget and for mid-day meal schemes, the increase is just 3%. If we account for inflation, which is around 5%, this is a decline. Costs norms for school meals and Integrated Child Development Services meal plans (allocation for which too has been increased by just 5%) have not been revised for many years, despite sometimes galloping food inflation. In real terms, children are being fed less and less.
The Centre for Budget Accountability and Governance, in its customary careful and insightful analysis of the Budget, notes that as a share of the total Union budget, allocations for education have remained stagnant at 3.7%. The share of school education has actually fallen from a very low 2.4% to an even lower 2.34%.
Higher education, although also very poorly resourced, has in comparative terms been prioritised over school education as has technical education over general education. The share of Union spending on education as a percentage of GDP fell further to 0.47%. Even the budget rhetoric regarding education was watered down. In his last budget speech, Jaitley spoke of “education, skill development and job creation” as one of the pillars that would transform India. This year, he only spoke of education as something that would transform the youth and did not discuss Right to Education.
With his continuing neglect of education, the finance minister has chosen once again to ignore the constitutional obligations placed on government under the Right to Education Act. The public school system is in a shambles and widely lacks the infrastructure and trained teachers that the RTE Act prescribes.
The Centre is therefore defying and disobeying laws passed in Parliament that oblige it to commit sufficient budgetary resources to enable all people to access their legal rights to education, rural wage work and food. There are specific provisions for educating children outside the formal schooling system who are in the toughest circumstances, such as street children, migrant workers’ children and child workers.
Ailing health sector
The public health sector does only marginally better. The Centre for Budget Accountability and Governance observes that the Centre’s allocations for the health sector as a proportion of the GDP saw a marginal increase to 0.30%, from 0.26% in 2016-’17.
However, this falls distressingly short of the long-standing demand to increase allocation to the health sector to at least 2.5% GDP, despite the fact that India has one of the most shamefully privatised systems of health care in the world. National Sample Survey Organisation data tells that nearly 70% of out-of-pocket expenditure is on medicines. Making free medicines available in all public health facilities would substantially reduce distress due to health costs and improve the access and the credibility of the public health system. But this Budget misses the opportunity of ensuring the availability of free generic medicines in all public health facilities.
Stagnating social spending particularly hits those sections of the population that are most vulnerable and actually deserve the greatest state support. The National Social Assistance Programme (which covers old age pension, widow pension and disability pension schemes) has been allotted Rs 9,500 crore rupees in 2017-’18 – the same level as 2016-17.
In real terms this is a decline. With nine out of 10 workers in informal and mostly uncertain employment, it is only the state that can secure pensions for all through public spending. It is unconscionable that government covers only those older people that it designates through its notoriously poor targeting to be BPL or below the poverty line, and that too with a Union government contribution of as low as Rs 200, unchanged for several years. Contrast this with the small percentage of us in the formal sector who will retire and receive half their last drawn salary continuously, indexed for inflation.
Likewise with maternity benefits. The National Food Security Act mandated the payment of Rs 6,000 to most women during pregnancy, but the Union government refused to fulfill its legal obligation for this. Modi chose to use his much-awaited end of 2016 speech – in which he was expected to give the country a report card on demonetisation but instead offered homilies and some welfare promises – to announce near-universal maternity benefits. But despite the imperatives of the law, and the prime minister’s prime-time announcement, the budget provision for maternity benefits is only Rs 2,700 crore for 2017-’18.
The Right to Food campaign estimates that about Rs 16,000 crore (0.2% of the GDP) is required for near-universal maternity benefits (Rs 9,600 crore from the Centre, as the amount is divided 60:40 with states). I have argued earlier in Scroll.in that the law provides for 26 months of fully paid leave for all women working in the formal sector. Rs 6,000 would be less than a quarter even of statutory minimum wages for unskilled work for 26 weeks. Even this has come so late and so reluctantly, and yet the Union government has not made the necessary budgetary provisions for this despite the law and the prime minister’s public pledge.
Danish Siddiqui/Reuters
Pro-rich Budget
Overall, India remains what development economist Jean Dreze memorably described as the “world champions of social under-spending”. As the Lokayat, a socialist group of activists in Pune, observes in a scathing press statement on the Budget, the total social sector expenditure of the government (Rs 4,92,635 crore) as a percentage of the GDP is only a lowly 2.92%.
This is even lower than the 3.23% level budgeted by Finance Minister Jaitley in his first budget of 2014-’15, and 3.43% in the 2010-’11 Budget of the United Progressive Alliance government. The total social sector spending of the governments at the Centre and states combined is a mere 7% of the GDP, which is far lower than not only that of industrialised countries (where it is upwards of 30%) but also other emerging market economies, like the Latin American countries, which spend about 18% of their GDP on the social sector.
In the end, below a very thin veneer, this remains a routine pro-rich Budget, with as little to offer the farmer, the worker, the woman, the child, the aged and the disabled as past budgets. To expect differently from this government would mean it was willing to move far from its ideological moorings of market fundamentalism and fiscal prudence.
In the first place, this would have required the government to substantially raise the levels of public spending. However, as calculated by the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability, the total Union government expenditure as a percentage of the GDP has further fallen from 14.2% in 2012-’13 to 12.7% in the current budget.
The tax effort of the UPA government was already very low by global standards, but the BJP-led government contracts this effort further. The refusal of the government to expand its tax base means there just aren’t enough public resources for agriculture, education, health care and pensions. In the global recessionary context, it |
, a human rights activist and defender of persecuted Christians who was assassinated by Muslims — for saying "Merry Christmas."
Five Christian-rights activists were known for their public opposition to the country's blasphemy laws; all went missing the same week.
Iran: "The Iranian government strives to limit the exposure of the majority Muslim Farsi-speaking Iranians to Christianity by banning them from attending church services, especially during the Christmas season," said a report on the conditions of Christians in the Shia-majority nation.
"Such restrictions are in place to slow down the spread of Christianity in the country. In recent years, all churches were strictly banned from holding Farsi Bible study sessions and refrained from any form of evangelistic activities. The official figure for the number of Christians in Iran is 200,000 individuals and only those officially recognized as Christians are allowed to celebrate Christmas in official churches. All others, including Farsi-speaking Christians are not allowed in churches."
Indonesia: A court decided to bar media coverage on the trial of the Chinese-Christian Governor of Jakartaka, known as Ahok. He is charged with insulting Islam and desecrating the Koran. The blasphemy controversy erupted when a video appeared online of Ahok saying that many Muslims misunderstand Koran 5:51 — which commands Muslims not to befriend Jews and Christians. That a Christian would dare try to distort the Koran's call for hostility against Christians and Jews in order to boost his chances at reelection was deemed blasphemous enough to prompt mass riots and calls for his death in Indonesia.
In the same manner, less than one month after Yulius Suharto, a Christian man, was hired to be the sub-district chief of Pajangan, he was fired and relocated to a mostly non-Muslim region, "following a massive lobbying campaign launched on social media by Islamic extremist groups and radical Muslims who targeted him because he is Catholic.... Most officials welcomed the decision to remove the official because he was not Muslim."
Muslim Contempt for and Discrimination against Christians
Pakistan: Back in 2013, after Muslims accused a Christian man living in Joseph Colony of blasphemy against Muhammad, approximately 3,000 Muslims descended on the predominantly Christian neighborhood in Lahore. During the attack they set fire to more than 150 Christian homes, shops, and two churches, and displaced hundreds of Christians. In January 2017, an anti-terrorism court acquitted all 115 ringleaders of the attacks, leaving many Christians, including the victims, bereft of justice. One Christian leader said:
"It's a sheer disappointment. The message is clear for us. Those who attack minorities and openly preach hate can go scot-free. Perhaps the pictures and video footages clearly showing faces was not enough evidence."
Egypt: Prosecutors in Minya province dropped a case against ringleaders of a Muslim mob that stripped naked and paraded a 70-year-old Christian woman in the streets, before plundering and then torching the homes of seven Christian families. Eihab Ramzy, the lawyer of the victim said, "It's a calamity" and pointed out that "preliminary investigations heard testimonies supporting her account from family members and policemen at the scene." Meanwhile, the elderly woman, Souad Thabet, and her family are unable to return to their home due to ongoing Muslim threats. According to Thabet:
"The government is allowing the oppressors to walk free on the streets... This is our village that we were born and raised in.... How can we be the victims and not be able to return to our village and homes? I feel let down for a second time. I feel that nobody is standing by our side."
Kyrgyzstan: In late 2016, approximately 70 people were involved with a mob that dug up the body of a Christian twice and reburied it elsewhere without informing the family. They did so because the deceased "had been a practicing Christian in a village that was overwhelmingly Muslim, and local religious leaders restricted the cemetery to Muslims." In response, only three of the 70 went to trial for their actions and they all received suspended jail sentences.
Bangladesh: Although police manage to rescue some non-Muslim children from the notorious child-trafficking rings that proliferate in the Muslim-majority nation — four were rescued in January — the fate of many more children remains grim. According to the report:
"Over the past seven years, the Bangladeshi police has rescued 72 children from a crime ring led by religious fanatics... [T]he group targets underprivileged indigenous communities most of whose members are Christians, Hindus or Buddhists. The religious extremists belonging to these crime ring[s] entice parents with prospects of a better future for their children, which then end up in [Islamic] madrasas around the country to be forcefully converted to Islam.... The forced religious conversion of young children adds yet another facet to the already severe marginalization of ethnic and religious minorities in Southeast Bangladesh."
Germany: Thanks to dishonest Muslim translators, immigration officials are rejecting asylum applications from Muslim converts to Christianity from Iran and Afghanistan, during what one pastor characterized as "kangaroo court" hearings. Rev. Gottfried Martens accused the "almost exclusively Muslim translators" who "mocked and laughed at" Christian asylum seekers of deliberately mistranslating their responses to disqualify their applications.
"He also referred to attacks on Christian asylum seekers by radical Muslims, and criticised the Catholic Church and the Protestant EKD Church, which had opposed housing Christian and Muslim refugees separately because doing so might suggest religions could not coexist peacefully."
A spokesman for the disqualified Christians said:
"These Christians have either fled from their home countries because of their newfound faith and the persecution they had to face because of it, or have come to believe in Jesus Christ after fleeing to Germany. Sending them back to their countries of origin is completely irresponsible in view of the situation for Christian converts in places like Iran or Afghanistan, because it is truly a matter of life and death."
In Germany, thanks to dishonest Muslim translators, immigration officials are rejecting asylum applications from Muslim converts to Christianity from Iran and Afghanistan. Pictured: Hasan (left), a Yezidi refugee in Germany who was threatened by Muslims, speaks to a reporter from German public television about how a government-employed translator deliberately mistranslated his complaint and took the side of his attackers. (Image source: Bayerischer Rundfunk video screenshot)
United Kingdom: After Rev. Kelvin Holdsworth of St. Mary's Cathedral invited Muslims to recite the Koran during an Epiphany service, Madinah Javed, a law student from Glasgow went beyond reciting the passage in the service sheet to include verses that explicitly denied Jesus was God's son — a cardinal Christian doctrine that Islam rejects. Regardless, Holdsworth posted a video of the reading on Facebook and described it as "wonderful event." This prompted outrage from some Christians who emphatically called on Holdsworth to resign. The video was removed and police, who later issued the following statement, were called: "Police Scotland will not tolerate any form of hate crime and encourages all communities to continue working together to ensure no one feels threatened or marginalized."
About this Series
While not all, or even most, Muslims are involved, persecution of Christians by Muslims is growing. The report posits that such Muslim persecution is not random but rather systematic, and takes place irrespective of language, ethnicity, or location.
Raymond Ibrahim is the author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians (published by Regnery with Gatestone Institute, April 2013).
Previous reportsVerizon Communications (NYSE: VZ) plans to participate in next year's incentive auction of 600 MHz broadcast TV spectrum, but the company is more interested in acquiring higher-band spectrum for capacity, according to a senior Verizon executive.
Speaking during the company's third-quarter earnings conference call, Verizon CFO Fran Shammo noted that Verizon first deployed LTE using nationwide, contiguous 700 MHz spectrum. "That doesn't mean that we can't operate with 600," he said. "But 600 and 700 don't play well together. There's a lot of interference. So where we have 700 there would be a lot of work to deploy 600 MHz spectrum."
Shammo said there are areas where Verizon could use more lower-band spectrum, "but it's probably not the top priority. We like the higher band like AWS."
There has been speculation that Dish Network (NASDAQ: DISH) and Verizon could strike a deal for Verizon to get access to Dish's spectrum, most of which sits around the 2 GHz band. The companies would need to strike a deal soon ahead of the FCC imposing anti-collusion rules that prohibit discussions of spectrum agreements ahead of the incentive auction, or would otherwise need to wait until the latter part of 2016 to make a deal after that auction ends.
Referring to Dish Chairman and CEO Charlie Ergen, Shammo said that "we've said that all along that Charlie is sitting on very good spectrum. It's very good for capacity, which is why we spent $10.4 billion in the [AWS-3] auction." Shammo added that "higher frequency spectrum is capacity and that's really what we need at this point in time."
Verizon said the LTE network is now handling around 89 percent of its total wireless data traffic, an increase of about 75 percent in network data megabytes in the past year. Interestingly, Shammo added that it will probably be around the end of 2016 when Verizon launches an LTE-only phone without a CDMA chipset that relies on Voice over LTE only for voice service.
Shammo also touched on Verizon's Go90 over-the-top mobile video service, which launched at the beginning of October nationally to all wireless customers. "This really is just a totally different perspective than linear TV and content deals," he said. Shammo said Verizon has not really done any advertising or promotional activity for the service and is seeing solid traction with it, though he declined to reveal the number of active users.
Go90 is primarily aimed at millennials, and Shammo noted that it now has two exclusive shows: "Top Five Live," a 15-minute daily live variety show with celebrity and musical guests, and "Betch," a sketch comedy show. Shammo said Go90 will add 48 more exclusive content deals by the end of the year.
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A fault in one of the generating units of Delimara power station caused a nationwide power cut this evening (Tuesday). An explosion took place at the same time at a distribution centre near Marsa Industrial Estate.
No one was injured but the explosion produced a fire and thick black smoke. Extensive damage was caused.Enemalta reported the fire extinguished at 11.15pm
Cars provide some lighting for an open air restaurant in Bugibba. Photo - Mark Zammit Cordina
Power was lost across Malta and Gozo at 7.50pm, setting off burglar alarms as lights and air conditioners went off - as did the street decorations in the towns and villages preparing to celebrate the feast of Sta Marija. Some traffic junctions became dangerous as traffic lights went off.
Malta International Airport was forced to temporarily close all activity within the airport as a safety precaution as the runway was closed.
Flights diverted to Catania included Vueling flight VY 8744 from Barcelona, Norwegian flight DY 6530 from Copenhagen, Airmalta flight KM 4293 from Glasgow, and Ryanair flight FR 9874 from Bari.
Operations at the airport have now resumed as normal.
Supply started being restored to some areas at 8.50pm. But power was lost again at 10.40pm. It was restored to most areas by 1.30am today except for areas connected to the distribution centre at Marsa, where works were still underway.
These include parts of Birzebbuga, Corradino, Floriana, Hal Farrug, Luqa, Marsa (including factories), Qormi, Siggiewi, Tarxien, Valletta and Zebbug.
A number of readers reported problems with their telephone and internet service.
Many people went out as soon as power was lost, crowding the promenades. Restaurants with generators had brisk business and one restaurant in Bugibba was seen cooking meals over a large barbeque.
Other people cooled off on their roofs and, with power still not back again till late, some opted to sleep there - under a full moon and the annual meteor shower.
At Grand Harbour, a ceremony marking the arrival of the Sta Marija convoy of 1942 continued -- the power failure recalled the wartime blackout, someone said sarcastically. Power for the sound system was provided by a patrol boat.
Many localities had their power restored for the second time by midnight.
Picture - Karl Cilia - mynews@timesofmalta.com
A spokesman for Enemalta said that the reason for the power station generator fault was being investigated as engineers worked to restore power as soon as possible.
Police investigations are now underway and Enemalta has also launched internal inquiries to identify the cause of the explosion at the distribution centre and the supply disruption, assess the damages caused and identify measures that may need to be implemented to avoid similar difficulties in the future.
Enemalta thanked its employees, the police, the Civil Protection Department and employees and officials from several other entities who worked throughout the night to respond to the emergency and restore electricity supply in the shortest time possible. It also thanked customers and the public for their support.
Malta last suffered a nation-wide power cut on January 9 because of a Delimara power station fault.
Daniel Cilia took this picture of the star-lit light as the moon rose over Birkirkara with electricity lights off at about 9.30pm.The Basilica was still lit from the inside at the start of celebrations of the feast of St Helen.
A slow shutter shot of a street in Iklin during the blackout, using car lights and the full moon. Picture - Simon Scicluna - mynews@timesofmalta.comType Ia supernovae are a very special type of stellar collapse because they provide so-called “standard candles” for distance measurement. This means that they provide a reliable luminosity to astronomers — and that’s all those astronomers really need to start doing calculations. But the fact is that even a Type Ia supernova is only standard at the very peak of its brightness, so it’s imperative to catch such an event early and watch it grow in strength until its eventual zenith.
That’s just what NASA did last month, when neutrino detectors gave early warning of the explosion. It trained a whole range of equipment at the event: From the Spitzer Space Telescope to the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), to the Swift Gamma Ray Burst Explorer, this was one well-documented effect.
The reason astronomers cared about it so much is that it took place right next door, in our nearby M82 galaxy. Around 12 million light-years away, this supernova could provide real insight to astronomers by letting them view a star’s death up-close (or relatively so).
NASA has released a stunning photo of the event at its brightest as captured by the Hubble Telescope, which gives you an idea of the relative violence of a supernova and regular stars.
The standard candle on display here is not terribly necessary for the range-finding aspect (we already know how far away its galaxy is) but the violence of its message could still carry novel information to astrophysicists. Prior supernovae led scientists to observe that the universe is expanding, and have helped them to map the distribution of galaxies.
Type Ia supernovae are generally hard to capture because they are less energetic than some other types. In fact, this supernova was likely caused by a collision or some other extreme change in its mass distribution. As a result, they give off fewer neutrinos — which are usually an early sign of a supernova, allowing scientists to reorient telescopes in time to see the event. The neutrinos from this explosion only gave us warning because it occurred so close by.
However, they can occur far closer than that. So-called galactic supernovae are those that occur in the Milky Way itself, ans some astronomers are warning that if we don’t invest now in quick-response systems, we risk missing one of the most important events in our history of star-gazing.
Regardless, this event did not go unnoticed, and its data is still being crunched in labs around the world.Japanese writer claims Japan`s massacre of Koreans in colonial rule. August. 31, 2013 05:34..
"(Japanese) soldiers shot Koreans to death with machine guns after biding them by the tens. The soldiers laid Koreans who was not dead yet on a railroad and poured oil on them to burn them to death."
"A fully pregnant woman was thrown into a river after being tied up with a rope around the belly. Afterwards, the baby was born. The two drifted away, linked with the umbilical cord. It was so horrible."
"Two men hooked the bodies of Koreans in their ankles and dragged them to a police station."
The books in three volumes containing vivid witness accounts of Japan`s massacre of Koreans in Tokyo and its surrounding areas after the Great Kanto Earthquake on Sept. 1, 1923 has been published to mark the 90th anniversary of the disaster. Japanese author Masao Nishizaki said in an interview with the Dong-A Ilbo that the Japanese government had "concealed or downscaled the Japanese military and police`s involvement in the massacre during the time of the Great Kanto Earthquake." He stressed, "There are countless witness accounts that the Japanese military directly murdered Koreans and the (Japanese) police spread groundless rumors (against Koreans)." He warned that if Japan turns a deaf ear to the lessons from the past, the disaster could be repeated.
"When Japanese soldiers killed Koreans at that time, the general masses hurrahed because they thought that the military was defending them, believing groundless rumors that Koreans were murderers and arsonists," the author said. "The incident prompted Japan to plunge into fascism. The current (Japanese) government`s moves to use threats from China and North Korea to turn the Self-Defense Forces into the military are in the same vein. History can repeat itself."
Nishizaki is a former middle school English teacher. He left the job 10 years ago for health issues and devoted himself to a group that excavated the remains of Koreans massacred during the times of the Great Kanto Earthquake. He rummaged through all public libraries in Tokyo and read tens of thousands of books for four years to collect witness accounts of the massacre.
Q: What kind of accounts did you find the most?
A: They are claims that the Japanese police spread the groundless rumors about Koreans adding poison to wells and the (Japanese) masses organized vigilante groups and massacred Koreans. There are many witness accounts about Japanese soldiers directly killing Koreans. They even killed pregnant women, claiming that they hid bombs in the bellies. Korea`s provisional government in Shanghai reported on the December 5, 1923 edition of the Independent, Korea`s first modern newspaper, that 6,661 people were killed in that year. However, the number is not accurate.
Q: How did the Japanese government respond?
A: Afraid of criticisms from the international community, the Japanese government put only cases of civilian murders of Koreans to court, but not those involving the Japanese military. However, most cases ended up in light punishments such as suspended sentences, and the convicted were all pardoned on the occasion of the crown prince`s wedding four months later. As there was no evidence of Koreans` riots, the Japanese government even tried to fabricate evidence.
Q: How did the Japanese react?
A: Most of them had no idea about the massacre and were shocked when they heard about it. It is from that point that I think about the future of Japan. Current high school textbooks are removed of the parts describing the incident. Japan is increasingly forgetting why their country started the past war.
Nishizaki has been staging with relevant civic groups a signature collecting campaign for holding Japan responsible for the massacre of Koreans. So far, about 500 people have signed up. He and the civic groups plan to collect more signatures until the end of this year to file a petition with the speaker of Japan`s upper and lower houses to find the truth about the massacre.Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world
A video has emerged of a homophobic incident which took place in the centre of the Soho area of London during which verbal abuse is hurled at two cabaret performers.
Cabaret and burlesque gender dissillusionist Miss Cairo, and friend Rubyyy Jones said the man featured in the video (a rickshaw driver) approached them and told them to “suck [his] dick”, as they walked for a bus on Old Compton Street, Soho.
Videos posted by both victims show the abuse, during which the perpetrator tells them to “suck his dick”, and says he “doesn’t respect” one of the victims who he calls a “fucking gay boy”.
Please note that both videos contain strong language.
A second video shows a friend of the man shout “bad man don’t wear dresses”, after a passer-by asks for a photograph with Miss Cairo.
The incident has been reported to police, who have said they will follow up with the victims this weekend.
Miss Cairo told PinkNews: “This hasn’t been the first time I have received homophobic abuse in London. A few months ago I had a very severe incident of homophobic on the N29 bus route. I stopped the bus and notified the police who arrested the abuser. A month later I received a cheque as form of compensation. Instead of cashing it in, I rang the magistrates and told them that I was angry that they hadn’t kept me in the loop and I felt that I was being paid off.
“I am now in talks with the court to discuss a more positive way of tackling hate crime abusers. I have suggested the person should attend an LGBTQ awareness course, in order for them to understand more about equality and our sexual orientation should not be used against us.”
She went on so say that she was extremely grateful for support from those who had seen the videos online, but that she was shocked to see racist comments calling for the man to be deported in her defence.
“After putting this video up on Facebook, we were shown a lot of love and support, but I was appalled to see the level of racism which was being used as a form of ‘support’. It doesn’t matter when this man is from, this man needs to be educated about tolerance.”
Soho is considered by many to be the heart of London’s gay scene, and is generally known to be diverse and accepting.100th Anniversary of Fatima is May 13 – Time to Do the “Nineveh Thing”
We have now entered the 100th year since Our Lady appeared in Fatima, Portugal. The anniversary is May 13, 2017. Many people are wondering if God may do (or allow) something soon to “shake us up” (I wrote about it HERE – this is the most “shared” article I have ever written).
As we watch terrorism rising up everywhere around the world, relations between nations in steep decline, a false economy ready to collapse, morality at an all-time low, pre-born babies murdered by the millions, marriage redefined for the first time in all of civilization, adult men allowed to share a bathroom with little girls, religious freedom under assault, corruption and collusion rampant within our government, and confusion in our Church … people are asking, especially as we enter this centennial year of Fatima, “WHAT DO WE DO NOW?!?!”
The answer may lie more in “God’s style.” What is “God’s style?” Throughout salvation history, we know that no matter how far we stray from God, He always wants to give us every opportunity to return.
In our time, we see God’s offer given to us in the Third Secret of Fatima. What is the third part of the secret or “Third Secret”?
Here is what Sr. Lucia wrote:
After the two parts which I have already explained, at the left of Our Lady and a little above, we saw an Angel with a flaming sword in his left hand; flashing, it gave out flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire; but they died out in contact with the splendour that Our Lady radiated towards him from her right hand: pointing to the earth with his right hand, the Angel cried out in a loud voice: ‘Penance, Penance, Penance!’ (You can read about the rest of the message at Vatican – The Message of Fatima, “Third Part of the ‘Secret’”)
When the Apostles asked the Savior why they had been unable to drive the evil spirit from a demoniac, Our Lord gave a “key” for what intensifies or increases the power of our prayers: “This kind is not cast out but by prayer and fasting“ (Matthew 17:21). So, too, the evil which today torments humanity can be conquered only by a world-wide crusade of prayer *and* penance. As the Fatima anniversary approaches, and we see evil moving unabated in our world, the call of the angel at Fatima in 1917 is ours today: “Penance, Penance, Penance!”
This is particularly challenging for most people in our modern times, which is all the more reason why it is so necessary. Most of us living in America have been swimming in a veritable ocean of comforts and forms of pleasure. While many forms of pleasure are not sinful, in and of themselves, some are, or can be. Some forms of pleasure are objectively evil … e.g., viewing pornography. An over-indulgence of something can be sinful … e.g., excessive alcohol consumption. The things that give them pleasure, which leads to over-consumption or even addiction, can control many. In other words, they find themselves in a place where they are not happy unless they continue their pursuit of the “things” that make them happy.
Spiritually speaking, this over-indulgence or the use of objectively evil things causes a spiritual death (mortal sin). According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “mortal sin destroys charity in the heart of man by a grave violation of God’s law; it turns man away from God, who is his ultimate end and his beatitude, by preferring an inferior good to him” (CCC 1855). Furthermore, being in a state of mortal sin further inclines us to do evil. It leaves us with very little defenses against the Devil and our own weaknesses. If we are not God’s possession (in a state of grace), we are BY DEFINITION the devil’s possession (mortal sin), as he easily manipulates us.
When we are diminished by separation from God to this sloth, we lose our “drive to strive.” We take the easiest route. We are, quite literally, imprisoned or “stuck” in this lower, animalistic way of living. Having moved away from the Divine Life, we are now choosing the world over God’s love and protection. We are now “devil fodder” for every whim Satan sends our way.
The famous Nike slogan – JUST DO IT! – was, essentially, a call to physical fitness. Yet, it became the motto of our modern culture. Basically, it seemed to morph into, “If it feels good, do it” … don’t deny yourself any comfort or form of pleasure, even if it rises to the level of sin. In fact, the motto of satanists is, “Do What Thou Wilt.”
Penance, strictly speaking, is a choice for some superior good at the expense of denying oneself an inferior good. It’s a choice to disconnect from some worldly pleasure (leisure, junk food, etc.) in a desire to connect more to God and His will. The choice to offer extra prayer time, for example, means that it might take away from someone’s TV time. This is what it means to “Carry your cross.” Jesus could have chosen to flee and go vacation on the shores of the sea of Galilee, but instead He chose something more challenging … Christ made that “sacrifice.” We do that when we choose things of God over things of the world.
So, while satanists ascribe to “Do what thou wilt,” we follow the lead of Mary who, with her very last words ever recorded, gave us the prescription for a life filled with the power of the Holy Spirit, “Do whatever He tells you” (John 2:5). So, in essence, we are saying, “Just Stop It!” Just stop serving our carnal passions and free ourselves to serve the “higher goals” God wants us to focus upon in our lives.
THE NINEVEH 90 CHALLENGE
Nineveh 90 – the 90 days from February 13 to May 13 – is inspired by the excellent program – Exodus 90 – designed exclusively for men by Fr. Brian Doerr and others. I strongly encourage men to sign-up for Exodus 90 (sign-up HERE), and use it for our 90-day journey.
For our Nineveh 90 journey, which includes both men and women, we are embracing the great values of mortification, a support system, and the research in the behavioral sciences that says 90 days is about the time needed to change bad habits. We will also be using some of the tried and true supernatural elements. Namely, the Brown Scapular, 54 Day Rosary Novena, and the 33 Day Preparation for Marian Consecration.
Why Nineveh 90? Recall the story of Nineveh in the Book of Jonah …
Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time: “Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you.” Jonah obeyed the word of the Lord and went to Nineveh. Now Nineveh was a very large city; it took three days to go through it. Jonah began by going a day’s journey into the city, proclaiming, “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.” The Ninevites believed God. A fast was proclaimed, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth. When Jonah’s warning reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth and sat down in the dust. This is the proclamation he issued in Nineveh: “By the decree of the king and his nobles: Do not let people or animals, herds or flocks, taste anything; do not let them eat or drink. But let people and animals be covered with sackcloth. Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence. 9 Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish.” When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened (Jonah 3:3-10)
The Nineveh 90 Challenge Begins February 13
“Consecration Day” will be on May 13, the 100th Anniversary of Our Lady of Fatima.
Nineveh 90 – Ten Elements
For these 90 days, resolve to let go of repetitive sin you struggle with (e.g., masturbation, over-eating, alcohol, etc.) Wear Brown Scapular (Scapular Medal allowed) – Akin to Sackcloth Daily Mass (This is more of an encouragement, as many cannot do this) Confession (at least once a month … immediately following grave sin) Support System: Create or join a “Nineveh 90 Squad” of 3-8 people. Meet 1-3 times per week (in person or online). Join together with an “Accountability Buddy.” Meet daily or, at least, 3 times a week. Daily Prayer Morning Offering
Angelus (6,Noon,6)
Rosary
Holy Hour (or at least 20 minutes – does not need to be before the Blessed Sacrament. This is normally done at home or your favorite prayer space)
Bedtime Prayers For 90 Days, Commit to … Regular and intense exercise (this may be one of the greater challenges for many)
Seven hours of sleep is essential
No alcohol
No desserts & sweets
No eating between meals
No soda or sweetened drinks
No television or movies (news allowed)
Only music that lifts the soul to God
No televised sports (one per week allowed)
Limit recreational computer time (only use for personal needs and fulfillment. May be needed for Nineveh 90 too) 54 Day Rosary Novena (Basic Training in Holiness) – February 13 to April 7 33 Day Preparation for Consecration – April 10 (Monday of Holy Week) to May 12 Marian Consecration – May 13, 2017. 100th Anniversary of Our Lady of Fatima
Prayer Intention for 54 Day Rosary Novena: Personal Holiness and for the Roman Catholic Church.
Sundays and Solemnities: may be a day of relaxed discipline, but not abandoned. (Sleep in an extra hour, cream in your coffee, a dessert, a beer, etc.)
Fasting: Wednesdays and Fridays (Water/Juice and bread only, if medically allowed, otherwise as is outlined by the USCCB)
You are encouraged (not required) to join the Angelic Warfare Confraternity (We have found that the requirements for joining are not very accessible to many, so we are not requiring this)
NOW, is a wonderful time to, in essence, “warm up” for Nineveh 90. For example, maybe take this time to ease into your exercise program that will begin on February 13.
Please join our “Special Forces Training” FB group to receive instructions and form Nineveh 90 squads and buddies: SPECIAL FORCES TRAINING
UPDATE: From Michelle Linn Fallon: “I want to encourage everyone thinking about this to do it. I did this in a way without calling it this beginning in September when we did the first novena for our nation. I got up before 6am and worked up to 11 workouts a week. I’ve lost 40 pounds. I look great. I feel great. I’ve lost my taste for sweets. Broken my addiction to soft drinks from childhood. I have little sugar, little dairy and don’t want it. I am no longer considered obese and only slightly overweight according to my doctor. In 10 pounds my BMI will be normal again. My prayer life is more consistent. I hardly miss a day on this second novena so I rarely have days to make up prayers. I’ve joined a lay apostolate. Amazing things happen when you offer the discipline to God. Amazing prayers have been answered for me and I’ve witnessed miracles in my life. I can’t fast on bread because I can’t eat bread. But I can deny myself other things. I have health issues that keep me from some of the fasting things. But I can deny myself sleeping in when I want to and pray instead. It’s all habits. Do what you can do and focus on that. Let God do the rest. He will!”The Leader of Gamergate 10/13/14 (Mon) 01:20:30 ID: d7e6b1 No.98443[Watch Thread] ID: wouldn't it be just the worst thing ever if a small group of apparently feminists from le tumblr army raided /b/ with death threats against hotwheels in retaliation?
that would just be the worst.
imagine if the feminists started sending death threats to other people as well! who knows what those crazy cooks will think of now that death threats are getting involved.
The Leader of Gamergate 10/13/14 (Mon) 01:22:30 ID: 64bb31 No.98455 >>98488 ID: Get out shill, we don't false flag, and you guys wouldn't have to if your rhetoric was based on reason.
The Leader of Gamergate 10/13/14 (Mon) 01:23:01 ID: ae8fe0 No.98459 ID: What is with all this shills this weekend? Are we winning that hard?
The Leader of Gamergate 10/13/14 (Mon) 01:29:04 ID: 6d45b3 No.98488 >>98515>>98622 ID: >>98455
Why don't we? Why don't we use a method that clearly works wonders for the SJWs? It's like we're agreeing to fight someone with one hand tied behind our back. Why don't we? Why don't we use a method that clearly works wonders for the SJWs? It's like we're agreeing to fight someone with one hand tied behind our back.
The Leader of Gamergate 10/13/14 (Mon) 01:30:52 ID: 6d45b3 No.98503 >>98515>>98547>>98622>>98678 ID: >>98494
The poster's right. Nothing matters but winning. So why aren't we doing everything we can to win, including fighting dirty? Why are we limiting ourselves? The poster's right. Nothing matters but winning. So why aren't we doing everything we can to win, including fighting dirty? Why are we limiting ourselves?
The Leader of Gamergate 10/13/14 (Mon) 01:36:08 ID: 6d45b3 No.98534 >>98543>>98622 ID: >>98515
Ethics, yes, because our ethics are truly going to vindicate us. Last I checked, people didn't give two fucks about our ethical high ground. All the SJWs have to do is fake-dox Literally Wu and all our progress feels like it's for naught. Ethics, yes, because our ethics are truly going to vindicate us. Last I checked, people didn't give two fucks about our ethical high ground. All the SJWs have to do is fake-dox Literally Wu and all our progress feels like it's for naught.
The Leader of Gamergate 10/13/14 (Mon) 01:36:39 ID: 4c492a No.98539 ID: >>98512
praise be mighty hotwheels praise be mighty hotwheels
The Leader of Gamergate 10/13/14 (Mon) 01:37:56 ID: ae |
barely a month later, Manila Times publisher Chino Roces confronted Marcos about pressuring advertisers to drop their accounts. The president denied it.
“I had nothing whatsoever to do in suggesting the cut of advertisement,” the president wrote that night – only 36 pages after writing the opposite.
The president’s romantic affair with American actress Dovie Beams turned to public scandal that same year, prompting a torrent of denials to his diary and to Imelda. “I am being blackmailed,” Marcos wrote in his diary, calling it “a diabolical plot” that he blamed variously on his political rivals and the CIA.
After Dovie appeared before the Manila press corps to play taped recordings of her lovemaking session with the president, Marcos still insisted in his diary that the claims were “patently false.” And to punish the United States, he told a bewildered American ambassador that Washington's military bases agreement with the Philippines would have to be renegotiated.
When an elderly delegate to the 1972 constitutional convention made a dramatic public display of returning unspent bribe money that he said came from Imelda and other Marcos loyalists, the president raged publicly and privately. It was, he wrote in his diary, a “dastardly act to malign my family” by what he called “a tool of the opposition.”
A few days later, federal police raided the delegate’s home and claimed to find US$60,000 stashed in a bedside drawer. He and his family said police planted the cash, a suspicion shared, according to a poll, by 80 percent of the public. Still, the ailing 72-year-old was arrested.
Marcos told his diary that the bedside loot was a “lucky discovery” and that the old man’s arrest was “poetic justice.”
But years later, documents tucked in with Marcos diary pages would prove otherwise. The papers contained accounting records of a massive bribery scheme, referred to around the palace simply as the “envelope campaign.” The records helped Marcos keep track of his payoffs to some 200 convention delegates – even as he was urging prosecution of the one delegate who refused to be bought.
More than a year before he would declare martial law, Marcos tested the limits of his presidential authority in a case that came before the Philippine Supreme Court late in 1971. Amid widely disputed claims of a communist insurgency threat, Marcos wanted the court to sanction his power to declare a national emergency and suspend the constitution.
The stakes were high. Marcos feared that a closely divided panel could leave the matter muddled and undermine his authority, especially with military leaders. So, in truly Machiavellian fashion, he enlisted one of the 11 justices as a spy.
Fred Ruiz Castro, the president’s double agent on the high court, provided inside information for nearly three months. In late-night visits to the palace, recorded by Marcos in his diary, the judge shared updates on the shifting legal positions of fellow jurists and offered advice on strategies to win over the skeptics. He even conducted a mock hearing one night to prepare Marcos’s solicitor general for an appearance the next day before the full court.
When the controversial – but unanimous – ruling was finally issued, Marcos celebrated in his diary: “This is a red letter day.”
He went on to take personal credit. “The justification before the Supreme Court was prepared by me,” he wrote. He made no mention of his secret agent or the extraordinarily improper lobbying offensive that had assured unanimity.
Despite such lies – of commission and omission – I regard the Marcos diary as historic treasure. It says so much, not only about the dictator that always lurked in Ferdinand Marcos, but also about the vulnerability of democracy wherever fiction trumps the truth. - Rappler.com
William C. Rempel is author of the new e-book, Diary of a Dictator – Ferdinand & Imelda: The Last Days of Camelot, an updated and revised version of his 1993 book, Delusions of a Dictator (Little Brown & Co.) He also is a former investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times and author of At the Devil’s Table – The Untold Story of the Insider Who Brought Down the Cali Cartel (Random House).The Defense Department Thursday announced a long-term plan to share part of its reserved airwaves with industry while preserving security and access for the military to the electro-magnetic spectrum.
The Electro-Magnetic Spectrum Strategy developed with several federal agencies did not mean that the military “will have to make due with less spectrum,” but rather was aimed at working with wireless communications companies to meet the growing need for greater bandwidth, said Teri Takai, Chief Information Officer at the Pentagon.
A key White House advisor on telecommunications attended the briefing by Takai and other defense officials to applaud the effort to reach out to industry. The needs of the nation “can only be met through spectrum sharing,” said Karl Nebbia, associate administrator of the Office of Spectrum Management.
The Defense Department’s announcement was in line with President Obama’s goal of finding 500 megahertz of spectrum for wireless broadband over the next decade, Nebbia said.
Takai stressed that the Pentagons’ own wireless spectrum needs would not be compromised by the new strategy..
I used to say that everything's connected to the network except if you carry around a weapon, and I was very quickly corrected that ‘no, in fact, most of our weaponry is facilitated by position navigation and timing -- or what you'd call GPS,” Takai said.
The new strategy could possibly entail having the Defense Department give up part of the spectrum, while sharing other parts with industry, said Air Force Maj. Gen. Robert Wheeler.
"That's how we're going forward with it," said Wheeler, the Pentagon’s deputy for Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Information Infrastructure. "It also depends on what industry needs, so there's basically a combination."
The release of the spectrum strategy would be followed over the next six months with the development of an implementation plan with the troops in mind that will focus on the practical issues involved in apportioning space on the electromagnetic spectrum, Takai said.
“The whole idea behind the spectrum strategy is to try to get ahead of this increasing demand so that they don't have to operate with radios that are either more difficult to use or that have to be re-calibrated,” Takai said.The strange saga of the Scottish public school that allowed American homosexuality-denouncing evangelists to “help out,” and to give children as young as five years books like How Do You Know God Is Real? and Exposing the Myth of Evolution, has just entered a new phase:
Two head teachers at a Scottish primary school who allowed members of a US creationist Christian religious sect into classrooms have been removed from their posts, it emerged last night. Headteacher Alexandra MacKenzie and her deputy Elizabeth Mockus — who job-share at Kirktonholme Primary School in East Kilbride — are to be “redeployed” to backroom duties while South Lanarkshire Council carries out an investigation. … Education chiefs want to determine why the Church of Christ sect had been allowed into the school to work as classroom assistants for the last eight years.
For the time being, the head teachers have been replaced with a temporary senior-management team. A spokesman for the Scottish government says that his higher-ups agree with that course of action.
Among other things, the investigation will focus on whether other regional schools (besides the two known to have harbored the Church of Christ evangelicals) were also targeted. Green member of Parliament Patrick Harvie said he hoped that no other pupils had been exposed to “this sort of extremism.”
I wonder how this story would have played out if it had happened in the United States. Might FOX News commentators be angrily citing it as proof that Christians suffer discrimination and persecution? I wouldn’t put it past them, but I hope we won’t have to find out.
(Image via Class Warfare)A historic Black church that was reportedly burnt down by Ku Klux Klan members in 1995 was ablaze late Tuesday in Greeleyville, South Carolina. This fire follows weeks of suspected arson incidents at Black churches across the U.S., and comes nearly two weeks after the June 17 mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina that left nine dead.
Mt. Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church is a predominantly Black church, which was among 70 suspicious fires that hit Black churches throughout the South between 1995 to 1996, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Mark Keel, chief of State Law Enforcement Division, told the Post and Courier that officials from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and other federal agencies were called, and an investigation is underway.
This is at least the seventh Black church to burn this month, as the conversation about #WhoIsBurningBlackChurches spreads on social media.
On Saturday, a fire destroyed College Heights Baptist Church in Elyria, Ohio. Firefighters arrived shortly after 7 a.m. and found the church fully engulfed in flames. No one was injured, Derrell Deer, the pastor of the church, told local news reporters, but what caused the fire is still under investigation.
This latest fire is one in a string of blazes set on predominantly Black churches in the U.S. Some of these fires have been deemed arson and some are under investigation as possible hate crimes.
In North Carolina, investigators determined that a fire set on June 24 at a primarily Black congregation called the Briar Creek Road Baptist Church was arson, and are asking people for any information that could help solve the case. At about the same time, a fire burned the tiny church, God's Power Church of Christ, beyond repair in Macon, Georgia. Associate pastor Jeanette Dudley got the call shortly after 5 a.m. on June 24. When the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco arrived, they determined that this was arson. Investigators do not yet know if it is a hate crime.
Two other predominantly Black churches had possible arson attacks this past week, and the fire at Glover Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Warrenville, South Carolina on June 26 was not its first, according to Rev. Bobby Jones. He told the Augusta Chronicle that the church's previous building was lost in suspected arson.
The other possible arson happened on June 22 at College Hill Seventh Day Adventist in Knoxville, Tennessee. Tennessee investigators believe it was an act of vandalism and are not investigating the fire as a hate crime. Apparently at that fire, bales of hay and bags of dirt were left at the church doors.
Other suspicious blazes occurred at Black churches recently as well, according to the Atlantic:
In two other cases of fires at Southern black churches this week—at Fruitland Presbyterian Church in Gibson County, Tennessee, and the Greater Miracle Temple Apostolic Holiness Church in Tallahassee, Florida—officials suspect the blazes were caused by lightening and electrical wires, respectively, but investigations are still ongoing.
The string of arson attacks and pending investigations about how these Black churches were set on fire comes at a time of heightened racial tension in the wake of the gruesome attack that left nine people dead, including the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, a pastor and South Carolina state senator, who President Obama recently eulogized.
Black churches have been the target of hate crimes throughout U.S. history, dating back to before the Civil War.
16th Street Church. Birmingham, Alabama - Sept. 15, 1963.
Americans learn in history class about the bombing of the 16th Street Church in Birmingham, Alabama, when Ku Klux Klan terrorists killed four girls on Sept. 15, 1963.
“They died between the sacred walls of the church of God,” Reverend Martin Luther King said. “And they were discussing the eternal meaning of love.”
Mt. Zion Church. Longdale, Mississippi - June 16, 1964
On June 16, 1964, members of the Ku Klux Klan beat people leaving a church meeting in Longdale, Mississippi. They were targeting a civil rights activist named Michael Schwerner. Schwerner was not there, but the historic haven for slaves was burned down by the Klan anyway. Later, Schwerner and two other civil rights workers -- James Earl Chaney and Andrew Goodman -- drove to visit the burned church. On the way, they were pulled over, arrested, and jailed. They were released from jail then beaten and killed. Their story is told in the 1988 movie "Mississippi Burning." The case of the three murdered civil rights workers was one of the key incidents that helped finally drive national attention to the plight of Black people living in the segregated South.
Macedonia Baptist Church and Mount Zion A.M.E. Church. South Carolina - June 21, 1995.
On June 21, 1995, four Ku Klux Klan members burned the Macedonia Baptist Church in South Carolina. The day before, a fire was set at Mount Zion A.M.E. Church in Greeleyville, South Carolina. In a decision against the Klan, Macedonia Baptist was awarded $37.8 million. There were more than 30 suspicious fires at Black churches in 1995 and 1996. This was a time where there was a rise in domestic terrorism, with the most devastating attack happening when anti-government extremists bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.
Louisiana church fires - Feb. 1, 1996.
In Louisiana on Feb. 1, 1996, a group of churches within six miles — Cypress Grove Baptist, St. Paul's Free Baptist, Thomas Chapel Benevolent Society in East Baton Rouge, and Sweet Home Baptist in Baker — were each set on fire on the 36th anniversary of the Greensboro, North Carolina sit-in.
Inner City Baptist Church. Knoxville, Tennessee - Jan. 8, 1996.
In Knoxville, Tennessee on Jan. 8, 1996, a fire at Inner City Baptist Church destroyed the sanctuary area. Racial slurs were painted on the walls inside, where Molotov cocktails, kerosene cans, and gunpowder were all found.
Macedonia Church of God in Christ. Springfield, Mass. - Nov. 5, 2008.
Shortly after the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, Macedonia Church of God in Christ, a predominantly Black church in Springfield, Massachusetts, was set on fire on Nov. 5. The church was under construction at the time. Three white men were charged; two pleaded guilty, and a third was convicted and sentenced to 13 years in prison.
Hate crimes
The FBI identified 3,563 victims of racially motivated hate crimes in 2013, according to the most recent federal data. Here's what the agency found:
Black victims constituted 66 percent of the total.
21 percent were victims of anti-white bias.
4.6 percent were victims of anti-Asian bias.
4.5 percent were victims of anti-Native American bias.
Most of these hate crimes were not fatal.
Related: America's Biggest Terror Threat Is Not Who You ThinkRoger Clemens, Nomar Garciaparra, and Pedro Martinez have been selected to the Red Sox Hall of Fame along with longtime radio broadcaster Joe Castiglione.
The players were chosen by a 16-person panel that includes club executives, print and broadcast media members, booster club representatives, and historians. Garciaparra was one of 15 position players under consideration. Clemens and Martinez were among 13 pitchers considered.
Clemens spent 13 seasons with Boston beginning in 1984. He is tied with Cy Young for the most career wins (192) and most career shutouts (38) as a Red Sox, and is the all-time franchise leader in strikeouts (2,590). The Rocket was a three time Cy Young Award winner with the Red Sox and 1986 AL and All-Star MVP.
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Clemens had two 20-strikeout no-walk games, in 1986 against Seattle and 1996 in Detroit. He was named to the All-Star Game five times as a Red Sox, including the 1986 game that he started and won. Clemens is second in club history, behind Tim Wakefield, with 382 career games started and 2,776.0 innings pitched.
Garciaparra was with the Red Sox from 1996-2004. He was the 1997 AL Rookie of the Year and a five-time All-Star.
The shortstop has the fourth-best career batting average (.323) and fifth-best slugging percentage (.553) in Red Sox history. He led the AL with 209 hits and 684 at-bats in 1997, the same year he had a 30-game hit streak. Garciaparra tied the club record on May 10, 1999 against Seattle when he hit two grand slams and collected 10 RBI. His.372 average in 2000 is the fourth-highest in club single-season history.
Martinez was a two-time Cy Young Award winner and four-time All-Star in his seven seasons with the Red Sox from 1998-2004. He was a key part of the 2004 team that brought a World Series title to Boston for the first time since 1918. Martinez is the club’s all-time leader with a.760 (117-37) career winning percentage and 72 10-strikeout games. He was named MVP of the 1999 All-Star Game at Fenway Park when he struck out five of the six batters he faced as the American League starter.
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Castiglione has spent 31 seasons as the Red Sox play-by-play announcer. Castiglione became known nationally for his call of the 2004 World Series win as he broadcast the now famous words, “Can you believe it?”
Martinez’s 1999 one-hit, 17-strikeout complete game against the New York Yankees at Yankee Stadium has been selected as the “Great Red Sox Moment,” a memorable moment in Red Sox history that is regarded for its special significance.
The Red Sox Hall of Fame was instituted in 1995.A policeman died and scores were injured during clashes near the Ukrainian parliament on Monday.
© REUTERS / Valentyn Ogirenko Blast Heard Near Ukraine's Parliament as Protesters Clash With Police: Some 100 Injured
KIEV (Sputnik) — Ukrainian police released overnight 13 of the 31 suspects arrested over the deadly clashes outside the parliament in Kiev, Ukraine's Interior Ministry adviser Zoryan Shkiryak said early Tuesday.
Clashes between nationalists and riot police erupted Monday after lawmakers backed in the first reading a bill that would provide for the decentralization of the country. One police officer died from wounds he sustained when a grenade went off in the crowd, injuring over a hundred others.
In a Facebook posting, Shkiryak said that 18 people remained in police custody, including the protester who allegedly threw the grenade. According to the adviser, the man behind the explosion served in a volunteer battalion.
© REUTERS / Stringer France Condemns Deadly Clashes Outside Ukrainian Parliament
The rest were released, pending an investigation. "All materials are being analyzed and gathered. The death of the National Guard member and the wounds inflicted on almost 130 officers will not go unpunished," he vowed.
Earlier on Monday, Ukraine’s Interior Minister Arsen Avakov promised a thorough investigation behind the causes of the unrest.
Ukrainian authorities agreed to give greater autonomy to Donetsk and Lugansk regions in the country’s southeast as part of their peace deal with local militias. Under the Minsk peace agreement, reforms to the Ukrainian constitution are to be passed before the end of 2015.The Coca-Cola bottle was born 100 years ago, yesterday, when its iconic contour bottle—heralded as the “perfect liquid wrapper”—was approved for patent on Nov. 16, 1915.
The Coca-Cola Bottling Company The 1915 bottle.
In 1915, to distinguish itself from copycats and competitors like iKoka-Nola, Ma Coca-Co, Toka-Cola and Koke, Coca-Cola issued a design competition announcement seeking “a bottle so distinct that you would recognize if by feel in the dark or lying broken on the ground.” The best design would win $500 (approximately $11,700 today).
A five-person team from the Root Glass Company in Terre Haute, Indiana—Chapman J. and William Root, Earl Dean, Clyde Edwards and the shop’s foreman Swedish émigré Alexander Samuelson, whose name is listed on the original patent—created the winning proposal for the contour bottle.
They were inspired by an illustration of a cocoa pod with “an elongated shape and distinct ribs,” from the local library, explained Coca-Cola’s director of heritage communications Ted Ryan in an article posted on the Coca-Cola website. Originally intended as a “brain tonic and intellectual beverage” by its inventor pharmacist John Styth Pemberton in 1886, Coca-Cola’s recipe once included a small dose of cocaine (now eliminated) derived from the leaf of coca plant shrubs—but not the cocoa which grows in pods, from trees.
“They knew Coca-Cola had nothing to do with cocoa, but felt the cocoa pod had an appealing shape,” explained a Coca-Cola spokesperson to Quartz. The story goes that during the brainstorming process, the designers went to the local library to search the dictionary for the word “coca,” stumbled upon “cocoa”—and just went with it.
The judging committee was sold anyway, calling Root Glass Company’s design “a clear winner,” according to Ryan. The patented design was curvier, with more girth than the version that eventually went into mass production. The first edition of their glass bottles were colored “German Green” (later renamed “Georgia Green” in honor of the company’s home state). These first bottles were also specified to be made of heavy, durable glass—no less than 14.5 ounces (or 0.9 pounds)—so when filled with liquid, Coke bottles used to weigh more than pound.
Records of the Patent and Trademark Office, National Archives The Contour Bottle’s Original Patent.
When the Root Glass Company patented the design, their application omitted Coke’s signature script lettering logo to keep it secret from competitors. The original patent (a.k.a. the contour bottle’s birth certificate) is now on display at the National Archives in Washington, DC until December 2.
While the unprecedented bottle shape certainly makes a case for distinctive design in branding, Coca-Cola’s bottle has also transcended soft drink sales to become a cultural icon—lionized, lampooned and immortalized in visual culture—enough to be featured on the cover of TIME magazine in 1950, the first ever commercial product to gain that distinction.
The unmistakable contour bottle has also appeared in art (notably, in Andy Warhol’s pop art canvases), in numerous movies, and has even seeped into vernacular language. “Coke bottle glasses” refers to round-frame eyeglasses with very thick, face-distorting lenses, like the thick glass bottom of the contour bottle.
Since its debut, over 300 billion glass Coke bottles have been sold worldwide.Brexit: nothing to report 06/09/2016
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Assuming the responsibility of running the Brexit department certainly seems to have brought David Davis a little closer to reality than some of his former backbench colleagues.
From the despatch box yesterday, in what was described as his
We will not delay one day more than is necessary to do the job that we have to do, he said, but it is a complicated and extensive relationship that we have to untangle, and we will do so in good time.
But then, in the "stupid stakes", he would be struggling to complete with
Back in the House, Peter Lilley was doing his best, arguing that the two-year limit set down in article 50 "is an arbitrary maximum, not a necessary minimum". Most countries that have obtained independence or left a political union, he said – including India, Canada and Australia or the Czech Republic and Slovakia - have done so in far less than two years.
Lilley was to expand upon his stupidity in the obvious repository for such endeavour, the
According to Mr Lilley, joining the EC (back in 1972) was far more complex than leaving: and that barely took two years. And, since – in his view - every week that we delay Brexit costs the British taxpayer nearly £200 million in membership fees, both the Treasury and Health (which will have first call on extra spending) should be pushing for a speedy exit.
But, like so many with these nostrums which only marginally skirt insanity, Mr Lilly never lets us know how this should be achieved. But then,
Nevertheless, to the refrain of, "Is that it?", Davis has been able to add so little to the fount of human knowledge that even Lilley looked informative by contrast.
One suspects that there is a deeper agenda here. During the 1970-1972 entry negotiations, the view was taken by the British government that, given the open character of the Community and the fact that virtually all its developments and disputes became public knowledge with the minimum of delay, negotiations would have the same character.
It was anticipated that it would be difficult to conceal the substance of discussions, and t was assumed that everything of importance would inevitably become public knowledge and be spread over the media by opportunistic hacks.
However, the greater problem turned out to be exactly the opposite. Towards the end of the negotiations, journalists in Brussels had become so thoroughly bored with the multiplicity of highly technical subjects still under discussion that they were ready to be content with fairly superficial information.
There was little difficulty in concealing information from journalists. Instead, the problem was in getting them interested and motivated enough for them to report was happening. The issue died of boredom. A few more of these "lack-of-progress" reports and we could end up repeating history. Assuming the responsibility of running the Brexit department certainly seems to have brought David Davis a little closer to reality than some of his former backbench colleagues.From the despatch box yesterday, in what was described as his first lack-of-progress report, Davis at least managed to remind us that we have been in the European Union for 40-odd years, the links are very complicated and the effects on much of our society are quite complex.We will not delay one day more than is necessary to do the job that we have to do, he said, but it is a complicated and extensive relationship that we have to untangle, and we will do so in good time.But then, in the "stupid stakes", he would be struggling to complete with Bernard Jenkin, who announced to his incredulous Twitter audience that: "Some people don't seem to understand is: the single market IS the EU. You cannot be in the SM and not be in the EU". It is a pity no-one told the Norwegians Back in the House, Peter Lilley was doing his best, arguing that the two-year limit set down in article 50 "is an arbitrary maximum, not a necessary minimum". Most countries that have obtained independence or left a political union, he said – including India, Canada and Australia or the Czech Republic and Slovakia - have done so in far less than two years.Lilley was to expand upon his stupidity in the obvious repository for such endeavour, the Telegraph, where he argued that: "We should seize the benefits of Brexit sooner rather than later".According to Mr Lilley, joining the EC (back in 1972) was far more complex than leaving: and that barely took two years. And, since – in his view - every week that we delay Brexit costs the British taxpayer nearly £200 million in membership fees, both the Treasury and Health (which will have first call on extra spending) should be pushing for a speedy exit.But, like so many with these nostrums which only marginally skirt insanity, Mr Lilly never lets us know how this should be achieved. But then, as we have seen, Mr Lilley has only a tenuous grasp of the issues, and prefers his opinions to mere facts.Nevertheless, to the refrain of, "Is that it?", Davis has been able to add so little to the fount of human knowledge that even Lilley looked informative by contrast.One suspects that there is a deeper agenda here. During the 1970-1972 entry negotiations, the view was taken by the British government that, given the open character of the Community and the fact that virtually all its developments and disputes became public knowledge with the minimum of delay, negotiations would have the same character.It was anticipated that it would be difficult to conceal the substance of discussions, and t was assumed that everything of importance would inevitably become public knowledge and be spread over the media by opportunistic hacks.However, the greater problem turned out to be exactly the opposite. Towards the end of the negotiations, journalists in Brussels had become so thoroughly bored with the multiplicity of highly technical subjects still under discussion that they were ready to be content with fairly superficial information.There was little difficulty in concealing information from journalists. Instead, the problem was in getting them interested and motivated enough for them to report was happening. The issue died of boredom. A few more of these "lack-of-progress" reports and we could end up repeating history.Gov. Brown appeared on NBC s Meet the Press Sunday morning to talk about California s drought and his decision to run for re-election, but it s what he said about the possibility of California legalizing marijuana that has everyone talking. NBC Bay Area s Monte Francis reports from San Francisco. (Published Monday, March 3, 2014)
California Gov. Jerry Brown, who just announced he's running for a fourth term, said on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday that he is not sure that legalizing pot in his state is a good idea because it could affect the state and country negatively.
Gov. Jerry Brown Announces Plans to Seek Re-Election
When "Meet the Press" host David Gregory asked Brown whether it was time to legalize recreational marijuana in America's biggest state, Brown said that he would like Washington and Colorado -- the two states that have legalized recreational marijuana -- to "show us how it's going to work."
"The problem with anything -- a certain amount is OK, but there is a tendency to go to extremes," Brown said. "And all of a sudden if there's advertising and legitimacy, how many people can get stoned and still have a great state or a great nation? The world's pretty dangerous, very competitive. I think we need to stay alert, if not 24 hours a day, more than some of the potheads might be able to put together."
Gov. Jerry Brown Unsure Legalizing Pot is Good Idea
California Gov. Jerry Brown, who just announced that he is running for a fourth term, said on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday that he is not sure that legalizing pot in his state is a good idea because it could affect the state and country negatively. (Published Sunday, March 2, 2014)
"As a TV guy I know I have a good sound bite when I hear one," Gregory responded, laughing.
Brown said that California has medical marijuana, "which gets very close to what they have in Colorado and Washington."
California legalized medical marijuana use in 1996.
But pot advocates are confident recreational use will eventually be legal here, regardless of what the governor says.
"I think he’s being the political animal he is… trying to slow things down… even though the ball is already rolling," Scott McGlashan of San Francisco said.
Opponents argue that pot is a gateway drug to other more-dangerous street drugs. But pot advocates say that is not true and point out that marijuana is less dangerous and destructive than alcohol
There are voter initiatives in the works in three other states aimed at legalizing the recreational use of pot, but for now, California is not one of them.
A December 2013 Field Poll shows that 55 percent of California's favor marijuana legalization, compared to a 1969 Field Poll, when 75 percent of Californians wanted either strict enforcement of marijuana laws against its use or passing even tougher laws, while only 13 percent favored its legalization.House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) publicly reminded House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) Tuesday that his goal of cutting domestic spending below sequestration levels will soon run headlong into the brick wall of the GOP’s own vote-counting problem.
Citing conversations he has had with House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-KY), Hoyer said he doubts the Republican votes are there for the spending cuts Boehner is proposing.
“Hal Rogers thought it was pretty difficult to mark at [pre-sequestration spending levels], as you know,” Hoyer told reporters at his weekly Capitol briefing. “I think if you ask Mr. Rogers he would say it would be very, very difficult to responsibly mark at the numbers of which Mr. Boehner speaks. So we’ll have to see whether they do that, but if they bring those appropriation bills to the floor, they’re going to be very difficult bills for them.”
Translation: Without Democratic help, this GOP leadership can’t budget, can’t fund the government, can’t really pass any of the handful of must-pass legislation that comes to the floor each year.By way of further explanation, the Ryan budget resolution isn’t a bill that can become law, but rather a blueprint, establishing overall spending levels for specific segments of the federal goverment. The hard work of approproating those monies to specific departments, agencies and projects comes later. That’s when abstraction becomes reality and lawmakers struggle to fund their preferred programs — and ones favored by voters — within the constraints Ryan imposes. Republicans hope to pass the Ryan budget in the House this week.
That reality, Hoyer suggested, means the GOP should temper the its enthusiasm for the sort of partisan policymaking included in their entire budget.
“In my view if you took all the Democrats out of the House and all the Democrats out of the Senate and the Ryan budget passed and then they tried to implement it through the 12 appropriations bills and the Ways and Means Committee … they could not get the votes on the House floor or the Senate floor to pass it,” Hoyer said. “And the reason for that is because the draconian actions they would have to take, and the adverse impact it would have on working Americans, middle class Americans, and their country, would be such that they would ultimately have to vote against their own policies made real.”How old is Sylvester Stallone?!
Sylvester Stallone was born on July 6, 1946, in New York’s gritty Hell’s Kitchen, to Jackie Stallone, an astrologer, and Frank Stallone, a beautician and hairdresser.
Sylvester Stallone always manages to say the right things to get people motivated and get back into work. He always have the right words to touch people.
Inspire Yourself With These Motivational Words. Sylvester Stallone Quotes.
At my age exercise becomes a competition with yourself…
Arlette Martens: ” You are an inspiration, we are the same age and it’s far easier to just sit back and let the world pass you by. Having not only a healthy diet and exercise you also need a healthy mind. That is the first and most important part of our bodies that needs to be addressed as it controls everything in our body and soul. Age is only a number….frame of mind, thoughts are what keep us going and keep us wanting to be healthy and strong.”
Ramiro Carranza: “I know how you feel and I haven’t gave up yet no matter how old I am I’m still going to workout hard every day”
Doug Lacy “At 51 just ran my 4th half marathon…Also have run 4 marathons all in the last 4 years…used to weigh 360+lost 170 pounds few years back. Our bodies temple to holy spirit…”
Dennis Burke: “I just joined the gym again… I decided to change myself. I had found my spirit which I once lost and have a passion deep down inside and I am dedicated to being in the best shape I can be in.”
Read Quotes On Moving On – you can discover for yourself how to deal with change, so that you can enjoy less stress and more success in your work and in your life.
Ines Sanderson: “Age, time, work are all excuses. It’s up to you to decide what matters in your life. There’s no price tag on my health. I take pride in doing the same training programs, or close, I did 30 years ago.”
Krunal Pardeshi: “There is one thing which Rocky has taught me is to have patience and faith in what you are doing…Take one step at a time and give total justice to that one step in terms of hard work and passion..eventually will make you stronger, more compassionate and build your will power in the long run.
Whenever I challenge myself to a difficult task the same inspirational Rocky music echoes in my ears and my mind automatically turns positive to work harder, builds confidence in me…”
Life is an Opponent that never stops Punching, so you better never stop Punching back!
Paul Balfour: “There is and only will be one life. One fight in our lives, knowing to get out of that state of mind and moving yourself forward and upwards and moving on with confidence and belief. Those who hold back will wonder, those who seek will find, and will surround themselves with all happiness. ”
How old is Sylvester Stallone?
Sylvia Medina: “This is food for my soul. I’ve been dealing with the loss of very special people in my life, so this hits home. Giving up isn’t an option. Thank you for your words of encouragement! ”
Deepak Parwana: “Age is just number. Challenge yourself and try to win. That’s the hardest fight which one fights with oneself. And after winning that fight you become ageless and timeless.
As you have become, Mr. Sylvester.”
Keep punching.
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How old is Sylvester Stallone? Stallone yearsLooking for news you can trust?
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First the good news. Storks, pelicans, ibises, and other rare waterbirds from Cambodia’s famed Tonle Sap region are making a comeback. Some of the waterbird species have rebounded 20-fold since 2001. That’s when the Wildlife Conservation Society partnered with the Ministry of Environment of the Royal Government of Cambodia to employ former hunters and egg poachers as round-the-clock park rangers to monitor the birds. The upshot is that the colonies of Tonle Sap (Great Lake), including the largest, and in some cases, only breeding populations of seven globally threatened large waterbird species in Southeast Asia, have increased from a total of 2,500 breeding pairs in 2001 to 10,000 pairs in 2007.
Now the bad news. An alarming new study reveals that Australia’s shorebirds have suffered a massive collapse in numbers over the past 25 years. A large scale aerial survey study covering the eastern third of the continent by researchers at the University of New South Wales has identified that migratory shorebirds populations there plunged by 73% between 1983 and 2006. In the same timeframe, Australia’s 15 species of resident shorebirds have declined by 81%. The study is published in the scientific journal |
Alpine A310 V6 by E.T.A.I France - page 129Alpine A610 by E.T.A.I France - page 129AlvisAlvis 20 1933 Rolling Chassis by Pratt - page 109AmilcarAmilcar C6 1926 by Jeremy Gower - page 117AmphicarAmphicar by Rosso(?) - page 86AMCAMC AMX by unknown artist - page 97ArmstrongArmstrong Siddeley 1932 interior by John Ferguson - page 102 (Not a cutaway)ArrowsArrows FA1 by Giorgio Piola - page 95Aston MartinAston Martin DBR1 by Tony Matthews - page 04-21Aston Martin DBR1 by TD Collins - page 22Aston Martin DB3S by Theo Page - page 68Aston Martin DB3S by Tony Matthews - page 69-75Aston Martin DB6 by Inkwell - page 87Aston Martin DBR1-300 by Clarence LaTourette - page 88Aston Martin DB2/2-4 by James A. Allington - page 92Aston Martin DB3S by Bruno Betti - page 94Aston Martin V8 engine by Brian Hatton - page 96Aston Martin DBR1 by James A. Allington - page 100Aston Martin DB4 Zagato by Ian Cleaver - page 100Aston Martin Vantage by Martin Donavan - page 118AtillaAtilla Ford 1963 by Gordon Bruce - page 38-81ATSATS F1 1963 by Giovanni Cavara - page 47ATS F1 1963 by unknown artist - page 48-102 (?) Vic Berris - Bruno Betti (?)ATS F1 1963 by Clarence LaTourette - page 88ATS 2500 GT 1963 by Giovanni Cavara - page 125AuburnAuburn Speedster by Tony Matthews - page 93AudiAudi F1 Concept by Michael Stirm - page 31Audi Quattro Rallye by Jim Bamber - page 44Audi Quattro Rallye by Bruno Betti - page 61Audi Sport Quattro Rallye 1984 by Bruno Betti(?) - page 95Audi Sport Quattro S1 Rallye 1985 by Technical Art(?) - page 95Audi R10 TDI by Pan-Nullo - page 98Audi Quattro by Giorgio Alisi - page 113Audi Quattro by unknown artist (Audi AG) - page 117Audi V8 1982 by Technical Art - page 132Audi A4 1994 engine by unknown artist - page 133AustinAustin Sedan 1951 A/Gas Supercharged "Herrera & Sons" 1967 by Tom West - page 73Austin Cambridge 1954 by S.E. Porter - page 102-104Austin Light Six 1931 by Max Millar - page 102-104Austin A99 Westminster 1959 by R.E. Poulton - page 109Austin Healey 3000 MkIII by Keith Harmer - page 119Austin Seven 1925 by Roy Haynes - page 119Austin Allegro by Terry Davey - page 121Austin Seven 747cc 1926 by unknown artist - page 135Austin Healey 100 1952 prototype rolling chassis by John Ferguson - page 139Austin Healey 100 Bare chassis by John Ferguson - page 139Austin Healey 100 Engine by John Ferguson - page 139Austin Healey 1957 100-Six 117bhp 12-port engine by John Ferguson - page 139 (Not a cutaway)Austin Healey 100-Six, 117bhp, 12-port head 1958 with SU H6 Carburettors fitted by John Ferguson - page 139Austin Healey 3000 Body construction by John Ferguson - page 139 (Not a cutaway)Austin Healey 3000 engine 1959 by John Ferguson - page 139Austin Healey 3000 MKIII BMC 2.9 Litre engine by John Ferguson - page 139 (Not a cutaway)Auto Avio ConstruzioneAuto Avio Construzione AAC 815 by Giovanni Cavara - page 80Auto Avio Construzione AAC 815 by Giulio Betti - page 128-134AutobianchiAutobianchi 112 by Bruno Betti - page 128Auto UnionAuto Union Type C 1936-1937 by Terry Collins - page 38Auto Union P Wagen by unknown artist - page 44Auto Union 1934 by Klaus Unbekannt - page 52-67Auto Union Type C 1936 by Yoshihiro Inomoto - page 67Auto Union 1938 by S.E. Porter - page 102Auto Union Type C 1936-1937 by Bruno Betti - page 103Auto Union Type C 1937 by J. Walkden Fisher - page 103-104Auto Union Type C 1937 by G. Gedo - page 107AvalloneAvallone Ford 1973 by Walter Brito - page 44BabsBabs V12 1927 by Vic Berris - page 59-127BakerBaker Torpedo 1902 by Brian Hatton - page 115 - "Prophet without Honour" Nr 16 article by Cyril PosthumusBallotBallot 3 litre engine by unknown artist - page 135 (not a cutaway)BeatriceBeatrice THL2 Ford by Tony Matthews - page 35BenettonBenetton B194 by Terry Collins - page 23Benetton B187 by Terry Collins - page 55Benetton B188 by Terry Collins - page 55Benetton B192 by Terry Collins - page 56Benetton B193B by Bruno Betti - page 56Benetton B193B by Terry Collins - page 56Benetton B194 by Terry Collins - page 56Benetton B190 by Terry Collins - page 56BentleyBentley 4.5L Blower 1930 by Tony Matthews - page 41Bentley 4.5L Blower 1930 by Bruno Betti - page 103BluebirdBluebird Proteus CN7 by unknown artist - page 127Bluebird Railton Rolls-Royce 1935 (Sir Malcom Campbell's Record Car) by unknown artist - page 129Bluebird Railton Rolls-Royce 1935 by unknown artist - page 132 (with annotations)Bluebird Napier Railton 1931 by unknown artist - page 132 (with annotations)Bluebird Proteus CN7 by Lawrence Watts - page 133BMS DallaraBMS Dallara 1989 by Sergio Baratto - page 85BMWBMW 320i by Technical Art - page 35BMW 320i Imsa by Bruno Betti - page 36BMW 3000 CSL by Bruno Betti - page 36BMW M1 Procar by Technical Art - page 36BMW M12 4 cylinder 1500 Turbo engine by Niedermeier - page 36BMW 600 by unknown artist - page 36BMW 3500 CSL by Bruno Betti - page 36BMW 507 by Serge Bellu - page 51-128BMW M3 by Bruno Betti - page 66BMW 3200 Engine section by unknown artist - page 96BMW 3200 by unknown artist - page 96BMW 600 1956 by Schlenzig - page 105BMW Alpina by unknown artist - page 117BMW 635 by Niedermeier - page 130BMW Z -axle by unknown artist - page 131BMW 740iL 1992 by Technical Art (?) - page 131BMW 750iL by Technical Art - page 131BMW 750iL by Technical Art - page 131BMW V8 1950 and 1990 engines by unknown artist - page 131BMW Isetta 250 Bubblecar engine by Schlenzig - page 133BMW 502 Saloon 1954 V8 engine by Max Millar - page 133BMW 318is Coupe by BMW Grafik Design - page 133BMW 318 engine by BMW Grafik Design - page 133BondBond Bug by Lawrence Watts - page 125 (colour version)Bond Bug by Lawrence Watts - page 138 (B&W version)BorgeaultBorgeault Formula Jr by Gordon Bruce - page 74-81BorgwardBorgward RS by Clarence LaTourette - page 87Borgward P100 by unknown artist - page 97BrabhamBrabham BT34 by unknown artist - page 25Brabham BT34 by Giorgio Piola - page 25Brabham BT34 by Dick Ellis - page 25Brabham BT34 by Tony Matthews - page 27Brabham BT11 1965 by James A. Allington - page 28Brabham BT49C by Giorgio Piola - page 36Brabham BT52 BMW Turbo by Sergio Baratto - page 38Brabham BT45 Alfa Romeo by Technical Art - page 38Brabham BT34 drawings (not a cutaway) by Werner Buhrer - page 52Brabham BT33 by Bill Bennett "Anglia Art" - page 52Brabham BT54 by Giorgio Piola - page 67Brabham 1963 by James A. Allington - page 75Brabham Climax F1 1963 by Gordon Bruce - page 81Brabham BT19 by Theo Page - page 83(only link)Brabham BT3 1965 by James A. Allington - page 101Brabham BT19 by Serge Bellu - page 104Brabham BT7 1963 by Giulio Betti - page 121Brabham BT11 1964 by Dick Ellis - page 121Brabham BT49C by Bruno Betti - page 123Brabham BT50 by Bruno Betti - page 123Brabham BT52 by Bruno Betti - page 124Brabham BT46 by Bruno Betti - page 124BristolBristol 405 1956 by Ron Haynes - page 122BRMBRM V16 by Tony Matthews - page 09BRM P261 by Bill Bennett - page 21BRM P160 by Tony Matthews - page 27BRM P261 by James A. Allington - page 28-101BRM 1962 (rear view) by Gordon Bruce - page 28BRM P133 by unknown artist - page 47 - (?) Vittorio Dal Basso (?)BRM H16 engine by Vic Berris - page 48BRM V16 engine by Vic Berris - page 49-137BRM V16 engine by Cresswell - page 49BRM V16 by Theo Page - page 49BRM P180 drawings (not a cutaway) by Werner Buhrer - page 52BRM V16 by Max Millar - page 53BRM P57 1962 by Serge Bellu - page 56BRM 4WD by Brian Hatton - page 64BRM P261 by Theo Page - page 65BRM P261 by Bruno Betti - page 65BRM 1962 "Stackpipe" (front view) by Gordon Bruce - page 68-78-81BRM V8 1963 by James A. Allington - page 75BRM 2.5 Litre 4 cylinder engine with transaxle by James A. Allington - page 77BRM H16 by Dick Ellis - page 78BRM H16 by Vittorio Dal Basso (?) - page 78BRM P160 by Brian Hatton - page 88(only link)BRM P51 by James A. Allington - page 100BRM H16 by Theo Page - page 101-104BRM P61 by John Marsden - page 123BRM P578 by unknown artist - page 123BRM 4WD F1 by James A. Allington - page 129BRM V16 engine cross section by unknown artist - page 134 (not a cutaway)BRPBRP BRM F1 1963 by Gordon Bruce - page 81BRP BRM F1 1963 by John Fisher - page 125Brooke-WestonBrooke-Weston V8 by Theo Page - page 49BugattiBugatti Royale by James A. Allington - page 18Bugatti Type 59 by Tony Matthews - page 42Bugatti Type 35 by James A. Allington - page 94Bugatti Royale 1930 by Antonio Eiras - page 97Bugatti Type 35 by Antonio Eiras - page 98Bugatti 251 by Robert Roux - page 109Bugatti EB110 1991 by unknown artist - page 114Bugatti Royale Type 41 1930 by Inkwell Studios - page 122Bugatti Type 37 by Yoshihiro Inomoto - page 130Bugatti Type 53 1932 by Yoshihiro Inomoto - page 131Bugatti-King U-16 engine cross section by unknown artist - page 131 (Not a cutaway)BuickBuick V8 aluminium engine 1960 by Clarence LaTourette - page 101CadillacCadillac LMP side view by Stephen Miller - page 14Cadillac Fleetwood 1965 by Bruno Betti - page 111Cadillac Series 452 V16 1930 by Roger Farrington - page 122Cadillac V16 engine 135-degree vee angle 1938 by unknown artist - page 137 (cross section - Not a cutaway)CaterhamCaterham Super 7 Classic 1994 by Jiro Yamada - page 120CDCD Panhard Le Mans 1964 by G. Gedo - page 50CD Panhard by unknown artist - page 107CD DKW 1963 by by Robert Roux - page 109ChaparralChaparral 2F by James A. Allington - page 27-59-76Chaparral 2E by David Kimble - page 66Chaparral 2D by Vic Berris - page 70Chaparral 2F by Antonio Eiras - page 95Chaparral 1 by unknown artist - page 96-102Chaparral 2H by Brian Hatton - page 102Chaparral 2J by Brian Hatton - page 102Chaparral 2C by Brian Hatton(?) - page 102Chaparral 2J by unknown artist - page 137CheetahCheetah Chevrolet cutaway by Clarence LaTourette - page 124ChevallierChevallier Bol d'Or Speciale by Brian Hatton - page 115 - "The non-Conformists" NR 11 article by Cyril PosthumusChevroletChevrolet V8 c/w Weber sidedraft carbs by Bill Bennett - page 21Chevrolet Corvette C6 ZR1 by David Kimble - page 66Chevrolet Corvette C6R by David Kimble - page 69Chevrolet Corvette C6 Coupe by David Kimble - page 69Chevrolet Corvette C6 Convertible by David Kimble - page 69Chevrolet Corvette C6 Z06 by David Kimble - page 69Chevrolet Camaro 1968 Funny Car "Vicious Too" by Tom West - page 74Chevrolet Nova 1968 Funny Car "Super Nova II" by Tom West - page 75Chevrolet Corvette 1967 Funny Car "Fiberglass Trends" by Tom West - page 77Chevrolet 3500 V8 IRL 2002 engine by David Kimble - page 81Chevrolet Opala SS 1972 by unknown artist - page 83Chevrolet Corvette 1958 by unknown artist - page 84Chevrolet Chevy II 1969 Funny Car "Jungle Jim" by Tom West - page 86Chevrolet Corvette 1963 by Clarence LaTourette - page 92Chevrolet Corvette 1969 Funny Car "Too Bad" by Tom West - page 101Chevrolet Corvette 1958 by Tony Bryan - page 109Chevrolet Chevette 1973 by Walter Brito - page 110Chevrolet Camaro 2010 by David Kimble - page 116Chevrolet Corvette 1984 by Bruno Betti - page 116Chevrolet Corvette SS 1957 by Robert Roux - page 131Chevrolet Corvette GTP by Vic Berris - page 132Chevrolet Corvette Aerovette by unknown artist - page 137 (longitudinal section - Not a cutaway)ChevronChevron B19 by Betti - Giulio(?) or Bruno(?) - page 71-93ChryslerChrysler AA/Fuel Dragster 1965 "Yeakel Plymouth Special" by Tom West - page 73Chrysler Bantam AA/Fuel Altered 1970 "Rat Trap" by Tom West - page 111CisitaliaCisitalia 360 by Harold Bubb - page 101CitroënCitroën C23 by James A. Allington - page 18Citroën SM by Giulio Betti - page 81Citroën XM by E.T.A.I. - page 81Citroën Mehari chassis (not a cutaway) by unknown artist - page 96-113Citroën DS by Unknon artist - page 107Citroën Mehari by Giulio Betti - page 113Citroën Mehari subframe and body by Giulio Betti(?) - page 113Citroën DS by Nivelet - page 120Citroen 2 CV by unknown artist - page 122 (Document Relations Publiques Citroen, Design by Sempé)Citroën ZX Raid by unknown artist - page 128Citroën SM engine by Bruno Betti - page 133Citroën LN by unknown artist - page 136 (link only)CooperCooper Monaco by James A. Allington - page 18Cooper T77 1965 by James A. Allington - page 28Cooper T51 Climax by Tony Matthews - page 38Cooper Maserati 1966 by Theo Page - page 50Cooper Coventry Climax 1964 (rear view) by Theo Page - page 50Cooper Coventry Climax 1964 (front view) by Theo Page - page 50Cooper Climax 1959 by unknown artist - page 52Cooper 500cc racer by Theo Page - page 58Cooper T51 1959 by Serge Bellu - page 62Cooper T51 1959 by unknown artist - page 62 (?) Vic Berris (?)Cooper Maserati 1966 by Dick Ellis - page 66Cooper Monaco by J. Walkden Fisher - page 74Cooper Climax F1 1963 by Vic Berris - page 81-123Cooper Monaco by James A. Allington - page 87Cooper Climax roadster by Clarence LaTourette - page 88Cooper Maserati by Robert Roux - page 99Cooper T68 1965 by James A. Allington - page 101Cooper 500 1947 by Max Millar - page 102Cooper Mk2 T56 1961 by Brian Hatton - page 105Cooper Mk3 T59 1962 by Willin - page 106Cooper Mk1 T52 FJ 1960 by Brian Hatton - page 106Cooper Mk3A T67 FJ 1963 by Theo Page - page 106Cooper Mk5 by Vic Berris- page 106Cooper Mk9 by Max Millar - page 106Cooper Mk8 by Theo Page - page 106Cooper Mk2 FJ by unknown artist - page 106Cooper Formula 1 1960 by Bruno Betti - page 112Cooper Climax by Brian Hatton - page 112Cooper T53 by Vic Berris - page 113Cooper Monaco vy Dick Ellis - page 114CordCord 810 Beverly Sedan 1936 by Inkwell Studios - page 122CornelianCornelian 1915 Indy 500 by Brian Hatton - page 115 - "Prophet without Honour" Nr 12 article by Cyril PosthumusCostin-NathanCostin-Nathan by John Way - page 115CosworthCosworth Vega engine by Tony Matthews - page 07-52Cosworth GAA 3.4 litre V6 by Tony Matthews - page 38Cosworth GAA 3.4 litre V6 by Terry Collins - page 39Cosworth DFY engine by Diana Stevens - page 42Cosworth DFX engine by Tony Mattews - page 49Cosworth 4WD by Brian Hatton - page 64Cosworth 4WD by John Hostler - page 64Cosworth 4WD by Klaus Unbekannt - page 64Cosworth DFY engine by Keith Harmer - page 70Cosworth DFV engine by Theo Page - page 70Cosworth DFV engine by Bruno Betti - page 70Cosworth DFV engine by Vic Berris - page 70Cosworth FVA engine by Theo Page - page 123Cosworth BDA engine by Terry Collins - page 123CourageCourage C36 Porsche by Jean-Jacques François - page 85Coventry ClimaxCoventry Climax Flat 16 engine by Vic Berris - page 48Coventry Climax Flat 16 engine by James A. Allington - page 49Coventry Climax FWMV engine by James A. Allington - page 49Coventry Climax Flat 16 engine by S. Porter - page 49Coventry Climax FWMV engine by Vic Berris - page 49Coventry Climax FPF four-cylinder Twin-cam engine by James A.Allington - page 49Coventry Climax FPF by Vic Berris - page 123CrossleyCrossley-Burney 15.7 hp 6 cyl 2 liter 1934 by unknown artist - page 124DAFDAF 44 Variomatic 1969 bu unknown artist - page 131DAF 600 1958 by Charles Burns - page 131DatsunDatsun Violet by Tony Matthews - page 58Datsun 200L by unknown artist (Datsun Factory) - page 115Datsun 180B 1980 by unknown artist (Datsun Factory) - page 115DallaraDallara 392 Opel Spiess by Sante Lusuardi - page 116-129Dallara 392 Mugen by Sante Lusuardi - page 116-129DBDB 750 Sport by Robert Roux - page 99De Dion BoultonDe Dion Bouton 8HP Model R by unknown artist (Brian Hatton? - Quadrant Picture Library) - page 122De TomasoDe Tomaso Pantera by Anders Bonde - page 08-09De Tomaso F1 1962 by Giovanni Cavara - page 47De Tomaso Pantera by Alloisi Milanesi - page 101-104De Tomaso Pantera by Alloisi - page 101 (colour)De Tomaso Deauville by Franco Rosso - page 102De Tomaso Pantera GTS 1985 by Paul Shakespeare - page 120DKWDKW-Vemag Carcará 1966 by unknown artist - page 126DelageDelage La Torpille Grand Prix 1924 by unknown artist (Cavara?) - page 128DelahayeDelahaye 135 1936 by Danny Mercer - page 122DeltaDelta T83 FF2000 by anders Bonde - page 45DevinDevin Deusche by Bob Tatcher - page 115Devin Super Shillelagh by Clarence LaTourette - page 115DodgeDodge Viper SRT10 by David Kimble - page 69Dodge Charger Funny Car 1969 "Chi-Town Hustler" by Tom West - page 73Dodge Charger Funny Car 1968 "Rambunctious" by Tom West - page 77Dodge Dart Funny Car 1968 "Saddleback Dodge" by Tom West - page 77Dodge Charger Funny Car 1968 "Super Chief" by Tom West - page 81Dodge Charger Funny Car 1968 "Color Me Gone" by Tom West - page 81Dodge Charger Funny Car 1969 "Hawaiian" by Tom West - page 86Dodge Charger Funny Car 1970 "Rambunctious" by Tom West - page 92Dodge Challenger Funny Car 1969 "Challenger 1" by Tom West - page 92Dodge Charger Funny Car 1971 "Custom Body Mini Carger" by Tom West - page 123Dodge Challenger Funny Car 1970 "Rambunctious" by Tom West - page 123DolphinDolphin Formula Jr by Clarence LaTourette - page 78/92Dolphin Porsche by unknown artist - page 78Dolphin Porsche by Gordon Bruce - page 106Dolphin Formula Jr by Gordon Bruce - page 126DragadaDragada FJr by Emily - Page 27-33-83-90DragsterTwin-Buick AA/G Dragster 1962 "TV Tommy Ivo" by Tom West - page 73Kent Fuller-built AA/FD "Magicar" by Tom West - page 73AA/Fuel Dragster 1999 "Tom Hanna" by Tom West - pageFord T 1923 AA/Fuel Altered 1969 "Groundshaker Jr." - page 92AA/Fuel Dragster 1970 "Smothers Brothers Beach Boys SApecial" by Tom West - page 101DuesenbergDuesenberg Model J 1928 by Inkwell Studios - page 119EagleEagle AAR 103 oil tank by unknown artist - page 34Eagle AAR 103 chassis by Brian Hatton - page 34Eagle Coventry Climax by Theo Page - page 34-47Eagle AAR 103 by Bill Bennett - page 34-35Eagle AAR 103 by Roy Huxley - page 51Eagle 1972 drawings (not a cutaway) by Werner Buhrer - page 53Eagle TG2 by Clarence LaTourette - page 62Eagle Formula A 1969 drawings (not a cutaway) by Werner Buhrer - page 62ElvaElva MkVIII chassis by ra Epton - page 54Elva Formula Junior by James A. Allington - page 84Elva Mk4 by Cresswell - page 101EmerysonEmeryson F1 by unknown artist - page 128Epsilon- EuskadiEpsilon- Euskadi Gt-1 by unknown artist - page 136 (Cad wireframe drawing)EstoniaEstonia 18 by unknown artist - page 97GalmerGalmer KN1 by Tony Matthews - page 16GAZGAZ 69 AM by Giulio Betti - page 66GilbernGilbern Genie or Invader or GT by John Ferguson - page 83GMGM Firebird III Concept Car by Clarence LaTourette - page 83GM Precept 2000 Concept hibrid by David Kimble - page 123Green MonsterGreen Monster by unknown artist - page 132GurgelGurgel Xavante XTC 1974 by Walter Brito - page 107FacelFacel Vega Excellence by Robert Roux - page 109FergusonFerguson P99 by James A. Allington - page 60-64Ferguson P99 by John Ferguson - page 84FerrariFerrari 512 S by Bruno Betti - page 01-64Ferrari 312 T by Kurt O. - page 02Ferrari 330 P3 by Jean-Jacques François - page 02Ferrari 330 P4 side view by Mark Fenijn - page 02Ferrari 330 P4 by René Bellu - page 02 (colour version at page 104)Ferrari 250 TR59 by Tony Matthews - page 04Ferrari 250 Testarossa 1957 by Tony Matthews - page 04-09-30Ferrari F300 by Tony Matthews - page 04Ferrari Dino 246 by Tony Matthews - page 05-14Ferrari 049 engine by Tony Matthews - page 06-12Ferrari 312 PB by Tony Matthews - page 10Ferrari 365 BB by Jeremy Banks - page 13Ferrari F2000 by Tony Matthews - page 20Ferrari F2000 gearbox by Tony Matthews - page 20-43Ferrari 156 Shark Nose by Giulio Betti - page 26Ferrari F2 1960 by James A. Allington - page 26Ferrari Dino 246 F1 1958 by John Marsden - page 26-115Ferrari 330 P4 by James A. Allington - page 27-59Ferrari 156 Shark Nose by James A. Allington - page 27Ferrari 158 by James A. Allington - page 28Ferrari V12 engine by Brian Kinkaid - page 28Ferrari 156 Shark Nose by Serge Bellu - page 31Ferrari F300 by Tony Matthews - page 32 (Working drawing - front end - pedals)Ferrari F300 by Tony Matthews - page 32 (front end detail)Ferrari 126 C by Giorgio Piola - page 36Ferrari 156 Shark Nose by Giovanni Cavara - page 37Ferrari 156 Shark Nose by Gordon Bruce - page 37-81Ferrari 156 Shark Nose by Paolo D'Alessio - page 37-52Ferrari 156 Shark Nose by unknown artist - page 39Ferrari 312 Boxer F1 engine by Giulio Betti - page 40Ferrari 125 1948 by Giulio Betti - page 51Ferrari 500 F2 1952 by Bruno Betti - page 51Ferrari 641/2 1990 by Bruno Betti - page 51Ferrari 312 F1 1969-1973 drawings (not a cutaway) by Werner Buhrer - page 52Ferrari 312 B2 drawings (not a cutaway) by Werner Buhrer - page 52Ferrari Dino 246 1958 by Franco Rosso - page 52Ferrari Dino 246 F1 1958 by Giovanni Cavara - page 52Ferrari Dino 246 F1 1958 by Paolo D'Alessio - page 52Ferrari 500 1953 by Giovanni Cavara - page 52Ferrari 125 1950 by Paolo D'Alessio - page 52-127Ferrari 312 1966 by Paolo D'Allessio - page 52-61Ferrari 312 B 1970 by Bruno Betti - page 52Ferrari 312 1968 by Bruno Betti - page 52Ferrari 641-2 1990 by unknown artist - page 52 (plus plan and side views)Ferrari 158 F1 1964 by Bruno Betti - page 53Ferrari 500 Superfast by Bruno Betti - page 53Ferrari 512 S Longitudinal Section by Bruno Betti - page 55 (not a cutaway)Ferrari 312 T2 by Sergio Baratto - page 56Ferrari 500 F2 by Betti (Bruno or Giulio?) - page 56Ferrari 312 T2 by Marco Siotto - page 56Ferrari 555 Super Squalo by Bob Thatcher - page 57Ferrari F189 by unknown artist - page 57 (?) Hideo Mizokawa (?)Ferrari 158 F1 1964 by Vic Berris - page 57Ferrari 312 T4 by Serge Bellu - page 60Ferrari 250 GTO (right side) by Tony Matthews - page 60Ferrari 312 1966 by Vic Berris - page 61Ferrari 312 1966 by Bruno Betti - page 61Ferrari 046 engine by Bruno Betti - page 62Ferrari 049 engine by Bruno Betti - page 62Ferrari 312 T by Tony Matthews - page 63-82Ferrari 512 S by Vic Berris - page 64Ferrari 512 S engine by Vic Berris - page 64Ferrari 512 S by unknown artist - page 64 (B&W)Ferrari 512 S by unknown artist - page 64 (colour)Ferrari 312 B by Brian Hatton - page 64Ferrari 512 F1 1965 by Bruno betti - page 64Ferrari 312 T2 by Vic Berris - page 64Ferrari Dino 246 by James A. Allington - page 64Ferrari 312 B3 1974 by Giorgio Piola - page 67Ferrari GTO 1984 by Bruno betti - page 68Ferrari Enzo by unknown artist - page 68Ferrari 312 P 1969 by Vittorio Dal Basso - page 68Ferrari 250 GTO (left side) by Tony Matthews - page 68Ferrari 250 GTO by Shin Yoshikawa - page 68Ferrari Berlinetta Boxer by Dick Ellis - page 72Ferrari BB engine by Vic Berris - page 72Ferrari BB gearbox by Vic Berris - page 72Ferrari 512 Testarossa by Matt Jennings - page 74Ferrari 375 1951 by unknown artist - page 74Ferrari F40 by unknown artist - page 74Ferrari 612 Can Am by unknown artist - page 74Ferrari 312 T4 by unknown artist (Tamiya Box Art) - page 74Ferrari V6 F1 1963 by James A. Allington - page 75Ferrari Gilera Formula Concept 1962 by Sergio Baratto - page 78Ferrari 312 B3 1974 by Terry Davey - page 82Ferrari 312 B3 1973 by Giorgio Piola - page 82Ferrari 312 B3 1974 by Paolo D'Alessio - page 82Ferrari 312 B3 1973 by Bruno Betti - page 82Ferrari 312 T2 1976 by Bruno Betti - page 82Ferrari 312 T3 1978 by Bruno Betti - page 82Ferrari 312 T2 1977 by Bruno Betti - page 83Ferrari 312 T4 1979 by Bruno Betti - page 83Ferrari 312 B3 1974 by Bruno Betti - page 83Ferrari 750 Monza by Clarence LaTourette - page 83Ferrari 500 Mondial by Giovanni Cavara - page 86Ferrari 250 Testarossa 1957 by Clarence LaTourette - page 92Ferrari 365 GTB4 by James A. Allington - page 92Ferrari 275 GTB by James A. Allington - page 94Ferrari 275 GTB by Bruno Betti - page 94Ferrari 125 S 1947 by Giovanni Cavara - page 96Ferrari 330 P4 by Antonio Eiras - page 97Ferrari F1/90 (641) by Sergio Baratto - page 97Ferrari F40 by Antonio Eiras - page 100Ferrari 330 P4 by René Bellu - page 104Ferrari 126 CK by Paolo D'Alessio - page 104Ferrari 126 C2 by Paolo D'Alessio - page 104Ferrari 625 TF Vignale Berlinetta s/n 0302 TF by Alfredo Zanellato - page 104Ferrari Dino 206 S by Giovanni Cavara - page 104Ferrari 312 PB by Demand - page 107Ferrari 250 GT by Gareth Owen - page 109Ferrari F399 by Joca7483 - page 115Ferrari 126 C3 by Bruno Betti - page 115Ferrari Testa Rossa 1959 by Tony Matthews - page 116 (Working drawing)Ferrari Dino 246 GT by Bruno Betti - page 116Ferrari Dino 246 GT engine by Giulio Betti - page 116Ferrari 512 S by Takeshi Hosokawa - page 119Ferrari 333 SP by Sante Lusuardi - page 125Ferrari F40 GTE by Sante Lusuardi - page 125Ferrari 625 by Paolo D'Alessio - page 127Ferrari F300 by Paolo D'Alessio - page 127Ferrari 312 B3 1973 Concept Drawing (Spazzaneve) by unknown artist - page 128Ferrari 312 B3 1974 by John Bishop - page 128Ferrari 375 Thinwall Special by Lawrence Watts - page 132Ferrari 126 C2 by Bruno Betti - page 132Ferrari 375 F1 1951 by Bruno Betti (?) - page 132Ferrari 333 SP by Bruno Betti - page 133Ferrari 4 cylinder 2 Litre 1952-1953 by Giovanni Cavara - page 133Ferrari F355 cutaway by Bruno Betti (?) - page 134Ferrari F300 'Fast Circuit' by Paolo D'Alessio - page 134Ferrari 625 F1 1954 by Giulio Betti - page 135 |
, Villa's intentions at the time were to retaliate against the United States for their aid to Carrancista forces at Agua Prieta and to destabilize the region enough to where President Venustiano Carranza could no longer control it. On November 21, two Buffalo Soldiers from Troop F, 10th Cavalry, were fired on while manning a border observation post near "Monument 117". The cavalrymen returned the fire and in the gunfight Private Willie Norman was wounded. On the next day, five "armed Mexicans" attacked a small camp of Troop F soldiers along the Santa Cruz River near Nogales, Arizona. The soldiers returned fire with revolvers and killed two of the raiders. On November 25, some "guerrillas" crossed the border and attacked a 10th Cavalry outpost that protected Mascarena's Ranch. Again the soldiers were from Troop F and they repulsed the raiders, one Mexican was wounded and captured. The situation was about to get much more serious though. On the next day, while evacuating Nogales, Sonora, Villista snipers began shooting at American soldiers of the 12th Infantry who were guarding the border in Nogales, Arizona. In response to the sniping, the American commander of the 12th Infantry, Colonel William H. Sage, ordered his men to form a skirmish line and prepare for battle.[3][4][5][6]
The line was formed at International Street, a dirt road and the border between Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora. Also, some American snipers took positions on the rooftops overlooking the border. When the order was given to open fire at about 10:00 am, Colonel Sage made sure that his men were only shooting at the hostile Mexicans and not at any of the noncombatants. Some American units crossed the border during the fighting but when General Alvaro Obregon and his army arrived at about 12:40, Colonel Sage ordered his men to cease fire and return to camp. Obregon continued the battle for some time while the Americans watched from the border line. However, later that day, some 10th Cavalry sentries were fired upon by Obregon's troops from atop a hill. For thirty minutes the Buffalo Soldiers engaged the Mexicans, killing two, but eventually another cease fire was ordered and the commanders from both sides exchanged apologies. Obregon's men said they had mistaken the American troopers for Villistas.[5][7]
Aftermath [ edit ]
Only one American soldier is known to have been killed, Private Stephen D. Little, 12th Infantry Regiment, and five others were wounded,[1] but other accounts say as many as three Americans died.[7] Francisco Rosales says that the Americans killed sixty Mexicans in total and wounded several more. In honor of Private Little, the War Department changed the name of Camp Nogales to Camp Stephen D. Little, a base that would harbor more that 10,000 men by 1916. The camp was located along what is now Western Avenue from Grand Avenue to Interstate 19. The next major incident between the Americans and Pancho Villa occurred on January 11, 1916. Villista forces stopped a train near San Ysabel, Chihuahua, removed seventeen American passengers by gunpoint and then shot them all. Only one man survived by faking death. He later crawled away from the site while the Villistas were busy "stripping and mutilating" the dead. The victims were mining engineers who worked for ASARCO, they had been invited to Mexico by President Carranza to reopen the Cusihuiriachic mines south of Chihuahua. Their bodies were later recovered by a "special train" and taken back to the United States. When the citizens of El Paso, Texas learned of the massacre, the city was placed under martial law to prevent angry Texans from crossing the border into Ciudad Juarez and attacking innocents. President Woodrow Wilson refused to intervene in Mexico on behalf of the massacre, however, on March 9, 1916, Pancho Villa attacked the town of Columbus, New Mexico, killing eighteen Americans and burning several buildings. After that President Wilson ordered General Pershing to launch the Mexican Expedition, an attempt to capture or kill Pancho Villa. [4][8][9][10]
See also [ edit ]We wanted to inject some life into the first Battlefield 4 Battlefest community mission and kick things off the right way. Starting at 9AM PDT on Tuesday, July 15 we’re challenging the community to collectively perform 15 million revives across all platforms before 2AM PDT on Monday, July 21. Successfully reach this goal and we’ll award all Battlefield 4 players with a free Gold Battlepack. What do you say, can you lend a hand?
Battlefest is a month filled with weekly rewards, contests and in-game content and is designed to celebrate you, the Battlefield community. You can learn more about the Battlefield 4 Battlefest here.
Track the community’s progress as you revive your comrades by logging into Battlelog and going to Multiplayer, then to Missions. You can also check it out here.
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Scientists have unravelled one of the secrets of a plant used in traditional Chinese medicine.
The Chinese skullcap - known as Huang-Qin - is traditionally used for fever, liver and lung problems.
Scientists have discovered that the plant uses a special pathway to make chemicals with potential cancer-fighting properties.
They say it is a step towards being able to scale up production to make new drugs.
Prof Cathie Martin, of the John Innes Centre in Norwich, is lead researcher of the study, published in Science Advances.
Working in collaboration with Chinese scientists, her team deduced how the plant, Scutellaria baicalensi, synthesises the chemicals, known as flavones.
Flavones are found widely in the plant kingdom, giving some plants vivid blue flowers.
Image copyright Qing Zhao, Chinese Academy of Sciences Image caption The root is thought to have anti-viral properties
"Understanding the pathway should help us to produce these special flavones in large quantities, which will enable further research into their potential medicinal uses," said Prof Martin.
"It's exciting to consider that the plants which have been used as traditional Chinese remedies for thousands of years may lead to effective modern medicines."
Ancient remedy
Previous lab research suggests that flavones have anti-cancer properties, offering hope that they may one day lead to effective cancer treatments.
Commenting on the study, Dr Alan Worsley of Cancer Research UK, said: "This paper answers a very interesting biological question about how these plants are able to make particular molecules, but the study doesn't look at whether the molecules can be used to treat cancer.
"Instead it looks at how this compound is made in nature, which may allow scientists to make more of it in the lab and be able to research its potential uses."
This herb is a member of the mint family and native to China.
In traditional Chinese medicine, the root was used in combination with other plants to treat fever and other ailments.
There is increasing scientific interest in ancient medicinal plants.
In 2015, Tu Youyou was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for her work on artemisinin, an antimalarial drug derived from the sweet wormwood plant, Artemisia annua.
Ancient remedy helps China win Nobel Prize
The fever-reducing properties of the plant were first recognised in the 4th Century by Chinese physicians.Hi! Did you know that Antonio Gates played college basketball at Kent State, and didn't play any college football at all before signing with the San Diego Chargers as an undrafted free agent?
Of course you did, because it gets brought up every 5 minutes of every Chargers game you've watched over the last 13 seasons. It regularly gets brought up during the NCAA Tournament as well, so if you haven't seen it yet, brace yourself.
However, that's not why we're here. That's just a flashy title to throw off the people that don't read the actual articles themselves. (Hello, everyone who reads the articles! We love you!)
This morning I wanted to talk more about this recent fad of saying that Antonio Gates is not a Hall of Famer. Literally the only way this stance makes any sense is if you take such a hard line against a positive PED test that you are not willing to include anyone who has every had one.
Outside of that, Gates has the credentials. Let's go through them.
Since 1970:
Only two Tight Ends have more receiving yards than Gates ( Tony Gonzalez and Jason Witten
Only two Tight Ends have more receptions than Gates (Gonzalez and Witten)
Only two Tight Ends have more targets than Gates (Gonzalez and Witten)
Only one Tight End has more touchdown catches than Gates (Gonzalez)
When comparing Gates to the other guys around him, it's worth noting that pretty much all of them were drafted and expected to be something.
Tony Gonzalez was a 1st round pick. Jason Witten was a 3rd round pick. Shannon Sharpe, who has been the loudest critic of Antonio Gates and is in the Hall of Fame despite not having stats as good as Gates', is about as close as you can get to Gates because he was a 7th round pick (back when there were 12 rounds).
Either way, it's patently absurd to say that one of the three best pass-catching Tight Ends in the modern era shouldn't be in the Hall of Fame. He should be, and I'm going to go back to calling him "future Hall of Famer Antonio Gates".The suspected two gunmen were "formally recognised" by an employee at a petrol station south of Longpont this morning, France 24 reports. He said they wore balaclavas and were equipped with kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenades.
France 24 reported that an Interior Ministry official had earlier played down the chances of finding the gunmen in Longpont village. "We have not found them, there is no siege," he had said.
Local media say the hunt for the gunmen is focused on the village of Longpont in north-east of Paris. Villagers there also being reportedly told to stay at home and keep their doors shut.
Interior Minister Cazeneuve says nine people have been detained so far as part of the investigation.
France 24 reports it is believed that the Charlie Hebdo shooting suspects are on foot, and that police forces' PUMA helicopters deployed are equipped with infrared and body heat tracking tech.
The French Interior Ministry has informed that around 88,000 people are involved in the manhunt for the the Charlie Hebdo gunmen.
Police continue door-to-door searches in Corcy, north-east of Paris.
The latest reports say that it will remain unclear whether the police are closing in on the attackers until after they have apprehended (or not) the suspects.
The manhunt for the two suspects seems to have moved to another phase as the French police have surrounded a house where the two gunmen may be held up, reported France24. TV visuals showed thick police presence outside a house in a town north-east of Paris.
Meanwhile, French news agency, AFP, is reporting that French prosecutors are officially treating Thursday's shooting in Paris, in which a policewoman died, as a terrorist act.
In the latest news coming from France, it is being reported that the two armed suspects have now abandoned the car. Molotov cocktails and jihadist flags were found in the vehicle, AFP reports.
The two gunmen, who were spotted moving in a car full of weapons, are said to have held up a gas station, stealing food and petrol and they fired gunshots as they fled, reports said. Police officers rushed to the scene and now even military helicopters were seen hovering over the area, the BBC reported.
People across the world have popularised "I am Charlie" or "Je Suis Charlie" slogan in the aftermath of deadly attack on French magazine Hebdo Charlie. Silent vigils were held across the world and people placed pen and pencils as a tribute to the slain journalists.
The Britain, too, has beefed up security at key points in the country in wake of Paris attack, reports say.
France has deployed police at main entrance points to Paris so as to check their exit from the town, says reports.
The Kouachi brothers are said to have been spotted moving in a light grey coloured car north east of Paris, the BBC says. The gunmen are believed to be masked and armed. Their car's registration plates were also masked, according to a witness. Police believe they may be heading back to Paris, and armed officers are being posted at access points into the capital.
The two armed suspects were recognised by the manager of a petrol station near Villers-Cotteret in the northern Aisne region of France, the AFP reported.
Meanwhile, in a befitting response to the terror attack, one of the editors of the targeted French satirical weekly, has said that the next issue of Charlie Hebdo will come out next Wednesday as scheduled, despite the gory attack on its magazine. We "will not let stupidity win", Patrick Pelloux told AFP.
It's 11:00 am in France and the entire nation has paused for a minute of silence to mourn the victims of Charlie Hebdo attack. People gathered outside Notre Dame in Paris to pay a silent tribute to those slain in the terror attack yesterday. Also, the bells of Notre Dame will keep ringing for ten minutes.
In the latest from France, an AFP alert says that the gunmen matching the description of Kouachi brothers who carried out Charlie Hebdo attack, have been located in the northern part of the country at Villers-Cotterets in Aisne region. The report says that they were seen in a car full of weapons in northern France.THE OLDEST house in Luzon and the second oldest in the Philippines has been demolished without any national culture agency or local government unit coming to its rescue.
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It will be reconstructed at the controversial Las Casas Filipinas de Acuzar in Bagac, Bataan, sources said.
Owned by architect and construction and development mogul Jose Rizalino Acuzar, Las Casas Filipinas has been buying up very old houses around the country, demolishing and reconstituting them in his hometown in Bataan. He has made of the complex of reconstructed houses a “heritage resort.”
Although Acuzar has been praised for saving the structures, he has also earned criticism for removing them from their original geography, thus destroying their physical, social and historical moorings.
Since Bagac is a seaside town, Acuzar has also been criticized for exposing the structures to the elements that might only hasten their deterioration.
Casa Ordoveza was constructed in 1744. It is believed to be the oldest bahay-na-bato in the country after the still-existing Jesuit House (built 1730), now the Museo de Parian, in Cebu City.
In the journal article, “Casa Ordoveza of Majayjay, Laguna: The Evolution of a Provincial Ilustrado Family (1637-1990)” published in the Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society in March 1991, historian Luciano P.R. Santiago writes that Casa Ordoveza was located on what was then “camino real” or the royal street (now Blumentritt Street) built by Majayjay gobernadorcillo Don Lorenzo Pangotangan.
Pangotangan (money-lender in Tagalog) changed their family’s surname to Ordoveza in 1849, notes Santiago.
Santiago takes notice the historical significance of the dilapidated but still at that time, surviving, structure.
“The longevity of the Ordoveza house as well as its continuous possession by the same family for two and a half centuries,” writes Santiago, “constitutes a rare occurrence in the Philippines, a country which has suffered since time immemorial from many a calamity both natural and manmade.”
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Last year, a book about the house and the family was published. “Casa Ordoveza: The Story of an Illustrious Filipino Clan” was authored by Santiago.
A source told the Inquirer that the house, demolished late last year was reportedly bought by Las Casas Filipinas de Acuzar of Bagac, Bataan where it will be reconstructed.
In a text message, Las Casas management confirmed to the Inquirer the house was indeed under construction in Bagac.
‘Sad story’
Danny de Luna of the Quezon Heritage Council said the demolition was “a sad story.”
“We from the Quezon Heritage Council can only do as much as we can preserve in Quezon province that’s why we encourage local people to stand and preserve their own heritage,” De Luna said. “However selling it (Ordoveza house) to the Acuzar is the lesser evil [since] at least the whole house can still be seen in Bagac, Bataan.”
The Heritage Conservation Society (HCS) lamented the demolition.
“Based on Republic Act 10066, all these old houses being transferred to Bagac, Bataan, are presumed to be Important Cultural Properties, and therefore are protected by law, unless the presumption is lifted,” HCS said.
“Our government cultural agencies should come out with a definitive statement on the transfer of heritage, especially since it goes against international conservation standards and deprives communities of their heritage,” HCS added.
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MOST READWhite House Director of Social Media Dan Scavino steps off Air Force One upon arrival at Newark Liberty Airport in Newark, New Jersey on June 9, 2017. MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images
Fake images and videos of Hurricane Irma that are making the rounds on social media can fool anyone, including, apparently people who are actually working at tracking the storm. The White House’s own director of social media, Dan Scavino Jr., sent out a tweet that he thought showed massive flooding at the Miami International Airport as a way to demonstrate how President Donald Trump’s administration was keeping track of Irma’s devastation. The problem? The video was not actually of the Miami airport.
Miami International Airport: 1
Trump's Director of Social Media: 0 pic.twitter.com/sZMyLjPZU3 — Vera Bergengruen (@VeraMBergen) September 10, 2017
Miami International Airport quickly replied to Scavino’s tweet to inform him that the video did not depict the situation at the airport. Scavino thanked the Miami Airport for the information and said he would delete the video. Scavino deleted the tweet about 30 minutes after he posted it without ever publicly admitting that he tweeted out a fake piece of news.
Thank you. It was among 100s of videos/pics I am receiving re: Irma from public. In trying to notify all, I shared - have deleted. Be safe! — Dan Scavino Jr. (@Scavino45) September 10, 2017
WH social media aide shares fake post. Did he also share w/ POTUS? https://t.co/Qb6i5FNYkj pic.twitter.com/4le5SNHnc0 — Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) September 10, 2017
Several people on Twitter were quick to point out that the video Scavino claimed showed flooding at Miami airport was actually footage of flooding at Mexico City’s airport from several weeks ago.Russian state TV presenters are using ever more extreme language to vilify government opponents - even comparing Western nations to the Nazis.
To mark the anniversary of the 1938 Munich Agreement, that handed the Czech Sudetenland to Hitler, Rossiya 1's current affairs flagship News of the Week likened the West's handling of Syria to the actions of Nazi Germany. "How did the Germans get the Sudetenland?" asked anchor Dmitry Kiselev. "Under the pretext of defending human rights," he answered, accusing the US, Britain and France of using talk of Syrians' rights to "encourage terrorist intervention".
A Rossiya 1 news bulletin let Stalinist author and editor Alexander Prokhanov go even further. "Then it was Hitler, and now it is America, devouring country after country before our very eyes, before the eyes of the whole world," he said. Dubbing the US a "bloody animal", he warned Russia could be its next victim. "The Munich collusion is a lesson to us all. Not a step back. Behind Syria lies the Russian border." Neither Prokhanov nor Rossiya 1 mentioned the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, by which Moscow gave Hitler the green light to invade Poland.
Image caption Kiselev is among the most vocal newsreaders
State broadcasters treat government opponents similarly. Last month, Dmitry Kiselev likened Moscow mayoral hopeful Alexei Navalny's campaign to Joseph Goebbels' propaganda machine. Popular presenter Vladimir Soloviev didn't mince words on state-owned Vesti FM, either, when he warned Jews off supporting Mr Navalny: "They think they can control him, but they will be the first to find that the doors of the gas chamber slammed shut behind them and the gas turned on."
This rhetoric disturbs many independent broadcasters, especially when directed at the Kremlin's domestic opponents. Vadim Vostrov, of the regional station TVK, has compared Mr Kiselev's broadcasts to the compulsory "two minutes of hate" in George Orwell's novel 1984. "The comrades are still some way from the original, but are moving in the right direction," he said of Rossiya 1. Opposition campaigners have called for state anchors to be prosecuted on charges of inciting hatred, so far to no avail. Dmitry Kiselev himself is unrepentant. "I now understand that there is no place for disengaged journalism. We have to create values," he told liberal website Lenta.ru.
Use #NewsfromElsewhere to stay up-to-date with our reports via Twitter.Pepsi, enlists Kendall Jenner in what can only be described as the central casting music video for the social justice ethos, the resistance movement, and most likely, something-something anti-Trump. Except of course, Pepsi is Pepsi so its hedging its middle-of-the-road bets by hosting a march for peace. There's also a pissed off photographer in a hijab. And Kendall Jenner? Well she's wearing a blonde wig and then rips it off and hands a Pepsi to a cop, I guess kind of like that famous photo at Kent State where the hippie placed a flower in the rifle of a national guard member. Or nods to Black Lives Matter. In other words it's not tone deaf at all.
There's a lot of negative press around this ad. It's easy to see why. Kendall Jenner is not a great example of any sort of resistance movement. And mixing protests with Pepsi is just plain misguided. Pepsi of course has always stood for youth, and since the youth believe they're all 'woke," now it only makes sense they'd try to make something revolving around that, as opposed to say, using Britney Spears.
But the negative press is as much a part of outrage culture as it is the inevitableness of advertising responding to the demands of consumers who insist their brands be more politically attuned. Or rather, not consumers, but people on twitter who spend their days being outraged.
It was only a few short years ago where Tweets demanding brands be more involved with causes and political moments du jour, no matter how polarizing they would be started popping up. So in order to sell you something, brands waded into the zeitgeist. Starbucks talked about race. And immigration. In the case of 84 Lumber's Super Bowl spot, the CEO didn't even believe in the cause but just wanted to "create conversation," which is code for capitalizing on a trend.
This is Pepsi 2017 where kids march for peace and a cop sips a Pepsi (the new symbol of harmony, apparently) and Kendall Jenner smears her makeup. You wanted woke, you got it. And it's your fault for demanding brands do this.
Update: Pepsi has decided to pull this craptacular ad. In a statement to the Wall Street Journal's reporter Jennifer Maloney.Typical spraying of fields with commonly used pesticides is enough to cause the death of frogs
Frogs exposed to pesticides at the kind of levels routinely sprayed on farm fields can die in hours, a new study from German and Swiss scientists report. The scientists say that agricultural pesticide use is an overlooked contributory factor in the global decline in amphibian populations.
Carsten Brühl, lead author and ecotoxicologist at Koblenz-Landau University in Germany, says that the team used concentrations recommended on the labels of seven pesticide products, yet the effect was dramatic. ‘We would not allow any product on the market whose application kills a mammal in one hour.’
The effect of these pesticides on European common frogs was studied by simulating overspray in farm fields. Test application simulated a worst case scenario where there was no interception by plants. The herbicides tested in the study were Curol B and Dicomil, the insecticide Roxion, and the fungicides Prosper, Captan Omya, Headline and a pyraclostrobin formulation in development.
Mortality ranged from 100% after one hour for BASF’s Headline to 40% after seven days at the recommended application rate. Three registered products caused 40% mortality at just 10% of the recommended application rates – Stahler’s insecticide Roxion, Omaya’s herbicide Dicomil and the fungicide Captan Omya.
‘The extreme mortality after one hour is shocking,’ says amphibian biologist Malcolm McCallum, University of Missouri, US. ‘It makes me concerned not just for amphibians, but also for birds, mammals and even humans who come into contact with these compounds in this manner.’
Brühl questions why no specific risk assessment on amphibians is needed for the registration of a new pesticide product, unlike for birds and mammals. ‘The ecotoxicology of terrestrial vertebrates risk is covered by birds and mammals, but they are protected by fur and feathers,’ he says. Amphibians may be more susceptible due to their highly permeable skin.
Widely different mortality rates were also noted for two products with the same active chemical (pyraclostrobin) at the same levels. The commercially available and top-selling Headline formulation was most toxic, whereas a formulation BASF is developing was more benign meaning formulation additives could play a critical role in toxicity.
‘It’s a useful paper and helps fill a knowledge gap,’ says ecotoxicologist Daniel Pickford of Brunel University, UK, ‘but it is too simplistic to spray them [directly] and say they’ve died and this must be happening in the wild.’ Pickford adds that the low numbers used in the study are worrying; this was done for ethical reasons. ‘With just three frogs tested [for each product], there are only a few statistical outcomes possible,’ he says. ‘They are low numbers to be making such robust assumptions.’
‘There needs to be serious attention paid to amphibians from regulators because they as a group are going extinct thousands of times faster than they did at the K–T boundary,’ McCallum notes. ‘There needs to be discussion to work with pesticide companies and agricultural producers to develop workable solutions to the obvious problem that is certainly not restricted to amphibians. If you have ever walked through a corn field you will see that it is not exactly a rich diverse ecosystem,’ he says.President Donald Trump said stronger background checks for gun purchases would have made Sunday’s mass shooting at a south Texas church even deadlier.
During a press conference in South Korea, NBC’s Ali Vitali asked Trump if he would consider “extreme vetting” for anyone wanting to buy a gun.
After describing gun control as “a situation that probably shouldn’t be discussed right now,” Trump said stronger background checks would have made “no difference” in the attack, which left 26 people dead, including several children.
Trump also invoked Stephen Willeford, the Sutherland Springs resident who confronted shooter Devin Kelley. With more background checks, the president said, “you might not have had that very brave person who happened to have a gun or a rifle in his truck go out and shoot him and hit him and neutralize him. I can only say this: If he didn’t have a gun, instead of having 26 dead, you would have had hundreds more dead.”
Willeford told 40/29 News that he ran from his home to the church when his daughter told him about the shooting. Willeford confronted Kelley and shot him twice. When Kelley fled the area in his SUV, Willeford flagged down a passing motorist and chased him.
Authorities later found Kelley dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in his vehicle, which he had crashed into a ditch.
It’s unclear if background checks would have affected Willeford, a former NRA instructor. However, the current background check system missed Kelley, who was kicked out of the Air Force following a domestic violence conviction and therefore should not have been able to purchase a gun legally.We are proud to announce the release of Tx (LINQ to Logs and Traces), an open source project to help with the debugging of software from logs/traces, and the building of real-time monitoring and alerting systems.
This tool is code that has been used within Microsoft, for example, by the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and the ServiceBus teams. With this release, the Tx code is now available for use in your own projects.
Tx allows the use of Language Integrated Query (LINQ) queries on raw event sources. LINQ is a Microsoft.NET Framework component that adds native data querying capabilities using any of the supported.NET languages.
Tx enables the use of Reactive Extensions (Rx) on real event sources and provides support for multiplexed event sequences (a s ingle sequence containing events of different types in order of occurrence). Using Tx, it is possible to hide the heterogeneity of event sources and thus provide a single query across multiple sources. Such queries use the same API for both real-time and past history.
When working on historical log/trace files. multiple queries can be performed with a single read. For example, a single pass over a file can count all “Warning” events, match “Begin” and “End” events, and calculate the average duration of each activity. This functionality is extremely useful when working with large files as it is possible to perform the same real-time queries efficiently over historical data to gain additional insights.
With this first release Tx (LINQ to Logs and Traces) provides:
Parsers that surface various trace/log formats as IObservables
LINQPad Driver, allowing the usage of LINQPad directly on files and real-time sessions
Samples illustrating how to use Reactive Extensions + LINQ to Objects on: trace/log files that have no size restriction real-time sessions
This release also provides the following NuGet packages:
Tx.Core Common components that are not specific to a specific tracing format and are commonly reused across different formats.
Tx.Windows provides support for: Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) which allows application programmers to start and stop event tracing sessions, instrument applications and consume trace events. Event Logs (.etvtx) and listening for changes in event logs Performance counters from files (.blg,.csv,.tsv) and from real-time counter API IIS text logs in W3C format
Tx.SqlServer SQL Server Extended Events (XEvent)
Tx.All A convenience package containing all the above
Please check out the Tx project site on CodePlex for more information and the corresponding documentation.
Georgi Chkodrov, Developer, Microsoft Corp.
Ross Gardler, Senior Technical Evangelist, Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.So if Donald Trump becomes president, you want to move to Canada?
I’ve heard a few people say that, anyway. Canada: America’s hat, where everybody’s nice and healthcare is free and guns are only used for hunting animals.
It’s a goddamn paradise. So what if gas is 5 bucks a gallon and fully a quarter of the population lives on the government’s dole?
There is a French-speaking part of Canada. You would think they’d grasp the French word ‘entrepreneur.’
Whatever.
To move to Canada, what you need is a job in Canada, otherwise you are not allowed to move there (on any permanent or long-term basis). Imagine if we Americans took such RAYCIST measures as requiring people who want to come here to have a job already lined up…
Anyway, I find it funny that dipshit liberals want to move to a country with the same immigration policy that the man they hate is proposing for this country. He is vilified as a RAYCIST! What about Canada, doing the exact same shit? Oh, that’s ok.
Come on, it’s worth a couple of knee-slaps….
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Facebook22 Statistics That Prove The Elite Are Becoming Fabulously Wealthy While The Middle Class Is Being Ripped To Shreds
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In the United States today, the only group that is “doing better” each year financially is the folks at the very top of the income pyramid. Everyone else has seen their incomes decline. Once upon a time, America had a relatively egalitarian system where just about anyone could “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” if they just worked hard enough. But today, there are millions of Americans that can’t seem to get jobs no matter how hard they try. Millions of others feel their tenuous hold on the American Dream slipping out of their grasp just a little bit more each month. The truth is that we don’t have true capitalism in the United States anymore. Over the past several decades, the financial system in the U.S. has been carefully molded and shaped in such a way that all the wealth is funneled to the elite at the very top and to the monolithic predator corporations that now dominate the global economy. Power has become concentrated in the hands of very few individuals, and they are nearly impossible to compete against. If you doubt this, go set up a general store right next to your local Wal-Mart and see how long you can survive. In America today, the elite are becoming fabulously wealthy and the middle class is being ripped to shreds. One of the things that our Founding Fathers were extremely concerned about was not allowing too much power to be accumulated in the hands of any one person or institution, but today we have turned our backs on that principle and now we are paying the price.
So what is the solution? Well, Democrats tell us that we just need to “spread the wealth” a bit more. But raising taxes and giving people more handouts is not going to solve a thing. What the American people need are good jobs.
Republicans tell us that if we will just lower taxes on corporations and on the rich that they will hire more American workers and that wealth will “trickle down” to them.
But as we have seen, that is simply not true in today’s world. The elite have figured out that they don’t really need expensive American workers anymore. Instead, they can just set up shop on the other side of the world and pay workers less than a tenth of what American workers make.
This new “global economy” is really great for increasing the bonuses of corporate executives, but it is a really bad deal for middle class Americans. Most Americans do not have any other way to make money other than their labor. But if millions of our jobs are going to keep being shipped overseas, then where are all of those middle class Americans going to find good jobs?
For decades, our politicians promised us that “free trade” and “globalism” were going to be incredibly beneficial for us. Well, free trade and globalism have been great for the elite, but they have devastated middle America.
Middle class Americans were never told that they were being merged into a one-world labor market where they would be forced to directly compete for jobs with the cheapest labor on the globe.
If you listen really, really carefully you can hear that “great sucking sound” that Ross Perot once warned us so diligently about.
Once great manufacturing cities that were the envy of the world such as Detroit now resemble post-apocalyptic war zones.
America is being deindustrialized at a blinding pace, and the wealthy are making a lot of money in the process.
So in 2010, the elite are once again bringing in huge bonuses and they are living the high life. Spending on luxury goods is skyrocketing and the privileged few are enjoying all of the wonderful things that this life has to offer.
Meanwhile, millions of American families are trying to figure out how they are going to pay for heat this winter.
The following are 22 statistics that prove that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer in America today….
#1 Half of all American workers now earn $505 or less per week.
#2 In 200 |
-- we want -- a government which represents all of us, not just the one percent. This is a movement of people whoa re prepared to think big, not small. People who want to elect not just a new president, but to transform America..."Sanders continued. "Here is a simple truth which everybody understands whether you're progressive or conservative, you cannot have a Super PAC raise many millions of dollars from Wall Street or special interest and then tell the American people with a straight face that you're going to stand up to the big money interests. Not true!... What we said to the American people, to the middle class and working families, if you want a candidate who will stand with you, please stand with us. And in the last year, we have received seven million individual campaign contributions. That is more campaign contributions than any candidate in the history of the United States of America!... Anybody here know what the average contribution is? That's right. $27. And that is what the political revolution is about, and that is we're going to win this thing without being dependent on Wall Street or the big money interests."to see more photos from people who were at the rally, along with details about what happened and motivating messages that Sanders shared. This first photo was shared on Reddit by @superforecasting. You can see Bernie Sanders in the back of the photo, speaking to a huge crowd of thousands. ( RedditAmnesty International is urging Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion to focus his efforts on securing the release of imprisoned blogger Raif Badawi and his lawyer as the Canadian government meets with Saudi officials.
"We urge that you use all possible opportunities and exchanges during your visit to raise grave human-rights concerns related to both Saudi Arabia and Yemen," wrote Alex Neve, Secretary-General of Amnesty International Canada, and Béatrice Vaugrante, head of Amnesty International Canada's francophone wing, in an open letter.
The letter, which was written in advance of the minister's departure, calls on Mr. Dion and parliamentary secretary Omar Alghabra to press the Saudis to "immediately and unconditionally release all prisoners of conscience including Raif Badawi and Waleed Abu al-Khair," and to insist that the Saudi government "cease the war crimes and other human-rights violations that have been and continue to be committed by the Saudi-led coalition that has intervened in Yemen."
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Mr. Badawi was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for blogs that the government condemned as "apostasy" or "insulting Islam through electronic channels." The flogging portion of his sentence was suspended after 50 lashes, in the wake of strong international criticism. His case is of particular interest to the Canadian government because Mr. Badawi's wife and three children received shelter in this country after they fled Saudi Arabia.
Mr. Abu al-Khair, a human-rights lawyer who defended Mr. Badawi and others before the Saudi courts, was sentenced to 15 years for what Amnesty International calls "wholly unfounded" terrorism charges.
Critics allege that the intervention of a Saudi-led coalition into Yemen's civil war has resulted in thousands of civilian deaths and worsened conditions in a country where the situation for many was already desperate.
However, the letter made only passing reference to the Canadian government's controversial decision to sell light armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia. The $15-billion purchase will secure thousands of jobs in the Canadian defence industry, but opponents of the sale, including Amnesty International, say the vehicles could be used in offensive actions by the regime against Yemeni rebels.
Joseph Pickerill, Mr. Dion's director of communications, said by e-mail Monday that the minister had been in meetings with the Gulf Cooperation Council and would be speaking with Saudi officials Tuesday. "Minister Dion takes every opportunity to raise critical issues, particularly humanitarian cases," Mr. Pickerill said. "We raised these issues today and will do so again when we meet the Foreign Minister [Tuesday]."
As for the Amnesty International letter: "We also have a very good relationship with Amnesty International and always appreciate their advice."
He could provide no information, however, on whether Mr. Dion's visit might secure Mr. Badawi's release.
Story continues below advertisementOh man, have you all been playingfrom Telltale Games? I have, and with every installment of this episodic game I'm newly impressed by how hard it yanks on my emotions.Like the comic that spawned it, the game is unapologetically bleak and its appeal comes largely from watching characters getting crammed into really bad situations from which some of them just won't emerge -- unless they do so groaning and hungering for brains. Like many horror stories it's appealing the way a roller coaster is appealing. The characters are full of despair, heartbreak, anxiety, regret, and desperation.And the amazing thing is that the game gets me to feel all those emotions too. I'm glad that it comes in monthly installments, because I need the time between episodes to recover. But why is that? By what psychological, neurological, and biological mechanisms do video games likeget us to not only empathize with characters onscreen, but also share their emotions?For the answer let us start, as we so often do, with tiny Italian monkeys.Years ago, neuroscientists in the Italian city of Parma were conducting experiments on macaque monkeys in order to understand the functions of individual brain cells. This involved inserting wires into the brain so that the researchers could detect activity in cells related to functions like grasping and bringing food to little monkey mouths. As researcher Marco Iacoboni notes in his 2008 book Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect With Others, stories of a particular breakthrough are varied and apocryphal, but most of them involve a monkey wired up and awaiting his next round of experiments. In walks a researcher, who then reaches out and grasps something of interest to the monkey like a piece of fruit or a big red button marked "ACTIVATE TO FREE ALL MONKEYS."Suddenly the researcher noticed that according to the equipment hooked up to the monkey's brain, neurons were firing that were associated with grasping motions, even though the animal had only SEEN something being grasped. This was odd, because normally brain cells are very specialized and nobody knew of any neurons that would activate both when performing an action or when seeing someone else perform the same action. Yet here the monkey was, blithely firing neurons previously only associated with performing motor actions while just sitting still and watching.Thus was the first observation of a mirror neuron in action, a brain cell set apart from many of its peers and which are also present in delicious human brains. It turns out that many researchers like the aforementioned Dr. Marco Iacoboni, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at UCLA, believe that mirror neurons are important for our ability to empathize with things we see, like the plight of poor Lee and Clementine in"Mirror neurons are motor cells," Iacoboni tells me via e-mail. "That is, they send signals to our muscles to move our body, make actions, grab a cup of coffee, smile, and so on. However, they differ from other motor cells because they are also activated by the sight of somebody else's action." For example, a mirror neuron for grasp is fired when I grab an Xbox controller, but also when I see my friend grabbing a controller. "By being active even when we do not move at all and simply watch other people moving, they sort of create an inner imitation of the actions of others inside us."Curious about exactly how this phenomenon works, Iacoboni and his colleagues conducted a study (Carr, Iacoboni, & Dubeau, 2003) where they used very expensive equipment to monitor the brain activity of subjects who watched images of faces expressing different emotions. As expected, mirror neuron areas activated when people saw the expressions, and so did the limbic system, a portion of the brain known to be related to emotions. In short, upon seeing facial expressions, mirror neurons fired as if the subjects were making those expressions themselves, then triggered activity in the brain's emotional centers so that subjects could actually feel the emotion being imitated.Iacoboni notes that this process "puts us immediately in'somebody else's shoes,' in an effortless, almost automatic way. This is why we get so immersed in the movies we watch and the novels we read." When we see Lee Everett or any of the othercharacters grimace in disgust, our mirror neurons for grimacing activate as if we were making that expression ourselves. And because of that inner imitation, we actuallyfeel the emotion to some degree and thus understand what the other is feeling.I think this is one of the reasons whyis so good at eliciting emotions: it frequently shows us the faces of the characters and lets us see all the work put into creating easily recognizable and convincing facial expressions. And so it's not the zombies that elicit dread in us. Instead it's things like the face that Kenny makes when Lee tells him to make a hard decision about his family."We spend a ton of time on the facial animations for the characters in the game,"'s creative lead Sean Vanaman said when I asked him about this. "After writing the first episode we start to make lists of the type of things characters are going to feel in the story and then start to generate isolated facial animations to convey those moods and emotions. Those are then used throughout the game."But it's not just seeing an expression and imagining ourselves mirroring it. In the 2004 study cited above, Iacoboni and his colleagues also had some subjects physically imitate the expressions they were seeing and the cascade of mental activity increased. This suggests that actively imitating expressions helps us better empathize and understand, and it's part of a fairly established line of research called the "facial feedback hypothesis." For example, in one 2005 study researcher Paula Niedenthal had two groups of subjects look at the facial expressions of other people.One group, however, was made to hold a pencil between their teeth, which severely limited their ability to mimic the expressions they saw. The result was that those clenching the pencils in their mouths were less able to detect emotional changes in the faces they observed because the lack of mimicry short circuited their brain's ability to replicate facial expressions, feel the emotions themselves, and then recognize it in others.So, I suppose the moral of all this is that if you really want to get the full effect from, don't cover your eyes and peek between your fingers in a way that inhibits your ability to mimic the expressions you see on screen. Your mirror neurons don't appreciate that when they're trying to get your to replicate expressions of crippling, existential doom.REFERENCESCarr, L., Iacoboni, M., & Debeau, M. et al. (2003). Neural mechanisms of empathy in humans: A relay from neural systems for imitation to limbic areas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 100, 5497-5502.Iacoboni, M. (2008). Mirroring people: The new science of how we connect with others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Niedenthal, P., Barsalou, L., & Winkelman, P. et al. (2005). Embodiment in attitudes, social perception, and emotion. Personality and Social Psychology Reviews, 9, 184-211.If creating a city for Amazon isn’t enough to recruit the company to Georgia, maybe making the company’s CEO its permanent mayor will be.
How does Amazon Mayor Jeff Bezos sound?
Stonecrest Mayor Jason Lary said Wednesday he will seek state legislation to install Bezos as the unelected leader of Amazon, Ga. — if the company chooses to bring its giant corporate hub called HQ2 to the area.
“Think about this: You can get your package shipped from Amazon, Ga., from their own post office, and have the corporate CEO as the mayor of that town, forever if he likes,” Lary said. “What that does is give him the eternal brand that he’s looking for.”
Stonecrest is one of many cities from across the country seeking to lure Amazon to their areas. The company set a Thursday deadline for bidders to submit incentive packages for the company.
The Stonecrest City Council already voted 4-2 earlier this month to de-annex 345 acres of land if the e-commerce giant picks the area for its expansion, which is expected to bring 50,000 jobs.
The proposal to make Bezos (or his designee) the mayor would have to be written into state law and approved by the Georgia General Assembly, Lary said.
Another benefit for Bezos and Amazon: They wouldn’t have to do the work of actually managing a city government. The city of Stonecrest could handle municipal services for the company, Lary said.
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The AJC's Mark Niesse keeps you updated on the latest happenings in DeKalb County government and politics. You'll find more on myAJC.com, including these stories:
Never miss a minute of what's happening in DeKalb politics. Subscribe to myAJC.com.The German car manufacturer had come into the weekend thinking it likely that Hamilton will take a fresh power unit to ensure he has enough components to get through the remainder of the campaign.
The team had numerous options open to it to ensure the maximum return for any penalty, and it is understood to be considering further changes prior to qualifying.
For the start of first free practice at Spa-Francorchamps, Mercedes confirmed that both Rosberg and Hamilton would be fitted with new components.
Rosberg is still under the number of parts allowed for the campaign, but the change means that Hamilton has moved on to his sixth MGU-H and his sixth turbocharger – which will mean a 15-place grid penalty for now.
Mercedes could still make further engine changes ahead of qualifying to get more components into Hamilton's pool, which could mean further grid penalties.Sapo Codebits as you might know is the geek event in Portugal.
Its audience range goes from programmers and entrepeneurs to hackers and designers! This year 800 people came to participate in 3 days full of talks, challenges, games, demos and workshops
The Artica guys are addicted to race games and Trackmania is only one of their favorites!!
They’re still addicted to race games but they don’t play them, instead, they prefer to create their own games.
They thought it would be cool to drive a remote control car using a steering wheel and pedals, and if the car had a wireless cam, the gamer could look at the screen and really see what the car was seeing in real time, just like an arcade game!
This was the proposal to Sapo Codebits! To have an arcade game where it would be possible to drive two cars and participate in a real race, without any simulations or complex algorythms, neither 3D graphics.. They want something real! Celso Martinho from Sapo was very excited with their idea, and by coincidence (or not) they were planning to have a retro gaming area at Sapo Codebits!!
An this is where I appear. I was the one behind the retro gaming area: The Arcade Man. Besides having my own Arcade machines there, I was working on 10 old arcade machines, making them work with the so acclaimed Raspberry Pi!!
I had just bought two old Sega Rally Consoles, to repair and prepare it to have a game console, like a Xbox 360 or PS3 and run modern games like Dirt, Forza, among others in this arcade. Here we had the possibility to transform them to be the control station for Artica RC cars!
On a first (of many) tours to my “mancave” we start disassembling the old consoles, removing the old electronics boards and wonder … what’s best way to connect all the gear!?
There is a strange beauty in this sturdy mechanical systems, they are so well engineered and one can feel they were pushed into the limits through the years, and are still able to be pushed a lot more!
This was the throttle pedal gear, on the right you can see a hand-made replacement, it was a cool hack to do.. and a miracle that it worked flawlessly all the event!
At this stage we couldn’t imagine that one of the biggest challenges was about to start …
Yes, the CRT’s… to send Video signal to this old CRT is not impossible by any means.. but it proved to be way to complicated…
after many attempts and despair.. they finally decided to “kill the rabbit”!! they found two Mitsai CRT’s willing to have a new glorious life!!!
And they fitted perfectly in the old frame!
The steering, pedals, gears and buttons were connected to an Arduino, and data was sent via xbee to the car.
The car had an Arduino receiver mapping the data to the wheels, throttle and to the video switch! The gamer could choose which camera to use, the front camera proved to be extremely difficult to use and only hardcore drivers used it!! The upper camera needed a support, and it had its iterations due to be easily broken when the car crashes or capsize! The final iteration was a one PVC piece bended with heat, it proved to be sturdy and survived to the hole event!
The Sega Rally Championship Arcade was fully working all the time, they only need to stop a couple of times for final tweaks.
..and to recharge batteries!
Driving this was soooo cool!! We are looking forward to repeat the experience!!
As a final note, we want to give a big thanks to all SAPO and PT Team for making this event a reality, Mauricio Martins and Adriano Couto from AltLab for helping us with the CRT’s, Francisco Dias gave a major help with his hacking skills, João Ribeiro for being a true Artica member, Filipe Valpereiro for all the hardcore geeky support. He was the guy who told us how to remove the steering wheel lag caused by the xbee buffer.. and finally thank you Celso Martinho for believing in us!!!Of course these systems are useless without games and other content to experience through them. Leading the charge in this area is Gunfire Games which has just released Chronos for the Oculus Rift system.
Welcome to the world of Virtual Reality! Once a high-priced gimmick at the shopping mall arcade, it has at long last made its way into the home. There are currently no fewer than five VR systems available, with entry prices ranging from $20 up into the $800 range. (See the recent article in Polygon.)
Introductions:
John Pearl: I've been working in games for 16 years now. I've held many art related roles over the years: Character Artist, Environment Artist, Lead Environment Artist, Principal Artist, Environmental Art Director, Character Art Director and Technical Art Director. While in those positions I've worked on a number of different styles and genres of games. Most notably have been Darksiders and Darksiders II at Vigil Games and most recently on Chronos. I'm currently the Design Director here at Gunfire Games.
Eric Spitler: I've been working in the game industry for about 13 years. In the early days we just created low poly models and painted textures in Photoshop. ZBrush became an instrumental part of game development when normal maps were introduced. I started experimenting with ZBrush in version 2 and then began working in production with version 3 at Vigil Games, where we created Darksiders I and II. Now I'm working with a lot of the same people at Gunfire Games where we shipped Chronos for the Oculus Rift. I also sculpt in ZBrush in my free time.
Tell us about Gunfire.
John: Gunfire Games is a relatively new studio as we've only been around for about a year and a half. In that time, we've released Herobound: Spirit Champion for the Gear VR and Oculus Rift, Darksiders II: Deathinitive Edition for consoles and PC, and most recently Chronos for the Oculus Rift. We're a relatively small studio at just under 40 developers. Many of us worked together at Vigil Games on Darksiders and Darksiders II, and for a brief stint as Crytek USA. Some members of the core team have worked together for 9 years. Our focus is on creating compelling games set in fantastical worlds.
Was Chronos planned to be a VR game from the beginning?
John: Chronos was built from the ground up for VR. As a studio, we love creating big immersive worlds filled with visually interesting locations and characters. We felt like VR presented a unique opportunity to give people a level of immersion not possible in a traditional 2D screen-based game. When we began developing Chronos, we decided to go with the fixed camera/3rd person view because we wanted to create an experience that was comfortable for everyone over long play sessions. This way, people could spend a lot of time in the world and truly be immersed in it. When designing the game, we approached everything (the locations, the encounters and particularly the boss fights) to be interesting in VR. We did this through scale, perspective and world design. We really wanted to craft experiences that were truly unique to VR.
What factors did you have to be mindful of in developing a game for VR? What were the big challenges?
John: With our camera system, the person playing the game can view the world and characters very closely as well as from afar, so the assets had to have a good level of fidelity but also be readable at distance. The real challenge with that is the game also has to run at a consistent 90fps for VR. Knowing this, we made deliberate decisions in terms of the stylized look to the world of Chronos. A lot of the visual challenges are the same found in non-VR game development. For example, being mindful of polygonal and texture budgets while maintaining a consistent visual experience.
Where do you see VR technology in 3 years? How will it affect the gaming industry?
John: Technology obviously is always evolving, getting lighter, faster and cheaper. That seems like the obvious direction for the VR hardware. However once there is an appetite for VR in the general population, the innovations beyond the head mounted display could be huge! Running VR is very resource intensive on a PC, so we could see major advances in computer hardware focused around making VR more efficient and cheaper. Additionally, there could be a huge market for peripherals. Custom VR gloves, body suits, racing controls and better non-game VR creation tools for people who want to create content. Any tech advancements seem to eventually improve gaming so it's inevitable it will have an impact on games in a lot of ways.
Do you see Gunfire and other studios focusing more on VR in the future?
John: We've had a lot of fun working in VR while developing Chronos and Herobound, so we'll likely continue to do more VR games in the future. For VR in general to take off, the consumer adoption rate has to hit a critical point where it is financially viable for more developers to make exclusively VR games. As it grows, larger and larger teams can begin investing in VR as a platform to make money. Currently, it's still somewhat of an indie market where small teams are making games because the financial risk/reward is more manageable. However once that critical point is reached in regards to hardware adoption, you'll see more major developers and publishers in the VR space.
How is ZBrush implemented in your digital pipeline?
Eric: ZBrush is used on just about every high poly model for our games. Some high poly models like a character might be created from scratch in ZBrush using DynaMesh and then refined using ZRemesher. Others will be modeled in an external 3D app and then detailed in ZBrush. ZBrush is great for adding damage to models to give a more natural/aged look. This was especially useful for the ancient environments in Chronos. After the high poly model is done, it is decimated in ZBrush if needed and then used to create the low poly and normal maps. ZBrush is also becoming a good way to help concept ideas too. If you're unsure about the look of a character, you can block it out quickly in ZBrush and get feedback from the art director and concept artists.
How has it improved your work?
Eric: Being able to work with such a high poly object so fluidly in real-time was a game changer. It really made working on a computer feel like sculpting in clay for the first time and made it fun. The addition of DynaMesh has made our workflow much more flexible. Game development can be unpredictable. Making major changes to an asset is much easier with DynaMesh and ZRemesher. It's also very helpful for taking an existing character and creating a variant version. You can play Frankenstein, taking parts from one model and seamlessly attaching them to another. Using Layers was helpful in aging the main characters in Chronos. I created a young version of the character's face and then an older version on a new layer. I could then create in-between versions by adjusting the layer strength of the old version.
Please join us in thanking John, Eric and the team at Gunfire for sharing this info with us!Boss Ray McKinnon’s summer long pursuit of Fraser Fyvie finally paid off today when the former Aberdeen and Hibs midfielder joined Dundee United.
As far back as June, United were close to fixing up the 24-year-old but the deal stalled.
He was then linked with Blackpool and even staying at Hibs, but behind the scenes United kept working away.
And with keeper Cammy Bell leaving last night when his contract was terminated by mutual agreement, cash to complete the deal was freed up.
ArabZONE | New signing, Fraser Fyvie on joining Dundee United | pic.twitter.com/sod1gYD0w9 — Dundee United FC (@dundeeunitedfc) August 4, 2017
Fyvie, a former Scotland under-21 international, penned a one-year deal and will go straight into the squad for tomorrow’s Championship opener at Inverness Caley Thistle.
On signing, the midfielder told the club website: “I am happy to secure a deal at a club like United. When I spoke to the manager, he convinced me that this was the place to be for the next stage of my career.
“I am sure United fans will remember me from playing against them for Hibs and previously Aberdeen, but I am looking forward to showing them my ability and helping secure promotion for United.”
Manager Ray McKinnon added” “Fraser is an experienced, excellent midfielder who fits the criteria we are looking for. He will enhance our midfield and our dressing room.”
Fyvie becomes the eleventh summer signing as United attempt to secure a return to the Ladbrokes Premiership.Laura Beatrice Marling (born 1 February 1990) is a British folk singer-songwriter. She won the Brit Award for Best British Female Solo Artist at the 2011 Brit Awards, and was nominated for the same award at the 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018 Brit Awards.
Born in Berkshire in southeast England, Marling joined her older sisters in London at 16, to pursue a career in music. She played with a number of groups, and released her debut album Alas, I Cannot Swim in 2008. Her first album, her second album I Speak Because I Can, and her fourth album Once I Was an Eagle were nominated for the Mercury Music Prize in 2008, 2010, and 2013, respectively. Her sixth record, Semper Femina, was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Folk Album category.The SEC staff and FINRA are issuing this Alert because we believe individual investors may be confused about the performance objectives of leveraged and inverse exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Leveraged and inverse ETFs typically are designed to achieve their stated performance objectives on a daily basis. Some investors might invest in these ETFs with the expectation that the ETFs may meet their stated daily performance objectives over the long term as well. Investors should be aware that performance of these ETFs over a period longer than one day can differ significantly from their stated daily performance objectives.
What Are Exchange-Traded Funds?
ETFs are typically registered investment companies whose shares represent an interest in a portfolio of securities that track an underlying benchmark or index. (Some ETFs that invest in commodities, currencies, or commodity- or currency-based instruments are not registered as investment companies.) Unlike traditional mutual funds, shares of ETFs typically trade throughout the day on a securities exchange at prices established by the market.
ETFs have evolved over the years, becoming more complex. Investors considering ETFs should evaluate each investment closely and not assume all ETFs are alike. In the last few years, a number of leveraged and inverse ETFs have been introduced to the market that are very different from the traditional variety of ETFs.
What are Leveraged and Inverse ETFs?
Leveraged ETFs seek to deliver multiples of the performance of the index or benchmark they track. Inverse ETFs (also called “short” funds) seek to deliver the opposite of the performance of the index or benchmark they track. Like traditional ETFs, some leveraged and inverse ETFs track broad indices, some are sector-specific, and others are linked to commodities, currencies, or some other benchmark. Inverse ETFs often are marketed as a way for investors to profit from, or at least hedge their exposure to, downward moving markets.
Leveraged inverse ETFs (also known as “ultra short” funds) seek to achieve a return that is a multiple of the inverse performance of the underlying index. An inverse ETF that tracks a particular index, for example, seeks to deliver the inverse of the performance of that index, while a 2x (two times) leveraged inverse ETF seeks to deliver double the opposite of that index’s performance. To accomplish their objectives, leveraged and inverse ETFs pursue a range of investment strategies through the use of swaps, futures contracts, and other derivative instruments.
Most leveraged and inverse ETFs “reset” daily, meaning that they are designed to achieve their stated objectives on a daily basis. Their performance over longer periods of time -- over weeks or months or years -- can differ significantly from the performance (or inverse of the performance) of their underlying index or benchmark during the same period of time. This effect can be magnified in volatile markets. As the examples below demonstrate, an ETF that is set up to deliver twice the performance of a benchmark from the close of trading on Day 1 to the close of trading on Day 2 will not necessarily achieve that goal over weeks, months, or years.
Real-Life Examples
The following two real-life examples illustrate how returns on a leveraged or inverse ETF over longer periods can differ significantly from the performance (or inverse of the performance) of their underlying index or benchmark during the same period of time.
Between December 1, 2008, and April 30, 2009, a particular index gained 2 percent. However, a leveraged ETF seeking to deliver twice that index's daily return fell by 6 percent—and an inverse ETF seeking to deliver twice the inverse of the index's daily return fell by 25 percent.
During that same period, an ETF seeking to deliver three times the daily return of a different index fell 53 percent, while the underlying index actually gained around 8 percent. An ETF seeking to deliver three times the inverse of the index's daily return declined by 90 percent over the same period.
How can this apparent breakdown between longer term index returns and ETF returns happen? Here’s a hypothetical example: let’s say that on Day 1, an index starts with a value of 100 and a leveraged ETF that seeks to double the return of the index starts at $100. If the index drops by 10 points on Day 1, it has a 10 percent loss and a resulting value of 90. Assuming it achieved its stated objective, the leveraged ETF would therefore drop 20 percent on that day and have an ending value of $80. On Day 2, if the index rises 10 percent, the index value increases to 99. For the ETF, its value for Day 2 would rise by 20 percent, which means the ETF would have a value of $96. On both days, the leveraged ETF did exactly what it was supposed to do – it produced daily returns that were two times the daily index returns. But let’s look at the results over the 2 day period: the index lost 1 percent (it fell from 100 to 99) while the 2x leveraged ETF lost 4 percent (it fell from $100 to $96). That means that over the two day period, the ETF's negative returns were 4 times as much as the two-day return of the index instead of 2 times the return.
Things to Consider Before Investing
The best form of investor protection is to clearly understand leveraged or inverse ETFs before investing in them. No matter how you initially hear about them, it’s important to read the prospectus, which provides detailed information related to the ETFs’ investment objectives, principal investment strategies, risks, and costs. The SEC’s EDGAR system, as well as search engines, can help you locate a specific ETF prospectus. You can also find the prospectuses on the websites of the financial firms that issue a given ETF, as well as through your broker.
You should also consider seeking the advice of an investment professional. Be sure to work with someone who understands your investment objectives and tolerance for risk. Your investment professional should understand these complex products, be able to explain whether or how they fit with your objectives, and be willing to monitor your investment. Before investing in these instruments, ask:
How does the ETF achieve its stated objectives? And what are the risks? Ask about—and be sure you understand—the techniques the ETF uses to achieve its goals. For example, engaging in short sales and using swaps, futures contracts, and other derivatives can expose the ETF—and by extension ETF investors—to a host of risks.
Ask about—and be sure you understand—the techniques the ETF uses to achieve its goals. For example, engaging in short sales and using swaps, futures contracts, and other derivatives can expose the ETF—and by extension ETF investors—to a host of risks.
What happens if I hold longer than one trading day? While there may be trading and hedging strategies that justify holding these investments longer than a day, buy-and-hold investors with an intermediate or long-term time horizon should carefully consider whether these ETFs are appropriate for their portfolio. As discussed above, because leveraged and inverse ETFs reset each day, their performance can quickly diverge from the performance of the underlying index or benchmark. In other words, it is possible that you could suffer significant losses even if the long-term performance of the index showed a gain.
While there may be trading and hedging strategies that justify holding these investments longer than a day, buy-and-hold investors with an intermediate or long-term time horizon should carefully consider whether these ETFs are appropriate for their portfolio. As discussed above, because leveraged and inverse ETFs reset each day, their performance can quickly diverge from the performance of the underlying index or benchmark. In other words, it is possible that you could suffer significant losses even if the long-term performance of the index showed a gain.
Is there a risk that an ETF will not meet its stated daily objective? There is always a risk that not every leveraged or inverse ETF will meet its stated objective on any given trading day. Be sure you understand the impact an investment in the ETF could have on the performance of your portfolio, taking into consideration your goals and your tolerance for risk.
There is always a risk that not every leveraged or inverse ETF will meet its stated objective on any given trading day. Be sure you understand the impact an investment in the ETF could have on the performance of your portfolio, taking into consideration your goals and your tolerance for risk.
What are the costs? Leveraged or inverse ETFs may be more costly than traditional ETFs. Use FINRA’s Fund Analyzer to estimate the impact of fees and expenses on your investment. The SEC’s Mutual Fund Cost Calculator can also help you estimate and compare costs of owning mutual funds.
Leveraged or inverse ETFs may be more costly than traditional ETFs. Use FINRA’s Fund Analyzer to estimate the impact of fees and expenses on your investment. The SEC’s Mutual Fund Cost Calculator can also help you estimate and compare costs of owning mutual funds.
What are the tax consequences? Leveraged or inverse ETFs may be less tax-efficient than traditional ETFs, in part because daily resets can cause the ETF to realize significant short-term capital gains that may not be offset by a loss. Be sure to check with your tax advisor about the consequences of investing in a leveraged or inverse ETF.
As with all investments, it pays to do your own homework. Only invest if you are confident the product can help you meet your investment objectives and you are knowledgeable and comfortable with the risks associated with these specialized ETFs.
Related Items:
SEC Fast Answers, Exchange-Traded Funds
FINRA Regulatory Notice 09-31
FINRA Compliance Podcast, Non-traditional ETFs (July 13, 2009)
FINRA Non-Traditional ETFs FAQ
NYSE Informed Investor, What You Should Know About Exchange Traded Funds“If a single baal (strand of hair) is touched on the head of Bal Thackeray, then I vow to kill Dawood Ibrahim in less than 24 hours in Pakistan,” said Pawan Kumar Pandey. This pledge, made in a packed press conference at the Mumbai Press Club in the mid-1990s, was intended both as a challenge to the Underworld and as proof of loyalty to the Shiv Sena founder.
Pandey, who was a Shiv Sena member of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly from Akbarpur, was reacting to a veiled threat issued by Chhota Rajan to Thackeray in an English weekly. Chhota Rajan had picked up cudgels on behalf of his mentor, Dawood Ibrahim, soon after the serial blasts of 1993 in Mumbai when Thackeray had gone full throttle on the “deshdrohi Dawood Ibrahim” theme, calling the gangster a betrayer of his country. In righteous indignation on behalf of his boss, Chhota Rajan had been sending missives to newspapers. “Old man Thackeray should mind his business and not meddle with the Underworld,” he said in one interview.
Pandey, of course, got away with his posturing. Dawood Ibrahim and Chhota Rajan dared not touch a gangster-turned-politician. It was Pandey’s criminal legacy in UP that had got him his political legitimacy: 30 cases in all, of which seven were for murder, five for attempts to murder, and the rest for assaults, kidnapping of women and violations of various laws under India’s Arms and Gangster Acts.
Shiv Sainiks in Mumbai were glad that Pandey had spoken up for their venerated leader. What they could not figure out was how Pandey, with his criminal antecedents, had won an election on a Shiv Sena ticket in UP. In a state where politics is the last resort of scoundrels and where the maxim ‘bullets for |
what type of weapon used, right now always “projectile”, “laser” and “arc thrower” (I have not yet unlocked plasma weapons).
The initial goal was to get about 100 observations per major weapon type (arc thrower is a specialist weapon, so it would take a very long time to collect a lot of data on it) from about 10 missions. No analysis was performed prior to stopping at ten missions of data collected. This is a simple (but not entirely necessary) method of avoiding a “stopping bias” as we would expect even a fair coin sequence to appear somewhat unfair on some prefixes (see, for example, the law of the iterated logarithm). So an inspection that played “until something looked off” would have a large bias for false alarms (this is in fact, unfortunately, how most commercial research is done: see Why Most Published Research Findings Are False). We will mention the nature of the false alarm effect when we discuss significance. Like “control groups” this stopping bias isn’t something mystical that can only be avoided through certain rituals- but a real and measurable effect that you need to account for.
First we load the data into R:
d <- read.table('http://www.win-vector.com/dfiles/XCOM/XCOMEUstats.txt', header=T,sep='\t') d[is.na(d)] <- 0 # replace all NA (which came from blanks) with 0
The basic plan for analysis is: chose a summary statistic and compute the significance of the value you observe of that statistic. For our first summary statistics we just use “total number of hits.”
sum(d$hit)
Which turns out to be 191. In our data set “hit” is a variable that is written as 1 if we hit and 0 if we missed. We chose this representation because if hit.probability were the actual correct percent chance of hitting then we should have:
sum(d$hit) nearly equals sum(d$hit.probability/100.0).
That is because a probability of a hit is just the expected value of the process that gives you 1 point for a hit and 0 for a miss plus the remarkable fact that expected values always add. The fact that expected values always add is both remarkable and an immediate consequence of the definition of expected value (“The Probabilistic Method” by Noga Alon and Joel H. Spencer calls this the “Linearity of Expectation” and devotes an entire chapter to clever uses of this fact). So what is the sum of reported hit probability in our data set?
sum(d$hit.probability/100.0)
Which turns out to be 179.73. So in my single game I actually hit a bit more often (191 times) than the game claimed I would (179.73 times). A quick question is could this be do to rounding or truncation? We check that the difference in percentage points:
(sum(100*d$hit) - sum(d$hit.probability))/length(d$hit)
Which is 4.49, too large for rounding (which would by at most +/-1 and hopefully +/- 0.5 on average).
This brings us to significance. We want to know is: if this difference of about 11 hits is large or small? We in fact want to know if it was large or small in the special sense: was such a sum likely or unlikely to happen (and this is significance). The question is usually formed as follows: if I assume exactly what I am trying to disprove (that the game is fair) how often when I played would I see a difference (from an assumed fair game, also called the null-hypothesis) a difference as large as what I saw? If what I saw is rare (or hard to produce from a fair game), then I may reject the null hypothesis and say I don’t believe my original assumption that the game is fair (which was my intent in setting up the experiment in the first place). Now you can never “prove the null hypothesis” with this sort of experimental design (you can only reject the null hypothesis or fail to reject the null hypothesis). If the null hypothesis were in fact true, every time you collected more data you would get another equivocal result that you can’t quite reject the null hypothesis yet. “But more data may help.” However, for a true null each time you collect more data you will likely get yet another non-definitive result. So the data scientist will have to use judgement and decide where to stop at some point.
This standard interpretation of significance is why you don’t want to allow “venue shopping” or “data scumming.” Suppose I secretly played 30 different games of XCOM: Enemy Unknown and then showed you only the one play-through where “wow, that set of coin-flips was only 1 in 20 likely- the game must be unfair.” If you know only about the game I showed you the claim is you are seeing something that is only 1/20 likely under the null hypothesis (so a p-value of 0.05) and perhaps decent evidence against the null hypothesis (that the game is fair). However if you are then informed I had to play 30 games to find the bad example (and I only showed you the worst) the response would be: of course in 30 plays you would expect to see something that only happens one time in twenty by random chance- as you took more than 20 trials Of course data scientists always perform more than one analysis. If it was always a-priori obvious what the exact right analysis would be the job would be a lot easier. The saving fact is that we can use a very crude significance correction: if we ran k experiments and the best one had a significance of p (small being more interesting) then the significance of the “cherry pick adjusted” experiment is no more than k*p. So if we run 100 experiments and the best has p-value of 0.0001 then even after the cherry picking correction we know we have a significance of at least 100*0.0001 = 0.01 which is good. The second saving grace is that p-values decrease rapidly when you add more data. If we know we want to try k-experiments than collecting a log(k) multiple more data is enough to defend against data scumming or venue shopping. The thing that is expensive in data is attempting to measure smaller clinical effect sizes. If you halve what you think the size of the effect of some non-existent effect (like ESP) you are trying to measure (“oops I didn’t say I had a 5% advantage guessing wavy cards, I meant a 2.5% advantage”) you need to quadruple the amount of data collected. Effect size you are trying to measure enters your required sample size as a square. This is why it is easy for somebody defending a non-effect to run a cooperating data scientist ragged by revising their claimed expectations.
Back to our XCOM analysis. We said the strategy is to propose a summary and compute its significance. There are a few great ways to do this: empirical re-sampling, permutation tests and simulation. We will use simulation. We will write new code to generate hit outcomes directly from the published probabilities:
library(ggplot2) simulateC <- function(x) { # x = probabilities simHits <- ifelse(runif(length(x))<=x,1,0) sum(simHits) } simulateC(d$hit.probability/100.0) drawsC <- sapply(1:10000,function(x) simulateC(d$hit.probability/100.0)) mean(drawsC) sC = sum(d$hit) ggplot() + geom_histogram(aes(x=drawsC)) + geom_vline(x=sC)
The above R-code runs the simulation 10,000 times and plots the histogram of how often different numbers of hits show up. Our game experience is added to the graph as a vertical line. The graph is given below:
In the above graph the mass to right of the vertical line is how often a random re-simulation saw a count of at least as many hits as us. This is called the “one sided tail” and if there is a lot of mass in this tail then we were not that unlikely (not very significant) and if there is not much mass in this tail our measurement was very rare and very significant. The R commands to compute the mass in the tail are easy:
eC <- ecdf(drawsC) 1 - eC(sC)
This turns out to be 2.78%. The R-command “ ecdf() ” returns a function that computes the amount of mass below a given threshold. So eC(S) gives us the amount of mass not more than S (a “left tail” if S is small), 1-eC(L) gives us the right tail and eC(S) + 1 - eC(L) gives us the mass in both tails (or the two-sided tail).
Note: trusting the simulation significance results means you are trusting the pseudo random generator used to produce them (in this case R’s generator). The only ways to avoid trusting your test pseudo random generator is to use a trusted true-random entropy source or to deliberately pick a test where you know the exact expected theoretical shape of the cumulative distribution. Statisticians are the masters of exact theoretical tests and usually pick from a very limited set of summary statistics (counts, means, standard deviations) so they can apply known theoretical test distributions (t-tests, f-tests and so on).
Our p-value of 0.0278 is considered significant. The usual rule of thumb is that p ≤ 0.05 is considered significant). Notice we are using an empirical p-value (re-simulating generation of hits from the assumed distribution) instead of a parametric p-value (assuming a distribution of the outcomes and using the theoretical mean and a theoretical variance). Empirical p-values much better to explain (they are a sampling of what would exactly happen if you repeated the null-experiment again and again) and so easy to compute that there is really no reason to use the distributional methods (Normal, Student-t, chi-Sq or so on) until you are repeating the calculation very many times. It saves one level of explanations to directly estimate the significance through re-simulation than to bring in “the standard approximations” (and their attendant assumptions).
One important consideration is that we didn’t specify before running this experiment that we thought we would experience above-average luck (in fact we came in thinking we were getting ripped off, so we were looking for a low hit count). So we should be looking either at “two sided tails” (accept mass from both counts ≤ of of the distribution measure how far we were from the mean in absolute value terms) or at least double our p-value to 0.0556 to respect that we implicitly ran two experiments. The p-value for the two sided tail is gotten as follows:
expectation <- sum(d$hit.probability/100.0) diff <- abs(sum(d$hit)-expectation) eC(expectation-diff) + (1-eC(expectation+diff))
Which is 0.0646 (or even worse than the 2*p correction). What this means is that: if we had started the experiment with the hypothesis that XCOM was under-reporting hit probabilities (or equivalently cheating in our favor) we had collected just enough data to reject the null hypothesis (that XCOM is perfectly fair) according to standard clinical standards (which I have never liked, as they are far too lenient). However we started with the hypothesis that XCOM was over-reporting hit probabilities (or cheating in its own favor) and switched hypothesis when we saw our hit count was high. Under this situation we did not collect enough data to reject the null hypothesis as the 2-side p-value is 0.0646 and the corrected 1-sided p-value becomes 0.0556 (both above the middling 0.05 standard). We would not expect to have to double our data to get better p-values (as p-values fall fast when you add data), but if we were to continue to collect data we should know our hypothesis has not been taken from the data (so we should probably use the 2-sided p-value and still multiply by an additional 2 as we have already run a few experiments or done some venue shopping on this data). Also, remember if XCOM is fair all experiments will look equivocal- fail to prove it is unfair but not quite look fair. So really we have seen nothing to be suspicious about at this point. It is a strange but true fact that statistics is an intentional science: what you know and how much of the data you have snooped really does affect the actual objective significances you experience. If you fail to put in some sort of compensation for how many experiments you have run and how often you switched measurement or hypothesis you will mis-report the ideal theoretical significance of a single clean room experiment (that you really did not run) as the significance of the entangled combination of measurements you actually did implement.
Part of the reason we are being so cagey accepting differences (but you always should be so), is that we strongly suspect (due to the forensic science study of Yawning Angel) that the generator is in fact fair. At least it is fair in a total sense (we are not testing for state-driven cheating or streaks).
Another summary we could look at (instead of total counts) is total surprise. This is a metric more sensitive to effects like “I swear I miss 80% shots half the time, how is that fair?” The surprise of an outcome is the negative of the logarithm (base 2) of the probability of the given outcome. Hitting an 80% shot has low surprise: -log_2(0.8) = 0.32 whereas missing an 80% shot has a high surprise -log_2(1-0.8) = 2.32. The total surprise for the shot sequence I observed is given by:
surprise <- function(x,o) { # x = probabilities, o=actual outcomes sum(ifelse(o>=0.5,-log(x,base=2),-log(1-x,base=2))) } s <- surprise(d$hit.probability/100.0,d$hit)
This turns out to be 153.7. So we have a new summary statistic, we now need to know if it is significantly large or small. The theoretical expected surprise of a sequence of probabilities is a quantity called the entropy and this is given by:
entropy <- function(x) { # x = probabilities ifelse(x<=0,0.0,ifelse(x>=1,0,-x*log(x,base-2) - (1-x)*log(1-x,base=2))) } sum(entropy(d$hit.probability/100.0))
The information theoretic entropy is 164.8. So our experienced surprise is in fact lower than expected, outcomes tended to go the majority direction slightly more often than expected (not less as missing a lot of near sure things would entail). We can again use empirical simulation to get the distribution of expected entropies and estimate the signficance:
simulate <- function(x) { simHits <- ifelse(runif(length(x))<=x,1,0) surprise(x,simHits) } simulate(d$hit.probability/100.0) draws <- sapply(1:10000,function(x) simulate(d$hit.probability/100.0)) ggplot() + geom_density(aes(x=draws),adjust=0.5) + geom_vline(x=s)
Again we see that we are not a very rare event in terms of the possible distributions of surprise:
In fact even the one-sided p-value is quite large (and poor) at 0.1 ( e <- ecdf(draws); e(s) ), let alone the more appropriate two-sided tail probability.
An additional thing to look for: is can we build a useful probability re-mapping table for the reported probabilities? We know the totals are mostly right and the outcomes of near-certain and rare events are largely right. Could there be some band of predictions that is biased (say the 70% to 80% range)? This is also easy to do in R:
ggplot(data=d,aes(x=hit.probability/100.0,y=hit)) + geom_point(size=5,alpha=0.5,position=position_jitter(w = 0.01, h = 0.01)) + geom_smooth() + geom_abline(slope=1) + opts(aspect.ratio=1) + scale_x_continuous(limits=c(0,1)) + scale_y_continuous(limits=c(0,1))
This produces the following figure:
The x-axis is the game-reported hit probability, the y-axis is the observed probabilities (always either 0 or 1 as each hit either happens or does not). Each black circle represents one of our recorded observations. The blue line with error-band is the spline-fit relation. It is estimating the ratio of hits to misses as a function of the stated predicted hit probability. Early on the blue curve is low because most black dots are at y=0, for higher x the curve pulls up proportional to fraction of points at y=1. Notice how close the blue curve is to the black line y=x and the error bar hardly pulls off the black line except in the 0.5 to 0.7 region. So maybe mid-values are slightly under predicted, but we don’t have enough data to say so (and more data would probably just show a new tighter correspondence instead of confirming this divergence). A similar plot can be made using the GAM package, but it is harder to get the error bars.
This graph, which is the kind of thing the data scientist should look at points out yet another data deficiency in our study. The distribution of shots probabilities attempted is given as best for play, possibly not best for analysis (a property of all real data when you don’t get complete control over the experimental design). The distribution (again represented as a density) of the shots I attempted is given below:
(for how to read density plots see My Favorite Graphs).
The core purpose of the article hasn’t so much been the analysis of XCOM itself, but to show how to analyze this type of data. We have emphasized methods that can deal with many different probabilities at the same time (as opposed to binning) in the interest of “statistical efficiency.” That is: to get the most results out of what little data we have. This is always important when you are producing annotated data, which is always going to be per-unit expensive, even in this “age of big data.” Finding usable relations and biases is the exciting part of data science, but one of the responsibilities of the data scientist is protecting the rest of their organization from the ruinous effect of pursuing spurious relations. You really don’t want to report a relation where there was none.
(edit: Cool “save scum” feature added to later XCOM games, some details here. Also the statistician’s versio of “save scumming” is called things like “venue shopping” or “failing to apply the Bonferroni correction.”)
Like this: Like Loading...When you think of some of the more memorable amateur qualifiers from recent US Open Cups, you probably think of teams from California like PSA Elite or Cal FC; the latter did pull off the most memorable run in recent years back in 2012 with an upset of the Portland Timbers. You might also be familiar with Harpo’s FC, the somewhat notorious pub side from Boulder, Colorado. If you’re on the East Coast, maybe you prefer New York Pancyprian Freedoms and their historic title winning sides of the 1980s.
No matter what your level of familiarity with the Open Cup is, you might end up overlooking the youth soccer hotbed of North Texas.
Case in point: North Texas (NTX) Rayados.
NTX Rayados probably aren’t even the most well-known amateur team in their home city of Dallas. Open Cup fans might remember Dallas Roma FC’s then-historic run of three wins back in 2006 when they took down MLS side Chivas USA on penalty kicks and then ultimately lost to LA’s other MLS club, the Galaxy, in the fourth round.
That run in 2006 inspired former Richland College teammates Tito Salas and Raul Herrera to form a new team in the summer of 2011 comprised of friends and other Richland College players in the area who wanted to compete at a high level. Richland College was a National Junior College Athletic Association Division III power back in the mid-2000’s and former players like Salas and Herrera were anxious to continue challenging themselves. They won the North Texas Premier Soccer Association 1A title in their first season and have qualified for the Open Cup every year since, setting a new Modern Era (1995-present) record for consecutive appearances by an open division amateur side.
“We try to stay simple and keep the same base of boys playing to compete,” said Salas, who is the team’s general manager and player/coach. “As we know that we are only getting older, we try to keep the youth involved with us. I think that people around the community see us involved in many different activities as well. A few of us are public school teachers, others are actively coaching within the metroplex, not to mention the NTX Rayados Youth academy one of our players just started.”
Antonio Rodriguez, who is not on the Rayados roster this year, launched the academy with seven teams from as young as four years old up to the Under-16 level.
“The boys are very humble, very simple guys that never give you an impression that we are better than any other amateur team around here,” said Salas. “Several teams around Dallas now claim to be semi-pro, yet never get to compete at the level that we have.”
According to Salas, the team is also proud of the fact that so many of the players on the team have used their soccer talents to earn college degrees. This foundation of their friendships and their love for the game has been what has kept the club going over the years.
While Salas is listed as the team’s general manager and head coach, the team receives a lot of support both on and off the field from assistant coach Humberto Rodriguez. Sales describes Rodriguez as “another hard working, humble man that simply enjoys watching us play. He has been there since day one, and we really appreciate his support. Would not be able to do it without him.” (He’s the white-haired man in the team photo at the top of the page).
The team actually did not participate in the highly-competitive North Texas Premier Soccer Association this past season. Salas says numerous injuries combined with a lack of player availability. They have scheduled a number of exhibition games to stay fresh. They played against teams like Dallas City FC, FC Dallas Academy teams, the NPSL’s Tulsa Athletics, Texas Spurs and will be playing against local rivals Legends FC and Liverpool Warriors before the match on the 11th.
They have also entered multiple tournaments like the Metro PCS Cup. They won the tournament which gave them a cash prize that will help them pay for their US Open Cup run. They will also be taking part in the Copa Alianza, another Dallas-based tournament that they have won three of the last four years.
Much like Dallas Roma FC, NTX Rayados drew the inspiration for their name from a professional club; in this case Mexican giants C.F. Monterrey. The team simply went by “Rayados” in their first season but then quickly decided to add “NTX” in order to broadcast their home base of Dallas. The team does feature a roster loaded with Mexican influence, but several players of English descent have graced their roster over the years. They want to honor their favorite Liga MX side, but they also want the best of the best regardless of heritage. Key players on this team include goalkeeper Eduardo Cortes and striker Alberto Rodriguez. Both entered the 2016 MLS draft but unfortunately for them, and fortunately for the Rayados, they weren’t selected. Rodriguez scored three goals during the 2014 US Open Cup (tied for third-most in the tournament), including two scores and the game-winning kick in the penalty shootout against the Austin Aztex. Returning players include Jamie Lovegrove and Kevin Ellis and left back Fernando Garza, who also play with the Dallas Sidekicks indoor team.
Even with February’s announcement about MLS-owned USL teams no longer being eligible to compete opening up more amateur side spots, NTX Rayados still had an easier path to the first round than most. They defeated Austin Real Cuauhtemoc 4-2 on Nov. 1, 2015 after the initial match the week before was postponed due to heavy rain and flooding in the Texas capital. Joshean “Yoshi” Gonzalez scored twice to help seal the deal and that was the last time the team had an Open Cup match. Their second round of qualifying saw them advance after International Portland Select (IPS) had to forfeit because they couldn’t make the 2,000 mile trip to Dallas. IPS had reached Round 2 because their opening round opponent, KC Athletics, had to drop out because they couldn’t make the long trip to Oregon. Travel was an issue for a few open division amateur teams that entered the qualifying process this year.
Despite their sustained excellence in qualifying, NTX Rayados haven’t had much success in the tournament itself. They’ve only managed to advance past their first game once since their qualifying streak began back in 2012. In 2014 they took down Austin Aztex (PDL) in a thrilling 4-4 game that ended with Rayados advancing via the penalty shootout. The victory was sweet for the North Texas side given that Austin crushed them 3-0 in the previous year. Rayados went on to put up a spirited fight against the NASL’s San Antonio Scorpions but ended up losing 4-2. This year they find themselves paired with another team from San Antonio: Corinthians FC of San Antonio. The Red and Black Rayados will be hoping this is the year they can finally make a sustained run and announce themselves as a true Open Cup amateur power.The murder on Tuesday of the Indian journalist Gauri Lankesh, a fearless critic of rising Hindu-nationalist militancy, has all the hallmarks of a hit job.
“The message and not to independent journalists but to all dissenters is loud and clear,” tweeted Sidharth Bhatia, founding editor of the Indian online news site The Wire. “We are watching you and one day we will get you.”
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has let a climate of mob rule flourish in India, with his right-wing Hindu supporters vilifying “secularists.” The venom that reactionary social media trolls direct at journalists, or “presstitutes” as they call them, is especially vicious, but not entirely new. At least 27 Indian journalists have been killed since 1992 “in direct retaliation for their work,” according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Only one of the killers has been convicted.
Still, Ms. Lankesh’s murder shocked India’s news media and set off protest marches in several Indian cities. “Journalists are increasingly the targets of online smear campaigns by the most radical nationalists, who vilify them and even threaten physical reprisals,” Reporters Without Borders said.While a bystander’s YouTube video shows the kick that a St. Paul police officer delivered to a man lying on the ground last year, a newly released squad car video is the first public glimpse of what happened in the car’s back seat.
The video shows another St. Paul officer drag the handcuffed man into the car by the hair and pepper-spray him in his ear.
Eric Hightower reacts by screaming, “He sprayed me in my ear. Ahhhh! Ahhhh, sir! My ear, my eye! Please!”
Hightower was resisting being placed in the squad car when officer Matthew Gorans stepped in, according to prosecutors who reviewed the case and declined to file charges against him or officer Jesse Zilge, who kicked Hightower.
Police conducted an internal affairs investigation, and Chief Thomas Smith recently decided to fire Gorans and suspend Zilge for 30 days, sources said. However, the discipline isn’t final because the officers are going through the union grievance process and they remain listed as St. Paul police employees.
Jeff Martin, St. Paul NAACP president, said Monday that the officers should lose their jobs.
“As a taxpayer in St. Paul, I don’t want that type of officer protecting and serving my interests,” he said.
St. Paul Police Federation attorney Chris Wachtler said in a statement that officers in the case were “dealing with a known dangerous individual who refused to follow directives, at a time when very dangerous conditions posed a threat to officer safety.”
An earlier, unrelated internal affairs investigation found Gorans used excessive force in a 2010 arrest of a man who later sued the city. The suit was settled in 2012 for $249,000.
Smith suspended Gorans for three days after that investigation, writing in a May 2012 letter about that case: “Your actions displayed not only conduct unbecoming a St. Paul police officer, but actions that indicate a lack of self-control. … Future acts of the same, or similar, behavior will result in increased discipline up to and including termination.”
The more recent internal affairs investigation of Zilge and Gorans followed the Aug. 28 arrest of Hightower, 31, after he allegedly threatened an ex-girlfriend.
A recording of the arrest taken by a friend of Hightower’s and posted on YouTube showed Zilge kicking the man. Gorans’ actions in the back of the squad car weren’t seen in the video.
‘I’M BURNING, MAN!’
Zilge, who was the first officer on the scene, told officers heading to assist him that a crowd was forming, and he asked officers to step it up, according to police radio traffic that can be heard on a video.
Zilge was aware that Hightower had been combative with police in the past, according to a review by the Olmsted County attorney’s office, which reviewed the case to avoid a conflict of interest for its Ramsey County counterpart.
The newly released squad car video, in which a camera was trained on the back seat of Zilge’s squad, shows what happened when officers tried to get Hightower into the car. Hightower can be heard saying he did nothing wrong and an officer telling him, “Have a seat.” Hightower does not.
Hightower then asks police, “Please wipe my face, please?” Zilge had used a chemical spray on Hightower while was trying to arrest him, when Hightower refused orders to lie on the ground, the county attorney’s review said.
On the video, officers are heard shouting at Hightower to get in the squad car. Hightower refuses and says, “Man, what am I being arrested for? I ain’t did nothing wrong.”
Gorans goes around to the other side of the squad car and, reaching across the back seat, pulls Hightower by his shirt.
Someone can be heard saying, “Head first then, head first then.” Hightower says that he will sit.
Gorans pulls Hightower into the car by his hair and pepper-sprays him in his ear.
Zilge drives Hightower to the Ramsey County jail. During the five-minute ride, Hightower continues screaming. Zilge tells Hightower to calm down.
Hightower asks again during the ride to jail why he is being arrested. Zilge tells him it was because of what he did the night before. When Hightower asks another time, Zilge says, “I told you, Eric, several times. Either you’re not getting it or you’re dumb.”
At another point, Hightower says to Zilge, “I’m burning, man! Please hurry up. I’m burning! My eye and my ear!”
He asks Zilge, “Please, can you squirt some water back here, please?” As they arrive at the jail, Hightower pleads to have someone wipe his eyes.
EXPERT: SPRAY IN EAR UNNEEDED
St. Paul police policy says officers can use Aerosol Subject Restraint (a chemical irritant) when “a uniformed and/or command presence, and/or soft empty hand options prove ineffective or unfeasible under the circumstances … to achieve a suspect’s control and compliance.”
The policy does not require that suspects sprayed with the chemical be taken to a medical facility. They are to “be put in front of a fan in the headquarters’ garage or at the Ramsey County Law Enforcement Center until they are able to keep their eyes open,” the policy says.
Greg Connor, a retired police officer and former University of Illinois Police Training Institute professor who taught officers in use of force, said he has never heard of officers being trained to spray a chemical irritant into someone’s ear and doesn’t know why an officer would do it.
Officers normally are trained to spray the suspect’s face in order to incapacitate the person long enough to be handcuffed or forced to the ground.
Connor, who viewed the video Monday, said because most of Hightower’s body was already in the squad car when he was sprayed, he didn’t see why the chemical spray was needed.
Connor said he found the focus of the spray into the ear to be inappropriate.
Martin of the NAACP questioned why police refused Hightower’s request to wipe off his face.
“What’s the purpose of doing that to another human being who is cuffed in the back of a squad car, who is not going to harm any other human being?” he asked. “It’s simple basic humanity.”
St. Paul police spokesman Howie Padilla said the department couldn’t discuss actions seen on the video because of an ongoing internal investigation.
Police released the videos in response to a Pioneer Press request. The police union said it objected to their release, saying it violates the state’s Peace Officer Discipline Procedures Act.
“Any member of the public viewing the video or the pictures out of context and apart from the rest of the investigation and circumstances surrounding the Hightower arrest could easily draw false conclusions about what occurred,” said Wachtler, the police union attorney.
“The release could also prejudice any grievance process … from discipline that may be imposed in this case.”
Padilla said the department consulted with attorneys before releasing the videos.
The police department hasn’t said what the chief decided as a result of the internal affairs investigation of Zilge and Gorans.
Under state law, disciplinary action against public employees becomes public when a final disposition is reached. Discipline is not imposed officially until after appeals are exhausted.
HIGHTOWER PLEADED GUILTY
The county attorney’s review of the case found “insufficient proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that either Zilge or Gorans “used unreasonable force during the arrest of Hightower.”
But Martin said for the actions to have been captured on video and “for these officers not to be charged takes away faith we have in the criminal justice system to be fair and impartial. To say they didn’t go beyond what they were called to do, I think is ludicrous.”
Wachtler said the “officers involved in the Hightower arrest acted within policy, and pursuant to their training.”
The Olmsted County attorney’s office review said that when Zilge encountered Hightower, the man wasn’t following commands and eventually got on the ground but not onto his stomach as Zilge had ordered. Zilge kicked Hightower in the upper chest as he moved in to handcuff him.
When officers had Hightower on his feet, the man turned his body in a way that police “characterized as an effort to head-butt Officer Zilge,” the review said. “The two officers act quickly and take Hightower towards a nearby squad car and force his upper body onto the hood of the squad car.”
As officers tried to get Hightower into the back of the squad car, Hightower resisted and Gorans went around to the other side, crawled across the back seat, grabbed Hightower and pulled his upper body onto the seat, the county attorney’s review said. Hightower’s feet were still outside the car, and two officers were trying to get his feet into the car.
“At that point(,) Officer Gorans uses his Mace and sprays it into Hightower’s face and right ear,” the review said. Officers were then able to get Hightower completely into the car.
The county attorney’s review also said, “Medical personnel suspect that Hightower had a punctured ear drum but the medical reports are inconsistent in this diagnosis.”
Hightower pleaded guilty in May to gross misdemeanor domestic assault in the case he was being arrested for in August and is to be sentenced July 18. He is in prison for violating probation on an unrelated 2011 assault charge.
Federal officials have been looking into possible civil rights violations in the arrest. The local FBI office recently sent results of its investigation to the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota to consider whether charges are warranted, according to the FBI.
Mara H. Gottfried can be reached at 651-228-5262. Follow her at twitter.com/MaraGottfried or twitter.com/ppUsualSuspects.(Police say everyone appears to be accounted for, one person may have suffered minor injuries, details from the scene)
NEW YORK, Feb 25 (Reuters) - A three-story building undergoing construction work partially collapsed on Manhattan’s West Side on Wednesday, and rescuers appeared to have accounted for everyone at the rubble-strewn site, New York authorities said.
One person may have suffered minor injuries, said a spokesman for the New York City Police Department at the scene.
A half dozen firefighters lifted in the buckets of so-called cherry-picker trucks were using power tools to saw through scaffolding that had collapsed around the site at 57th Street near 11th Avenue.
Search and rescue dogs were sent to the scene, according to NY1 television. By late afternoon, everyone was believed to be accounted for, the police spokesman said.
The report of a partial collapse came at 2:37 p.m. EST, the fire department spokesman said.
He said the building appeared to be a construction site. (Reporting by Laila Kearney, Barbara Goldberg and Ellen Wulfhorst; Editing by Paul Thomasch and Bill Trott)In the eternal balancing act of Canadian Liberalism, it’s a week for tilting left. One after another, cabinet ministers are lining up to resuscitate programs that please the Liberal base and that the Harper Conservatives fought tooth and nail. On Monday, Health Minister Jane Philpott announced approval for three supervised drug injection sites in Montreal. They’ll open in the spring, and bring the total number of such facilities in the country to five. A Vancouver site received Health Canada approval for supervised injection 13 months ago. Insite, the country’s first supervised-injection facility, opened in Vancouver after it received federal approval in 2003.
Former prime minister Stephen Harper's Stephen Conservatives fought for years to stop injection sites. His government also killed the Court Challenges Program. Both programs have been relaunched |
the "Notification Options" heading of the FBP options screen, titled "Sort Notifications Chronologically" that will do exactly that.
Is there any way of stopping Facebook from merging multiple posts from a specific user into one post in the Newsfeed? (e.g Friend X posted 12 updates)
Yes, click the "Newsfeed" link in the left column, then select "Friends Feed", in the Friends feed your friend's posts should appear separately (although you may not like the fact that on top of that, this feed also splits up album posts into separate posts for each image).
When someone posts multiple images at a time or an album to the Newsfeed, instead of appearing as a single post, the images are showing up as separate individual posts, how can I stop this?
This is the way Facebook has designed the "Friends Feed" to work, if you don't want that to happen, don't view the "Friends Feed", and also turn off FBP's "News Sort: Friends Feed" option.
Can I use F.B. Purity to filter out all foreign language posts from my newsfeed?
Yes, you can as long as the foreign language post has the "See Translation" or "Rate Translation" link (or the equivalent in whichever language you have facebook set to, you can put the text See Translation and Rate Translation into the Custom Text Filter box on separate lines, and it will filter out all foreign language posts from your newsfeed.
Can I turn off Facebook's notification sounds?
Facebook has a built in option for turning off the notification sounds, you can access it here
How can I turn off / hide / filter Facebook Questions & Answers posts (and Polls) from my news feed?
You can hide Facebook Questions / Polls and Answser posts from showing up in your newsfeeds by ticking the "Hide Facebook Questions" option on the FB Purity options screen. (Please note if you don't have your Facebook interface set to English, it wont work, and you will either have to set the interface to English or else put your own Custom Text into the Custom Text Filter to filter these and other "extras" out.)
Can I stop Facebook automatically adding topics to my posts?
Facebook have not released this topics functionality to everyone yet, it seems its just being tested on a small group of people at present, and I don't have it on my account yet. There is currently no way to stop this behaviour.
Why isn't the hide sponsored box option hiding the ads?
Check that you have the latest version of FBP installed, as Facebook often update the code for the ads section, which means FB Purity needs to be updated to hide the ads again, also check the FBP fan page for any news as the CSS/Code of the page may have changed. If you are using Facebook with a language other than English, you will need to either set your Facebook language to English, or put the word for Sponsored in your language, into FB Purity's "Text Filter" box. If those things dont work, and/or the ads say "Ads not by facebook" or something similar, its possible that you have installed a sneaky program known as "Adware" or "Malware" that inserts adverts into web pages that you view. To get rid of those ads, you should run an Anti Malware scanner, such as Super AntiSpyware, or MalwareBytes Antimalware.Facebook has now introduced video ads that show up in the middle of videos that you watch on Facebook, the latest version of FBP (V26) adds a "Watch vid (no ads)" link above videos in the Newsfeed that contain such ads, which when clicked lets you view the video ad free.
Why doesn't the hide Chat box feature work?
Facebook now has it's own built in option for hiding the Chat Interface. To access it you need to click the "cogwheel" button at the very bottom of the chat sidebar panel to open the chat options, one of those options is to hide the chat interface. Also, If you don't want the small chat tabs to open up at the bottom of your facebook screen whenever anyone sends you a message, you need to tick the "Full Screen Chat" option, under Chat options on the FBP options screen.
Can I disable or remove the poke feature of facebook
You cant disable it or remove the poke feature or stop people from poking you on facebook. You can delete invdividual pokes by clicking the "x" next to them, but if you do that it means that person can then poke you again. The best thing to do is to ignore the pokes, as if you don't poke back or delete the poke, that person cannot poke you again. The problem with this is Facebook do not give you a way to hide the poke box on the right hand side of the screen. Luckily FB Purity has an option to do this, look under the "Hide links in right hand column" section of the FBP options screen, for the hide Pokes option
Can I use FB Purity to remove / hide "Stickers" and "Emoticons" in chat / messaging?
Yes, FB Purity has an option to hide all emoticons and stickers on Facebook.
When I visit a "Fan Page" aka a "Page" on Facebook, a chat / message box appears saying "'PageName' is active now. Start a conversation." is there any way to stop this?
Yes, turn on FBP's "Full Screen Chat" option, this will get rid of that box. The option is located under the "Chat Options" heading on the FBP options screen
Can I hide Facebook generated posts that are titled "Popular Across Facebook"
When scrolling through my feed I sometimes see a box saying "Posts From Across Facebook" then after that lots of posts from Pages I have not liked, can FBP hide them?
Yes, tick the hide "" option, located under the "" heading on the FBP options screen. If that doesn't work try putting the text Popular Across Facebook into FBP's Text Filter box.Yes, as those posts are "Fan Page" posts, you can tick FBP's hide "Fan Page Posts" newsfeed filter option, please note that will also hide posts from Pages that you have actually liked, however you can view posts from Pages you have liked in a separate feed called the "Pages Feed", which you can access by clicking the link in the left column of the newsfeed, or clicking the "Pages Feed" menu item in the dropdown menu next to the Newsfeed button at the top of the left column.
Is there anything FBP can do about the "Keep scrolling for more posts from across Facebook" thing with the picture of the rocket ship that appears in the newsfeed?
No, apart from filtering out that specific thing with the Text Filter, by putting the text that appears in the box into the FBP's Text Filter, but all that will do is hide that specific box, it won't stop your newsfeed from being cut off, which is what facebook is effectively doing when that appears in your newsfeed.
Is there anything FBP can do about the newsfeed being cut off with the message "There are no more posts to show right now."
No. This message usually shows if you have your newsfeed set to "Most Recent". Facebook does not like its users viewing the "Most Recent" feed, they prefer it if you view the Newsfeed sorted by "Top Stories", so they do all they can to discourage their users from viewing the "Most Recent" feed, including not listing the posts in correct Chronological Order and also cutting the feed off short. The only real solution to this problem, to see more posts, you can try reloading the page until that message goes away, or else view some of the other available feeds, such as the "Pages Feed" or "Groups Feed" etc.
Can I hide the new Reactions bar that shows the different types of "like" but you can now click?
Yes, FBP lets you do this, just tick the Hide "Reactions Bar" option
Can I Customize the Reaction Images on Facebook with FB Purity?
Yes you can, the latest version of FB Purity lets you set Custom Reaction Images, you can even use animated Reaction images, see the Customize Facebook Reaction Images Page for more info.
Can I hide the new "Reacted to" post types that are now showing in the Newsfeed.
Yes, FBP lets you do this, just tick corresponding hide "Liked" option in the "Newsfeed Options" section of the FBP options screen, as "reactions" are just "fancy" likes.
Can I hide the "Links you may like" box in the newsfeed
Yes, just put the textinto FBP's Text Filter box, then click "Save and Close"
Can I hide "Check Ins", the "Check In" / "Travelling to/Travelled to" Posts that show with little maps from the newsfeed with FBP?
Yes, Tick the Hide "" option, under the "" heading on the FBP options screen.
What if I don't want to hide "Check-Ins" completely, i just want to hide the map section of the check in and the location bar section at the bottom of check-in posts, is that possible?
/* Hide the map section of a check in post*/
#stream_pagelet a[rel="dialog"][ajaxify^="/places/map/?id="] {display:none} /* Hide the location bar section of a check in post*/
#stream_pagelet div.userContentWrapper div._4-u3._2ph_ {display:none}
Can I stop Animated Gifs from Autoplaying? or Hide / Block them completely?
Facebook has recently started autoplaying Animated Gifs even if you have specifically turned off the Facebook video autoplay option. This is very annoying indeed. FBP cant stop the GIFs from playing, but you can hide the Gifs in comments completely with some Custom CSS code, which you can find on the FBP CSS page
How can I get rid of the Scoreboard showing sports team scores in the right hand column?
The scoreboard should have an "X" on it, clicking it should hide or minimise the scoreboard. FB Purity also has an option to hide the "Today's Games" box, the option is located under the "Hide Right Column Links" heading.
Why do some elements of the page (such as graphs on "Page Insights") become hidden when I set the background colour in the fbp options?
If you set the background colour to be slightly transparent, using the following CSS colour function "" (without the quotes) in place of a colour name, in the background colour box, the elements should no longer be hidden. the way the colour function works is the first 3 numbers are the red, green and blue components, and the last number is the transparency value, which has a range from zero to one, 0 being completely transparent and 1 being completely solid.
How can I set a background image for Facebook?
The easiest way to do this, is to first turn on the "Show'set as background' button" option under the "Font, Colours & Design" heading on the FBP options screen, then go to any image on Facebook (or upload the image you want to use to Facebook) then look for the "Set as Background" link/button (it will either be under the photo or to the right of it, depending on which image viewing mode you are in) and click it. To remove a background image, either go back to the image page and the "set as background" button, should now say "remove background", which if clicked should remove the background image, or else just open the FBP options screen and un-tick the "" box next to the background image option (under the "Font, Color & Design" heading of the FBP options screen), then click "".
If I set a background image with FB Purity, or change the colours or fonts can other people view it too when they visit my profile/timeline page?
No, FBP only affects what you see in your own web browser.
Why doesn't the FBP button in the Chrome Extensions toolbar do anything? and why does it show at all?
By default all chrome extensions that are installed display an icon in the Chrome extensions toolbar (the bit next to the address/URL bar). You will notice that the icon is greyed out and clicking it doesnt do anything. The reason for this is because FBP is a cross browser extension, that works across many different browsers and each browser has a different method for opening extension's options, that means its easier to have a single method for opening the FBP options screen that works across all the different browser versions of FBP without the need to code a new method for each browser. The way to open FBP's options is to click the FBP link in the blue bar (known as the top nav (navigation) bar at the top of any Facebook page. You can easily hide the FBP icon in the Chrome extensions toolbar, by "right clicking" on it and selecting the "Hide" option.
What should I do if I accidentally set the background colour and the font colour to the same color, and can no longer see any text?
document.getElementById('fbpfreestyler').textContent=''
Locate where the FBP link, for opening the options screen, would normally be in the top nav bar next to right of the home link, and click it, when your mouse is over the link, it should display the version number of the currently installed version of FBP. On the FBP Options screen, simply un-tick the two checkboxes next to where the colour options for font and background are, and then click the "Save and close" button. Failing that, "right click" anywhere on the page and select "Inspect Element" then click the "Console" tab, then enter the following command into the Console:That will temporarily reset FBPs style and Custom CSS data, allowing you to see the page again.
If I make a mistake with the Custom CSS or FBP's colour and or background image options and can no longer see the page clearly to open the FBP options so i can reset my changes, what should I do?
document.getElementById('fbpfreestyler').textContent=''
Right click anywhere on the page and select "Inspect Element" then click the "Console" tab and enter the following line of codethat will temporarily reset FBP's style and Custom CSS data, allowing you to see the page again and open the FBP options screen again, so you can change your settings back.
Can I hide Sponsored Posts and Facebook Offers from my news feed?
Yes you can, by default FB Purity hides all Sponsored posts and "Offers" posts such as "Claimed an Offer" or "Posted an Offer" from your newsfeed, this because they are basically ads, if you don't want them hidden, un-tick the "Hide Sponsored Box / Posts" option.
Can I hide the "(i)" ( About this website / About this article / About this link ) button that shows on posts in the Newsfeed?
Yes you can, check the FBP CSS page for some custom CSS code that you can use to hide it.
Can I hide "Games your friends are playing" / "Games You May Like" posts from showing up in my Facebook newsfeed?
FB Purity will hide those post types from showing in your newsfeed, if you have the hide "" option ticked. (If this is not working for you try putting the text "Games your friends are playing" into FBP's Custom Text filter (without the quotes).
Can I hide the "Set as Background" link that FBP adds to the bottom of images?
Yes, the latest version of FBP (v26) no longer shows the "Set As Background" link by default, but if you wish to see it, you now need to turn on the option to show it, the option is located under the "Font, Colour & Style" heading on the FBP options screen.
Is it possible to filter out photo/image posts based on the contents of the image?
Yes! FB Purity lets you filter out photo/image posts based on the contents of the image. Open the "" section of the FBP options screen, to edit setup the image content filtering options. At present the available built in image content filters are "cat photo, dog photo, baby photo, child, smoking, selfie, meme (image with text embedded), happy couple (2 people smiling), car, food photo. There is also a free text box, that lets you enter a comma separated list of other photo subjects you would like to filter out. This functionality is based on Facebook's artificial intelligence image classification system. Their system doesn't always get it right, so expect to see a few images get past the filters, and a few images to get misclassified. In theory the AI should improve over time. If you want to know what categories each image has been labelled with, turn on the "" option (at the bottom of the "Photo Posts" section of the FBP options screen, and when you hover over an image in an image post in the newsfeed, the categories Facebook's algorithm has chosen for that image will be displayed.
Can I hide "Friendship Anniversary" aka "Friends with Person Z for X years" type posts, where people make a post showing how long they have been friends with someone?
Friends with.* on Facebook for \d+ Years.*See Friendship
Yes you can, put the following text into FBP's Text Filter box:. Alternatively, if you tick the Hide "Your Memories" option on the FBP options screen, that will also hide these types of posts.
Can I hide "Upcoming Events" from showing up in my Facebook newsfeed?
FB Purity has an option for hiding Upcoming Events, its under the Events heading in the Newsfeed filters section.
Is it possible to block posts from a Facebook Page / Facebook Group / Facebook Event or Website from showing up in my newsfeed?
Yes, you can use the Custom Text Filter to achieve this. Just put the name of the Page / Group or Event (or in the case of a website, the domain name e.g) into FBP's Text Filter box, and FBP will filter out any posts from that entity
How can I hide the Marketplace box in the right hand column?
Tick the hide Marketplace option, located under the "Left Column Links" heading on the FBP options screen, and as well as hiding the Marketplace link in the left column, it will also hide the various Marketplace boxes on the right hand side (including "Top Picks on Marketplace","Recently Viewed on Marketplace" and "Still Available on Marketplace".
Can I hide the new "Like Suggestions" Bar that shows up after I click the like button on a Facebook Page?
FB Purity will hide the "Like Suggestions" Bar, if you have the "hide sponsored box" option ticked.
Can I hide the new "Suggested For You" Box that shows up in the right column of the Newsfeed?
FB Purity will hide the "Suggested For You" Box, if you have the Hide "Sponsored Box / Posts" option ticked.
Can I sort the Pages Feed in chronological/ correct time order?
Yes, FBP can let you do this. When viewing the Pages Feed, if you press the "" key on the keyboard, FBP will sort the currently loaded posts in that feed into Chronological order.
Can I hide the "Page Suggestions" Bar that shows up at the top of the Pages Feed?
Yes, see the Custom CSS page for instructions on how to do that.
I haven't chosen to hide the news ticker in the right hand column, but its not showing, whats going on?
Facebook have now completely removed the news ticker for everyone and there is no way to get it back.
Does FB Purity's feed filtering functionality work on Groups pages?
No, FB Purity does not currently work on Group's pages, maybe one day it will, but it will be a lot of work to add it, so currently no, it doesn't. You can however use Custom CSS that will affect Group pages, if you understand how to use CSS that is.
Can I turn off/on the coloured backgrounds for statuses?
Yes, Look under the "" heading, there is an option to turn off the colored statuses there, titled "Normalize Colored / Big Font Statuses" it is turned on by default, but if you *do* want to see the colored backgrounds for statuses, turn that option off.
Can I hide the colored boxes (that let you change a status' background colour) in the Status update box?
Yes, Look under the "" heading, there is an option to hide that.
Can I Freeze the Top Nav Bar in position, so it doesnt disappear when I scroll the page down?
Yes you can, there is an option under the "Top Nav Bar Options" heading, that lets you do this.
I sometimes see that FBP has filtered out a post because it matched "is at" or "is with" which filter is doing this?
That's the hide "Changed Location" filter.
How can i hide the "Messenger Kids" link in the left column?
If you tick the hide "Messenger" left column link option, as well as hiding the "Messenger" link it will also hide the "Messenger Kids" link. The reason it hides both is because the "Messenger" link itself is redundant, as you can access your Messenger and your messages via the Messages drop down menu in the top navigation bar at the top of the page. If you really must hide the "Messenger Kids" option separately, check the FBP CSS page as there is a code to hide it separately there.
Can I hide 3D posts from appearing in the newsfeed
Yes, you can do this using the Text Filter, put the textadded a 3D postinto FBP's Text Filter box then click "Save & Close"
Can I use FBP to delete all the "Interests" that Facebook has stored about you on the Ad Prefences page?
Yes, you can. Visit Facebook's Ad Prefences pages and FBP will add a button titled "". Clicking that button will systematically delete all the Ad Interest topics on the page. FBP also adds a button to clear the Advertisers listed at the bottom of the page.
Is FB Purity compatible with Seamonkey?
No, FB Purity is not compatible with Seamonkey, however if you can get Greasemonkey or a Greasemonkey compatible extension to run, then you should in theory be able to run the GM Script version of FBP, but I can't offer any support
Can I change the colour of the FB Purity Info Bar?
#fbpurityinfobar {background-color:lightyellow!important}
Yes, you can, using the Custom CSS box. Copy and paste the following into the CSS box:You can change the colour to any valid HTML/CSS colour code you like.For further customisations and more info about using CSS, please read the FBP CSS page
Is FB Purity compatible with "Facebook at Work"
No, this is something relatively new, and FBP is not designed to work with it, and I have not had a chance to look into it. If you are using Google Chrome, try logging into the work account in an incognito tab, theres a setting on the extensions management page for extensions which lets you choose whether you want an extension to also work in incognito mode, by default it should be turned off. So fbp won't load in the incognito tab and you won't have any problems.
Facebook has started adding some code at the end of shared external links, that looks a bit like?fbclid=asdfk34344asdhfjk3423423, which stops some links from actually working correctly. Can FBP stop this?
Yes, I have updated FBP to automatically fix this stupid facebook nonsense.
Can I stop Facebook from autoplaying Timeline cover videos or hide them entirely?
It is annoying that Facebook still autoplays cover videos, even if you have selected the Facebook option to disable the autoplay of videos. One workaround to this is to use Custom CSS code to hide all Timeline Cover Videos, check the CSS page for more info.
How does FBP's video volume preference saver work?
Whenever you change the volume on a video in Facebook, FBP saves the volume level, so whenever you start watching a new video, it automatically sets the video volume to the same volume as you chose previously. This is necessary because otherwise Facebook automatically sets the video volume to maximum every time you watch a new video.
Is there a way to stop the "Up Next" videos playing automatically when watching a video on Facebook
Yes. FBP automatically clicks the "Cancel" button when the "Up Next" notification pops up while you are watching a video, to stop the next video from playing automatically.
How can I Export and Import my FBP settings data? (Save settings to a text file that can be transferred to another computer or browser)
If you click the "" link at the bottom left of the FBP Options screen you will be given the option to save your FBP settings to a text file, alternatively a text box will appear with your FBP settings data inside, to export the data in this case, simply select and copy the text in the box and save it to a text file or document. When you want to Import your settings, click the "" link at the bottom of the FBP Options screen and a dialog box will pop up giving you the option to load your FBP settings from a text file. The alternative method if you dont want to load your settings from a file, is to just copy and paste the FBP settings data you have previously saved, into the box and click OK, if the import is succesful FBP will tell you then it will reload the page to activate your new settings. This feature is cross browser compatible, so you can copy settings from one browser to another or from one computer to another computer.
How can I unblock an application once its been blocked via the "BA" (Block Application) button?
If you used the "block app" button, it means the application has been placed on your blocked applications list, which you can view and edit by going to your privacy settings page here: https://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy then clicking the "Edit your lists" link under the "Block Lists" heading at the bottom of the page. If you used Facebook's Hide button to "hide" the application you need to go to the "Top News" page, then click the "Edit Options" link at the bottom of the page, your list of applications that you have "hidden" will be displayed there, and you can unhide them from there.
Can I hide the red "Block App" button that is added to facebook game/app dialog boxes?
Yes, check the FBP CSS page for some custom code that can do that
What is Greasemonkey?
Greasemonkey is an add-on on for the Firefox web browser (and certain other browsers too), that lets you alter the way websites are displayed to you in your browser. The way it works is you download scripts (small sets of custom instructions) for the sites you want to alter, once installed the script changes the page in some useful way, perhaps changing the layout or adding new features to the site, or even removing features you don't like.
How can I help spread the word about FB Purity?
You can suggest FB Purity to your all your Facebook friends by posting about this page to your stream via the Share button:
You can also let the world know about FB Purity, by posting to the following networks
Share on Twitter Stumble It. You can also subscribe to updates from FB Purity on Twitter, Pinterest, Youtube, Google Plus and Tumblr.
Where can I make suggestions about FB Purity?
You can make general suggestions for the FB Purity and also suggestions for additions to the default application whitelist that is built into the script here: FB Purity Contact Form. Please note I may not have time to answer all emails, but I will definitely read them, suggestions from donors will get higher priority attention.
Troubleshooting
Known issues (*UPDATE* FBP v27.1.2 has been released, update to the latest version by re-installing via the FB Purity Install page on the FB Purity website as that will most likely fix most issues if you are having any problems) BTW by "liking" the FB Purity fan page, you will be kept up to date of the latest issues, fixes, changes and updates. If the "Most Recent" feed is not being displayed chronologically, please note that this is not actually an FBP issue, click here to read more If after opening the Notifications menu (bell button) at the top of the Facebook page, the notifications suddenly all disappear, just leaving the "See All" link, this is caused by a bug in the "Sort Notifications Chronologically" option (located under the "Notifications" heading on the FBP options screen) If you re-open the notifications they should be there again. If you find this bug to be too annoying, turn off the "Sort Notifications Chronologically" option. I am looking into fixing this at some point. You can still view the notifications in chronological order by clicking the "See All" link. If your newsfeed is completely blank, make sure you have not ticked the 'hide "Newsfeed"' option, as thats exactly what that option does! Other possibilities are the filtering options you have selected are filtering out all the posts. If you don't want it to do that, adjust your FBP filtering options, please read the FB Purity User Guide to learn how FB Purity works. If the option to post to your Newsfeed has disappeared from the Status Update box at the top of your Newsfeed page, leaving only the "Your Story" option, this is due to a bug in the hide "Stories" option (located under the "Hide Right Column Links" heading on the FBP options screen) which is supposed to hide the "Stories" box in the right hand column, and the post to "your story" option that shows in the status update box. This option works for most people but for some people it is hiding the post to "newsfeed" option. If that issue is affecting you, you can turn that option off for now and I posted a Custom CSS code fix for the issue, here. If you are using Chrome and you find FBP is repeatedly getting disabled automatically every time you restart Chrome, this may be because you have a faulty Antivirus or Security program that is incorrectly disabling it. Another possibility is that you have removed the permission for the extension to access Facebook's site data, without that permission FBP cannot function, and you need to click the extension icon (it will then say "reload this page to use this extension") then you need to reload the page each time you want to use FBP. If you are using Google Chrome, you can restore the permission to access Facebook's site data by clicking the FBP icon in the Chrome extensions toolbar, then selecting "This can read and change the site data" on "Facebook.com". If you are using Chrome and click the "Import Settings" link and the file chooser dialog does not popup, this is a known bug that I am looking into fixing. A workaround that lets you import your previously saved FBP settings file is as follows: 1) Open the FBP options screen 2) Click the CSS link at the top right of the Text Filter box 3) Copy and paste the following CSS code into the CSS box:
/* Show "Choose File" button after clicking "Import Settings" */ #fileElem {display:inline}
4) Click the "Save and Close" button 5) Re-open the FBP options screen after the page has reloaded 6) Click the "Import Settings" link, then click "OK" 7) Click the "Choose File" button below the "Import Settings" link and select your previously saved FBP settings file 7) Job Done, FBP should now import your settings. it looks like facebook has changed the code for the small chat windows, that means FBP's "Revert Bubble Chat" option is not currently working in those, which means they will look a bit weird with that option turned on. The option still appears to work on the full screen "inbox" page though. it will take me a while to figure out a fix for the revert bubble chat option, a workaround would be to just turn on FBP's "full screen chat" option, and just use the full screen messenger interface. but if you dont want to do that, and dont like what the small chat window looks like now you can turn off the revert bubble chat option, and wait till i fix it, or just leave it as it is and wait for a fix, up to you. If you have set a background colour and the whole page has changed to that colour so you can no longer see anything on the page, im looking into what is causing this. Until i figure out a fix, turn off the background colour setting. I realise you can't access the FBP link to open the FBP options screen in this situation, so the workaround to be able to access the FBP options screen, is to visit this link where you should be able to see the FBP link that will let you access the FBP options screen and turn off the background colour settings. If you are getting a "Connection failure" error when trying to install the Firefox extension version of FBP, try temporarily disabling your Antivirus and or Firewall, or any other security software or extensions as there is a bug in Firefox that stops extensions being installed if you have antivirus software checking your web activity.
For a workaround to this issue, you can try the following: "Right-click" on the "Install F.B. Purity" button and then click "Save link as" then save the.xpi extension to your computer. Now drag the.xpi file from the saved location into Firefox's "about:addons" Extensions management page. If you are using the Greasemonkey script version of FB Purity with the Greasemonkey extension, and an old version of Firefox (under v57) and the Greasemonkey extension has updated itself to v4+, your GM scripts including FBP will no longer work, you need to use an older version of the GM extension with versions of Firefox that are below v57 (like the ESR version of Firefox for example) as v4+ is not compatible with older versions of Firefox. If the newsfeed has been shifted over to the left covering the left column, this is due to bug caused by a recent Facebook code change that affects the "Expand News Column" and hide "Whole Right Column" options, **UPDATE** the newsfeed shifting to the left issue should now be fixed, reinstall FBP for the fixed version. Please note if you have the "widescreen newsfeed" option turned on (under the Experimental Options heading on the FBP options screen) please turn it off, as this option does not work, and is being discontinued. Also if you have any added any Custom CSS code, try removing that also as certain codes could cause the shifting left problem. If you still have the problem after doing all that, its not FBP causing it. (one of the first steps in the Troubleshooting guide is to disable FBP and refresh the facebook page and see if the issue is still there, if it is, its not an FBP problem) If FBP has stopped working in Tampermonkey on Safari, you need to update to the latest version of Tampermonkey, to get FBP working again. If the "Export Settings" link is not working for you in the Chrome Extension version of FB Purity, try this: After clicking the "Export Settings" link, then click the "Save and Close" button at the bottom of the FBP options screen, that should then trigger the FBP Settings File Save Dialog box to open. I am looking into fixing this bug. If you have tried installing the latest FBP extension, but the FBP link doesn't show up in the top navbar, try closing your browser completely, then re-opening it, that should fix the issue. Another possibility is that you have "localstorage" storage turned off in your browser somehow (its either caused by a browser setting or an extension). Follow the rest of the steps in the troubleshooting guide to figure out what is causing your problem. If you don't see any posts in your newsfeed, just the "More Stories" link, thats most likely because FB Purity is filtering out the stories you don't want to see. You can adjust which posts FBP filters out via the FBP options screen. To learn how FB Purity works you should read the FBP User Guide page. If your feed only loads a few posts and wont load any more even if you try scrolling the browser window downwards, and you just see an empty post with the pulsing grey square and grey lines, i'm not sure what is causing this, it may be a network issue, try reloading the page, and seeing if that fixes it. If your newsfeed appears stuck and you can't scroll any further, a temporary workaround for this is to visit m.facebook.com where you should be able to scroll the newsfeed back further. If posts are missing on your friends or Page's you have liked Timelines, check if you have ticked the "Hide Games + Apps" option under the heading "Timeline Options", as that will hide posts if they have been made via an app or a game. If you are using the "X" button to hide posts in the newsfeed, but find the posts are returning again, this is nothing to do with FBP. The "X" button that FBP adds to posts, is just a shortcut to Facebook's own "Hide post" menu function, so if the hide post function is not working, that is just a bug in Facebook and there is nothing FBP can do about it. When this happens its usually just a glitch that Facebook **usually** fix within a day or two but this bug seems to permanent now, If enough people report the bug to Facebook maybe they will fix it, you can report a bug to Facebook by clicking the "Question Mark" (Quick Help) button in the Top Navigation bar of Facebook, then select the "Report a Problem" menu item, then select "Something isnt working" then "News Feed" then explain the problem. Remember you can always use FBP's Text Filter to hide posts you dont want to see in the Newsfeed automatically. If you are using Firefox, and find that occasionally the FBP link won't show up and FBP's functionality has stopped working, try reloading the page, and if that doesnt work please clear your browser cache, then re-install via fbpurity.com, that should fix your issue. If the FBP link still doesn't show up after that, close the browser completely, then re-open it. If it doesnt show after that try installing the ECleaner extension from the mozilla add-ons directory, and use it to clear FBP's saved data (this will remove any FBP settings you had). Another thing to try is check if you have the "open links in new window or new tab" option turned on in firefox, and if you do, turn that option off, and instead use the "right click" on links or "middle click" on links to open links in new tabs/windows, and see if that fixes |
does have is (currently) security and a great culture of extended family. Having children in the West is associated with decreased happiness of long duration,[3] as well as the obvious material deprivation associated not just with child rearing, but with the astronomically high and rising cost of higher education, or post secondary school job training.
Smart & Unhappy?
You got a fast car
But is it fast enough so you can fly away
You gotta make a decision
You leave tonight or live and die this way –Tracy Chapman
Finally, as the writer Ernest Hemingway sagely noted shortly before killed himself in 1961, “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” Emotional development in humans is perhaps best defined as the ability to cope with risky or stressful situations, especially over long periods of time, and to work and play well with others while doing so. These skills are best learned by dynamic interaction with cohorts with whom the growing child is well matched socially and intellectually. Unfortunately, high intelligence is socially isolating; children don’t want to associate with those who are ‘outsiders’ or ‘different.’
Figure 9: In a society that devalues and ridicules the very source of its technology, its art and its wealth, the highly intelligent individual will be marginalized, and in all too many cases, socially crippled. This is unacceptable.
Thus, when it comes to happiness, people who are socially inept and who have trouble coping emotionally with the exigencies of life are, on average, the least happy. It should thus come as little surprise that our prisons are currently filled with a disproportionate number of people who are more intelligent than average and who lack the social coping skills to get on in society. They are also smart enough to know that many of the rules and orders given them are arbitrary and have no basis in reason beyond maintaining the status quo. As sociologist and educator Bill Allin has observed: “People with high intelligence, be they children or adults, still rank as social outsiders in most situations, including their skills to be good mates and parents.”[4]
The relevance of this to cryonics should be obvious to most cryonicists; cryonics attracts, with massive disproportionality, the highly intelligent. Indeed, many of the arguments that make cryonics credible, require a remarkable degree of both intelligence and scholarship. Inability to understand the enabling ideas and technologies usually means the inability to understand, let alone embrace, cryonics. A disproportionately unhappy population of smart people translates to a disproportionately large population of ideal market candidates for cryonics being unwilling and indeed, unable to embrace it.
So How Do We Fix It?
There is no one solution or easy fix. The first step is to realize that what the marketplace is telling us is true: many people don’t want to live because the existential ground state of their lives is a gray-state of dysphoria at best, and at worst, a state of active misery, relieved only occasionally by a few quickly snatched minutes of relief, or if they are lucky, joy. That state of affairs can only be addressed by showing people very real and concrete ways in which the quality of their lives can be improved, both here and now, and in the future. Heaven isn’t waking up from cryopreservation and having to go into work two weeks later – FOREVER. That is the very definition of hell for most people. And the mystics have been smart enough to carefully exclude any mention of time-cards from their hereafters. The Mormons and the Islamists have even had the good marketing sense to offer up eternities where each man commands his own world, or at the least, his own harem.
We cryonicists need to offer concrete, if incremental practical and immediate, or at least near-term solutions to the existential woe of both the masses, and to that subset of them that are highly intelligent. We need to offer an improved quality of life today, using emerging technology, and not just talk about “the wonderful future” that will someday be there (not here, but there). And by our actions in developing and improving cryonics now, today, we need to offer an opportunity for a broad cross section of people to get involved, and to take satisfaction from their actions to extend their own lives. People respond to activism. They respond to organizations that urge them to take steps to improve their lot and inform them how to do it.
The passing of the father of cryonics, Robert Ettinger, is a case in point. His impending cryopreservation has been obvious to all who were plugged into the community for at least a year, and yet there was no planning by any cryonics organization to respond to the inevitable media blitz or, much more importantly, to the pro-death, ignorant and uniformed (but nevertheless opinion-shaping) commentary that must inevitably follow. The same was true of the recent attacks on cryonics by Johnson, Maxim, et al. If the cryonics societies can’t think that far ahead, and can’t think that strategically, how on earth are they to be trusted to have enough sense, or even the cojones, to cryopreserve, care for us and revive us?
We need to realize that we’ve got a fast car in cryonics, fast enough to fly away in; and that we leave tonight, or that we live and die this way.
ReferencesLUXEMBOURG (Reuters) - The European Union’s highest court on Thursday upheld a Spanish judge’s refusal to let a Moroccan resident bring his wife to join him because he had failed to show he would earn enough to support them both.
In a judgment that joins others in the past two years in restricting migrants’ rights as Europe deals with a surge in immigration, the European Court of Justice said the Spanish ruling was consistent with an EU law that gives long-term, non-EU residents an entitlement to “family reunification”.
“The directive allows the member states to demand proof that the sponsor has stable and regular resources which are sufficient to maintain himself and the members of his family, without him having to have recourse to the social assistance system,” the ECJ said in a statement on the ruling.
Mimoun Khachab, a Moroccan with a long-term Spanish residence permit, asked in 2012 that his wife too be granted residence. Spanish authorities turned that down on the grounds, among others, that he worked for only 48 days the previous year and was unlikely in the coming year to earn enough to live on.
One issue raised in the case was whether authorities were entitled to forecast his future earnings, from working for building firms and as a fruit picker. The EU judges ruled that they were.
As well as Spain, the German, French, Dutch and Hungarian governments submitted observations on the case to the judges.
The Court has recently underlined a link between economic resources and immigrants’ rights in cases involving EU citizens moving to other European states and claiming welfare benefits.
Immigration is fuelling hostility to the European Union in many countries, notably in Britain which is holding a referendum in June on whether to quit the bloc, and EU officials have been keen to emphasize the legal limits that exist on migration.Supreme Court (Photo: File photo)
COLUMBUS — Remember that political grudge match called Senate Bill 5?
A U.S. Supreme Court case on whether government workers must pay union dues against their wills could upend a key part of Ohioans' decisive vote against the anti-collective bargaining law. If the court rules against unions – and it's looking like it might – Ohio's public workers could become "right-to-work" overnight.
The case involves a California elementary school teacher, Rebecca Friedrichs, who does not want to pay dues to her local union because she disagrees with its stances on tenure and seniority. But California law, much like Ohio's, requires Friedrichs to pay a "fair share" fee even if she opts out of full union membership.
Union members fear that if Friedrichs is allowed to opt out, Ohio's 318,000 public union members could follow – taking with them money and political clout. Workers would become free riders, receiving the collective bargaining power of the union without paying for it.
"Ohioans voted on this five years ago when they all came together for SB 5," said Tim McAllister, a board member for the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association. "It would fly right into the face of Ohio voters."
But opponents of mandatory union dues argue workers should not be forced to pay money to unions if they disagree with the organizations' actions and political stances. Mount Lookout Rep. Tom Brinkman, who sponsored a controversial bill to prohibit mandatory dues for private-sector employees, hopes the U.S. Supreme Court sides with Friedrichs.
"It would be very positive for the 318,000-plus workers who are members of public unions in Ohio," Brinkman said. "They would have a choice of whether they want to support certain types of political campaigns or not."
There’s no gloom-and-doom prediction in Cincinnati. Should fair share fall, it would mean diverting more resources to marketing and recruitment, said Cincinnati Federation of Teachers President Julie Sellers. It might mean fewer resources for bargaining and less time to help teachers with professional development.
But “I don’t think it would be enough to weaken us and shut us down,” Sellers said.
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CFT represents about 2,700 Cincinnati Public Schools employees. Union members pay $34.77 a paycheck; non-members, through fair share, pay $29.75.
Overall, about 90 percent are dues-paying members, Sellers said. And she doesn’t hear complaints from the other 10 percent.
“Nuh-uh. No,” she said. “People are thankful. Especially the ones who have worked in charter schools where they didn’t have a union. They come into the buildings and tell people what it was like at the charter school or in a 'right-to-work' state.... And they’re like, ‘I don’t want to work under those conditions.’ ”
As a whole, teacher unions are pushing hard to keep the status quo. The American Federation of Teachers, which has more than 1.6 million members, including 20,000 in Ohio, filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court regarding the California case. Abolishing fair share, AFT wrote, would be “far more disruptive to state educational systems than petitioners are willing to acknowledge.”
It would be a “constitutional free ride” for people too cheap to pay, AFT wrote.
The plaintiffs want to “have their cake and eat it too, maintaining the benefits of union representation” for free.
Nationwide, states are about evenly divided on the matter. Ohio and Kentucky each require fair-share fees. Indiana and Michigan do not.
In Greater Cincinnati, school representatives who responded to The Enquirer didn’t seem overly concerned one way or the other. They’re watching the case, they said. They’ll wait and see what happens. Then, whatever the law is, they’ll follow.
The Supreme Court's decision is expected in June. It's unclear as of yet exactly how that would affect Ohio workers. It's also not clear how many union members would opt out of dues if they could. Robert Alt, president of the conservative think tank Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions, estimated about 10 percent would drop off based on decreases seen when other state implemented "right-to-work" laws.
The goal isn't to end unions, Alt said; it's to give more workers an option.
"The decision offers the individuals who disagree with the unions' positions a voice," he said, "which up until now have been denied."
USA Today contributed to this report.
Read or Share this story: http://cin.ci/1P4W6MiBALTIMORE, Md. (WJZ) — A Baltimore man who beat his roommate to death with a hammer and then set his body on fire has been sentenced to 34.5 years in prison, authorities said.
Lawrence Coverdale, 45, of Shamrock Avenue, received the maximum sentence for the murder of Nathaniel Quarterman, according to the State’s Attorney’s Office. He was found guilty in February of second-degree murder, intent to injure with a deadly weapon and malicious burning of personal property.
Quarterman’s burning remains were found by police investigating a reported fire in the 4200 block of Shamrock Avenue on August 22, 2014. Officers tracked drag marks from the remains to a nearby apartment where they noticed blood dripping from the balcony and found signs of a struggle inside. Coverdale and a woman present at the apartment were taken into custody for questioning.
The woman told investigators she overheard Coverdale and Quarterman causing a commotion in a back room when, at some point, the room fell silent. When Coverdale returned, she said, he choked her and threatened to kill her if she didn’t keep quiet. Then he went outside to ditch Quarterman’s body. During questioning, Coverdale acknowledged killing the victim, saying he didn’t mean to do it but his anger got the best of him.
An autopsy found Quarterman’s skull had been fractured by repeated blows from a hammer. He also had several broken ribs. Based on those findings, it was determined that he died before being set on fire.Fell Type - Open Source Font Saturday, December 1, 2012 design, fonts 5 Comments
Good fonts are hard to find. There're just so damn many out there and most are either boring, bad, or too specific. I've been hunting for a font, or set of fonts, to use for the Swordfish Islands and I believe I may have finally found *the* set. The fonts in this set seem to have it all. They have a look and feel that I really like, a rich history, and they're free and open source, so everyone else can use them in their independant gaming endevours too!Back in the 1600s, Dr John Fell played a pretty major role in setting up the Oxford University Press, Oxford going so far as to call him the "father" of their modern Press. Apparently he curated and edited everything that went through the Press ruthlessly, and with rigirous attention to quality and detail. He commissioned a large number of custom types from craftsmen in Holland, France and Germany, stating, "the foundation of all success must be laid in doing things well, which l am sure will not be done with English letters."Between 2000 and 2006, Igino Marini, an Italian civil engineer, digitized a number of these fonts and released them into the wilds of the internet under the SIL Open Font License, with a request that anyone using them for a project let him know about it.There are five different sets of standard letter fonts, two fonts of symbols and decorations, and one font of bold capital letters.Let's all make some beautiful things!As provinces begin drafting laws for the control and sale of cannabis on their territories, a case that the Supreme Court of Canada will hear in a few weeks threatens to derail their plans.
Ontario and Quebec, for instance, want to create provincial cannabis monopolies. As a consequence, Quebecers and Ontarians would be prohibited from mail-ordering recreational cannabis from licensed producers outside their home province or buying pot from anyone other than their provincial government.
But on Dec. 6, the Supreme Court begins hearing arguments in a case that could mean the end of state-run monopolies as they apply to another favourite Canadian vice: alcohol.
WATCH: New Brunswick has announced a subsidiary of NB Liquor will operate recreational cannabis retail stores in the province and has revealed more on how it plans to do it. Jeremy Keefe reports.
If the justices rule in favour of a New Brunswick man fighting against provincial liquor monopolies, the decision will almost certainly trigger lawsuits across the country seeking to dismantle similar government-run corporations for marijuana, according to legal and trade experts.
“It would mean big changes — a more free and fair cannabis industry,” said Jack Lloyd, one of the lawyers representing marijuana activists who received intervener status in the Supreme Court case.
The case began in 2012, when the RCMP arrested Gerard Comeau on his return to New Brunswick after he had bought alcohol in Quebec.
READ MORE: How a court case may open the way to cheaper beer in the province next door
He was fined for violating New Brunswick law, which limits the amount of booze that can be brought into the province from elsewhere in Canada.
Comeau contested the ticket, arguing Sec. 121 of the Constitution Act, 1867, mandates that all Canadian goods be admitted freely across the country.
His lawyers argued the fathers of Confederation wanted a single market for all products made in Canada.
WATCH: Albertans could soon be allowed to carry up to 30 grams of cannabis, which amounts to about 40 joints. But who – and where – it will be sold is still being decided. Kendra Slugoski has more.
Comeau won, and his case has made its way to the highest court in the country.
Legal and trade experts consulted by the Canadian Press said they believe the Supreme Court will likely rule in favour of Comeau, but their opinions diverged on how that decision would apply to the cannabis industry.
READ MORE: New Brunswick government says border-beer sales could ‘redesign’ Canadian federalism
Brian Lee Crowley, managing director of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, an Ottawa-based think-tank, said a Supreme Court ruling in favour of Comeau would prevent provinces from discriminating between Canadian suppliers of alcohol — or cannabis.
“I think (a Comeau win) would make provinces not be able to prevent you from, say, mail-ordering marijuana from someone in another part of the country,” Crowley said in an interview.
Pier-Andre Bouchard St-Amant, a professor at Quebec’s school of public policy, said “according to all the prognostications, the Supreme Court will rule in favour of Comeau.”
WATCH: Marijuana legalization was front and centre as the federal health minister joined a meeting of her provincial counterparts in Edmonton. As Tom Vernon explains, the ministers wanted assurances the federal government is still on track to meet a tight deadline.
He added, however, he believes provinces would still be allowed to enter into agreements with one another to limit the cross-border trade of certain products, depending on the scope of the ruling.
Andrew Smith of the University of Liverpool Management School, was an expert witness in the Comeau case and said he believes the framers of the Constitution wanted a single market “without fetters on interprovincial trade.”
Smith said if the Supreme Court agrees with Comeau, companies will surely attempt to use the judicial precedent to argue against provincial cannabis monopolies.
READ MORE: New Brunswick to sell pot from government stores, will check ID at door
“I don’t think that this will happen in practice,” he said. Australia’s constitution has a free-trade clause similar to Canada’s, and the European Union is also governed by free-trade principles — but not with regard to recreational drugs, he explained.
“People in EU countries cannot drive to Amsterdam, where marijuana is openly sold in cafes, and then drive back to say, Germany, with the marijuana,” Smith said in an email.
“The principle of the single market doesn’t extend to such controversial products” in Australia or the EU, he said.
WATCH: Manitoba will task its Liquor and Lotteries Corporation (MBLL) with securing and tracking the supply of marijuana once it’s legal but the private sector will be responsible for setting up storefronts and selling it. Global’s Timm Bruch reports.
Whether marijuana will be mentioned in the Supreme Court’s ruling, or how broad it will be, remains to be seen.
But Lloyd said if free trade in Canada doesn’t apply to cannabis, then the black market will continue to fill an important void.
READ MORE: Cannabis producers skeptical of whether Ontario’s plan can compete with black market
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has promised marijuana will be legal in Canada by July 1, 2018, but he has left it up to the provinces to regulate how cannabis will be controlled and sold on their territories.
One of the main justifications for legalization was to take revenues away from organized criminals.
Canadians, however, will continue to purchase marijuana from illegal producers across the country — including by mail — if they can’t find the products they like, in an accessible way, in their home provinces, Lloyd said.
“The existing illegal industry will thrive if these provincial restrictions (remain) onerous.”
WATCH: Starting next summer, cannabis could be controlled and sold through a subsidiary of the SAQ. As Global’s Raquel Fletcher reports, if the bill is passed without amendment, Quebecers will no longer be allowed to grow their own marijuana plants.Rob Gronkowski will undergo his fifth surgery since injuring his forearm last season. (Jared Wickerham/Getty Images) Rob Gronkowski will undergo his fifth surgery since injuring his forearm last season. (Jared Wickerham/Getty Images)
New England Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski will undergo another surgery on his back in mid-June, likely sidelining him for a portion of training camp, according to Albert Breer of NFL.com.
The Patriots anticipated Gronkowski would require the surgery after their record-breaking tight end experienced chronic back pain.
Gronkowski has undergone four surgeries on his left forearm since mid-November after injuring it during the 2012 season, then reinjuring it during the playoffs. The infection involved with those surgeries has cleared up, according to a Breer tweet.
Gronkowski previously underwent a 3-1/2-hour microdiscectomy to remove a small portion of his spine and relieve pressure on his sciatic nerve while at the University of Arizona.
PHOTOS: The fabulous life of Rob Gronkowski
https://twitter.com/AlbertBreer/status/339828624754606082Ethereum is great for creating your own token, but what exactly is a digital token and what is Ethereum’s ERC20 token standard?
A token is generally defined as a thing that serves as a representation of something else. On a blockchain network, a token often represents financial value or a digital asset, much like how arcade tokens (as in the ones that allow you to play Skee-ball) represent fiat quarters.
An ERC20 token is no different from any other token, it also just happens to conform to Ethereum’s token standard. Why would Ethereum need a token standard? Interoperability. If all tokens created on the Ethereum network use the same standard, those tokens will be easily exchangeable and be able to immediately work with Dapps that use the ERC20 standard.
What makes a token “standardized” is that it uses a certain set of functions. If developers are aware in advance of how a token will operate, they can easily integrate that token into their projects with less fear of bugs or errors. If multiple tokens behave similarly, calling the same functions in the same way, then a Dapp can more easily interface with different sub-currencies.
Because tokens aren’t only a store of value but can represent anything, things like voting rights or discount coupons can be tokenized. The Minime ERC20 token contract allows the ERC20 to be cloned for these and other functions.
Originally, the ERC20 token standard was available and actively being discussed as an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) here. Due to changes in how the Ethereum Foundation is organizing its GitHub, the ERC20 standard was moved from a GitHub issue to a GitHub pull request (PR), viewable here. On GitHub, Hudson Jameson of the Ethereum Foundation said, “To be clear, this is NOT a new version of ERC -20. This PR is simply meant to formally define ERC- 20 version 1 since there are slight deviations within the community. Once community consensus on version1 is reached, we will mark this ERC as accepted and it will become official with regards to the EIP repo.”
While there are many ERC20 tokens currently in use across a multitude of Dapps and startup projects, there is still work being done on the token standard. One minor unresolved issue with the ERC20 standard is that sending tokens directly to a token contract loses your money. It has to do with how token contracts function. While you would use the same wallet in which you store your Ether to buy, sell, or transfer a token, it’s a token contract that you’re actually interacting with. It’s that token’s contract, the contract that created the tokens in the first place, that handles the allocation and tracking of those tokens across Ethereum. So, when a user transfers a token to another party, what they’re actually doing, on a technical level, is calling a function on the token’s contract to move the tokens for them, as opposed to them directly issuing tokens from their own wallet.
That doesn’t mean a token holder doesn’t have complete ownership of the tokens they’ve acquired, though. Instead of the Ethereum network keeping track of who owns tokens the same way it tracks who has Ether, it’s a token contract that keeps tabs on token holders. That’s because tokens are effectively sub-currencies on the Ethereum network, where each token has its own contract that manages the distribution and tracking of those tokens. For example, an Augur user attempting to send REP tokens to someone else would be calling on the REP ERC20 contract to send tokens to a new address. The REP contract would see the initiating address is assigned an amount of REP tokens, see how many they’re attempting to send to a different address, and then allocate the REP appropriately. Token contracts are essentially distributed ledgers within the greater Ethereum distributed ledger.
If you’re interested in an incredibly comprehensive tutorial on creating a digital token, the Ethereum Foundation has a fantastic resource on its website. It goes through every single step in the process of creating your own cryptocurrency, from generating a token contract to deploying and interacting with that contract. The written tutorials even cover adding different levels of customization to your token. As the Ethereum network continues to grow and develop, so may the ERC20 standard. Be sure to check GitHub on occasion to stay up-to-date on all the latest updates and issues regarding Ethereum tokens.Temple of First Amendment supremacy. Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images
Dick, thank you for this: “The last thing a woman about to have an abortion needs is to be screamed at by the godly.” Amen.
And yet, I have dutifully convinced myself, for all the reasons Larry gives, that the First Amendment means protecting the freedom of speech of perfect plaintiff Eleanor McCullen, the Boston-area anti-abortion protester who stresses that she is a short, plump grandmother who just wants to gently persuade women to reconsider as they head into an abortion clinic. To me, and to the unanimous court, it mattered that she was asking to stand on the sidewalk—a quintessential public space. Also important, as the court summarizes Roberts pointing out for the majority, a separate federal law “imposes criminal and civil sanctions for obstructing, intimidating, or interfering with persons obtaining or providing reproductive health services.” And if anti-abortion protesters now take the court’s decision as license to block clinic entrances, the police can crack down via local traffic and crowd-control laws. Last point: Massachusetts couldn’t point to a single prosecution or court order against clinic protesters since the 1990s (when, no question, clinic violence was a serious and even deadly problem in Boston).
But now I wonder if I’m being a sucker for First Amendment absolutism, for two reasons. The first is how the court handled what Massachusetts had to say about the lack of prosecutions and injunctions. The state said that it was the 35-foot buffer zone that was keeping the peace—in other words, the law the court just struck down was the key to (relative) harmony. For support, Massachusetts pointed to a 1992 Supreme Court ruling, Burson v. Freeman, which allowed a 100-foot buffer zone around a Tennessee polling place, where campaign workers couldn’t solicit or hand out materials. In that case, the court accepted the state’s argument that the buffer zone prevented voter intimidation and election fraud—without evidence that either was actually a problem. But now, in a case with a history of violence, “it is not enough for Massachusetts simply to say that other approaches have not worked,” the court says.
Is that because evidence of voter intimidation and election fraud is a lot harder to come by than evidence of clinic harassment, as Roberts claims? Or, more discomfiting, is it because the court views voters as more deserving of consideration than abortion seekers? I worry it’s the latter. Though it’s worth noting that the court’s four liberal-moderates joined Roberts, blocking Justice Antonin Scalia (along with Kennedy, Alito, and Thomas) from going much further.
Here’s my other, bigger concern, though: I worry that even if the court is right, or right enough, that the Massachusetts buffer zone went too far in limiting peaceful speech in a public place, this case is the spoonful of sugar in a big bottle of bad First Amendment medicine. Larry, you say that cases like this one “force us to balance competing constitutional values: free speech against the safety and autonomy of women.” But does the conservative majority of the Roberts court really give weight to any value when it’s competing with its self-serving, anti-regulatory conception of the First Amendment these days? Eric and I joked a few weeks ago that it’s time to write a screed called Against the First Amendment. Here’s a quick and dirty version.
All the Ways the Roberts Court Has Mangled the First Amendment
To protect wealthy donors: Striking down part of Congress’ effort at campaign finance reform in the name of the First Amendment, Justice Kennedy made the crazy-making claim in Citizens United that donations to PACs and super PACs that are nominally “independent” from candidates “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” Please. Roberts doubled down on this lunacy in April, to strike another blow to campaign finance reform, in McCutcheon. As you said better than I, Dick, it’s pretty hard to believe that our smart, sophisticated chief justice truly believes that only quid pro quo corruption—essentially bribery—threatens the integrity of the political system enough to justify congressional intervention. Which is what Roberts says in McCutcheon. And why I think he was just laying the groundwork for killing campaign finance reform entirely—a move that will surely prove to benefit Republicans more than Democrats.
To protect corporations: Another Kennedy special: his majority opinion in the 2011 case Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc. At the time, like most journalists, I ignored Sorrell, but I’m repenting. The case started with a Vermont law that prevented drug companies from getting access to information about the prescriptions that doctors write patients. The idea was that pharma was using the prescription information for marketing—to better target doctors for sales pitches. Instead of treating this as a perfectly acceptable reason for regulation, especially given that traditionally, “commercial speech” gets less First Amendment deference, Kennedy treated the law as a form of discrimination against the drug companies. He calls handing over the prescription data to the marketers “a necessary cost of freedom.”
Seriously? As University of Tulsa law professor Tamara Piety writes, in an excellent article, this “is not just wrong, it is dangerously wrong.” Over email, Yale Law School Dean Robert Post writes that “the liberty values that were always implicit in First Amendment jurisprudence have now been transformed by conservative justices into a warrant for libertarian interventions, designed to overturn ordinary commercial regulations. They know that they are doing this. The irony here is that some conservatives initially opposed the extension of the First Amendment to commercial speech until they discovered in the 1990s that it could become an engine to destroy commercial regulations.”
To hurt unions: Harris v. Quinn, due to come down on Monday, is, as The Nation calls it “arguably the most important labor law case the Court has considered in decades,” which has “labor very, very nervous.” For good reason. The case is about whether unions can collect dues from government workers whom they represent in collective bargaining, but who have chosen not to join. In 1977 the Supreme Court said unions could collect dues from such workers to prevent freeloading. At argument, according to Adam Liptak in the New York Times,
Justice Stephen Breyer said there was no good reason to overturn the balance struck in 1977. He said he feared that “the courts of the United States are going to fashion, using the First Amendment as their weapon, a new special labor law for government employees.’ Justice Kennedy, on the other hand, pressed hard on the harm that may be done to workers’ First Amendment rights in the collective bargaining process.
It is a bad sign for unions that Kennedy’s only apparent concern was the “employee who objects to the union’s position on fundamental political grounds.” Also bad, odds are that Alito is writing the majority opinion. Larry, you said you thought Alito might express sympathy for the women going into abortion clinics, because Alito wrote movingly about the father who sued after his son’s military funeral had been beset by hate-filled protesters, in his lone dissent from yet another the First-Amendment-Made-Us ruling. But here’s the thing about Justice Alito: He is awfully selective about whom he expresses feelings for, and they happen to be people who are a lot like him. Women who need abortions and labor organizers are not on that list.
To protect corporations some more: I could write one more doomsday paragraph about the upcoming Hobby Lobby decision, which will probably include lots of conservative pronouncements about why the right to religious freedom of privately owned companies (yes, companies) matters so much more than the right of female employees to health care insurance that covers birth control. Here is Eric’s take. I’ll save mine for Monday. In the meantime, my closing thought comes from my email from Robert Post. “The conservatives are using the First Amendment as a weapon in every way they can,” he argues. They understand that this makes them seem righteous and principled. The protection of free speech, after all, is one of the most cherished American and bipartisan values. But it just cannot be our only value. That’s the wool the court is pulling over our eyes.IT'S one of the sad facts of life that few things attract attention quite like the spectacle of a car accident.
Another is that bad publicity unfailingly generates more publicity than good publicity.
Last week, Volvo managed to combine the two for a memorable day at its testing facility in Gothernberg.
The Swedish car-maker with a legendary reputation for protecting those who ride in its cars was left red-faced after inviting a horde of motoring journalists to witness the wonders of the crash-avoidance system in its S60 sedan.
Out rolled the shiny new S60 from the testing bay, with iconic crash test dummy at the wheel.
As it headed for the rear end of a truck parked some 50m ahead and hit a top speed of 50km/h, journalists watched and wondered when the new system would save it from certain disaster.
And watched. And wondered.
And laughed as the S60 ploughed into the truck without a hint of crash-avoidance, crumpling the front end and planting said crash test dummy's face square into the steering wheel.
Needless to say, it wasn't meant to be like this.
"We've had some kind of mishap in the testing here," Volvo's senior safety Thomas Broberg said, red-faced but smiling.
"Ah, apologise for that.
"This car actually contains the collision-avoidance system that we did not demonstrate in this crash."
In fact, the most impressive aspect of the demonstration was Mr Broberg's ability to remain calm through the sounds of clicking cameras and laughing journalists.
"Obviously the dummy didn't respond to the collision warning that it got," he said.
That's right, Volvo. Blame the dummy.
The company later issued a statement claiming that if a human were behind the wheel, they would have noticed the collision-avoidance system wasn't working and taken the appropriate action.
And to be fair to Volvo, given that 50km/h is somewhere near the top end of a Volvo drivers' thrill-seeking threshold, that's probably a fair call.In the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, the U.S. economy crashed. Republican candidate John McCain, a foreign policy expert with decades of experience in Congress, had the great misfortune to say this: "The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should." Ouch.
So, America gave the job to first-term senator Barack Obama, who promised that he could fix the problems (as well as lower worldwide sea levels and stop global warming). Sure, he was ambitious and a Harvard guy, but as a former teacher and community organizer, didn't know much about economics.
For his first year, then his second, Obama traveled the country telling Americans he had inherited a mess. Those Americans, for the most part, knew he was speaking truth. Things were bad, very bad (not as bad as the president, who called it the worst economy since the Great Depression, said, but bad).
Five years later, and at least four years since the Great Recession ended, America is still in the crapper. Salaries are stagnant, have been for years, and while the unemployment rate has dropped from a sky-high 10 percent, the percentage of Americans in the workforce has plunged to record lows.
The White House was optimistic going into 2014, but that was before two straight jobs reports fell far short of expectations. U.S. manfacturing is falling, as is the global economy, and the U.S. stock market has had some frightening drops of late.
Worse, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office last week predicted the president's health-care overhaul, Obamacare, will cost the economy millions of jobs as Americans opt to take government handouts.
So it was odd over the weekend when Obama used his weekly address to America to discuss: Income inequality and opportunity.
"Opportunity is the idea at the heart of this country -- that no matter who you are or how you started out, with hard work and responsibility, you can get ahead. I ran for president to restore that idea, and I’m even more passionate about it today," he said, with no trace of irony.
He ran for president? He IS president. (Check Wikipedia). But even in 2014, he's still saying things that he has literally been saying for nearly seven years. "Those at the top are doing better than ever, average wages have barely budged. Too many Americans are working harder than ever just to get by, let alone get ahead."
Then he ticked through his agenda: More new jobs. More job training. More education. "And number four: Making sure that hard work pays off, with wages you can live on, savings you can retire on, and health insurance that’s there when you need it."
For Obama, it's all "out there" -- YOU (never "we" or "us"). Darn it, you need jobs, wages you can live on, more savings. He's not in the least part to blame: He has nothing to do with the economy, and his fellow Democrats in Congress have nothing to do |
a grieving daughter still, and as I walked away they resounded in my mind. I wish that was my mom in that bed! I do know how you feel! But I didn’t say those things.
Nurses perform their duties with a smile, with an air of efficiency, and often what seems to be an indifference. You will not see their calm expression falter even as the feces hits the fan. You might see them stoic while you cry, or even laughing later in the hall.
You won’t see what’s underneath that seamless smile. You won’t see the reality of heartache, grief, and emotional loss that your nurse is experiencing right along with you. I think this is because if we let it out, we might never be able to reel it back in, and our skills would suffer under the strain of too much flow of feelings.
Instead of tears you see singing. You will never know that when I see your mother in the bed I think of my own, and I miss her terribly. As I watch you hold your mother’s hand my grief is reopened like a poorly healing wound.
Nurses experience their own loss, but in the quest to help you with yours, you will likely never know.
Nurses have their own skeletons in their own closets. Most of us have an alcoholic family member or someone suffering through another form of addiction. So know that we’re not judging, as we’ve been there too.
We’re personally touched by trauma, chronic illness, and sexual abuse. We’ve lost someone we once held so dear, and can now only remember in our hearts. We have stood where you now stand, and though you may never know, we understand.
Your nurse is not just a worker, and while she is deeply committed to her task, it means so much more than that to her, and she is so much more than what you see.
Your nurse is a daughter or a son, a mother or a father, a husband or a wife. Your nurse is a victim of loss, but has also seen victory over death. Your nurse has been a patient, even if not always the epitome of patience.
All I ask when you see me at the bedside is that you try and remember that there’s more to me than meets the eye. So much more than you’ll ever see.Self Improvement is the guiding principle of personal development.
Seldom will your self esteem, happiness, level of achievement, and your positive impact on others exceed your own self improvement.
level of achievement, and your positive impact on others exceed your own self improvement. Self improvement understands that formal education will make you a living and that self education will make you a fortune.
will make you a living and that self education will make you a fortune. Self improvement is about self education.
Those who seek self improvement believe that the only true ratio of
success is the difference between who they are and who they can become.
What’s In This For Me?
Self improvement does not change things overnight. It is about small things. You develop a new skill here or a new discipline there. And it is the accumulation of these over time that yield a positive harvest in the field that is life.
When you embrace the process of self improvement there will be a positive ripple effect throughout your life. First comes internal change. You change your thinking. All change starts from within.
Next, when you have changed your thinking you are now ready to change your habits. When you start changing your habits things start to change in our outside world.
When you change your habits it will change your activity.
With a change in activity comes a change in your results.
And the change in results brings change in your life.
Self improvement is your own personal elevator. As you rise to the top you will have to let some people off. You will have to let go of ways of thinking and ways of doing things. In fact, self improvement is about letting go. You must let go of the old to have success at bringing in the new. There cannot be any self improvement without letting go.
What’s in it for you? When you embrace the process and the adventure of self improvement you will let go. When you let go you will grow. This is natural. Just as a tree must let go of its leaves every year in order to grow, you must let go to become the person you wish to be and to have the life you desire.One part of Christopher Wray’s record Democrats are sure to dissect: the four years he served at the Justice Department under President George W. Bush, primarily after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. | AP Photo The 6 toughest questions for the next FBI director Christopher Wray’s confirmation hearing takes place as the Trump-Russia scandal deepens.
Christopher Wray faces a stark question from skeptics as he prepares to take on one of the toughest jobs in the Trump administration: Where does your loyalty lie?
The cloud of fired FBI Director James Comey will loom large over Wray’s confirmation hearing to replace him on Wednesday, as will the perpetual onslaught of revelations involving the federal probe into potential collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.
Story Continued Below
“After Comey was fired, as the president said, to stop the Russia investigation, there are some fundamental questions that need to be asked about any director of the FBI,” Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said in an interview Tuesday. “Where is your commitment? Is your commitment to the law, or to the president who chose you?”
Wray, a lawyer and former Department of Justice official, can expect to be peppered with questions about whether he can be sufficiently independent from President Donald Trump and how he will handle the sensitive investigation that is dogging the Republican administration and distracting GOP-led Washington from accomplishing its ambitious policy agenda.
Here are six key questions Wray is likely to face during his hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday:
Does your loyalty lie with the president who nominated you?
Wray confronts the same high-wire balancing act that other Trump picks, including Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, faced during their hearings: demonstrating his independence from Trump without alienating him.
But for Wray, that question is even more dicey considering the circumstances in which Comey was fired. The former FBI director testified Trump told him during a private dinner that “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty” — and Wray is likely to be pressed on whether he, too, faced a similar loyalty oath.
“To be very blunt, he’s appointed by an administration that is under investigation for obstruction of justice,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), another member of the Judiciary Committee who will grill Wray on Wednesday. “So why is that? Why was he appointed? What has been said to him? And what has he said to others in the course of the interviews that were conducted leading to his nomination?”
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Those are answers that will be closely watched not only by Democrats on the committee, but also Republicans. Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina said Wray’s ability to show some daylight from the Trump administration will be “critically important.”
“The FBI is one of the most respected law enforcement organizations in history,” said Tillis, a GOP member of the committee. “And a part of that is, they have — with few exceptions — proven to be highly independent. I want that.”
Did Comey handle the Clinton email probe appropriately?
Comey may be long gone, but expect him to be a consistent presence at his successor’s confirmation hearing.
After all, Trump initially premised his decision to fire the FBI chief because of his very public handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. It may have been an unusual justification considering the “lock her up” chants that became synonymous with the Republican’s 2016 campaign mega-rallies — but it also broached a sensitive topic inside the bureau and across the Justice Department.
Comey himself testified in May, before he was fired, that he was “mildly nauseous” over the notion he played such a significant role in the election’s outcome. The FBI director had announced in July 2016 that the Clinton case should be closed without prosecution. Then he made a new statement reopening it in October during the closing days of the race because of new messages that had emerged during the course of a separate probe involving sexually explicit materials on the computer of disgraced former Rep. Anthony Weiner, who was married at the time to senior Clinton campaign aide Huma Abedin.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein cited Comey’s “serious mistakes” on the Clinton case in his memo to Trump in May explaining how the FBI’s “reputation and credibility have suffered substantial damage” — a document the president used in justifying the firing and for dampening morale in the bureau, though Trump later cited Comey’s work on the Russia probe as a key reason.
Key senators who have met privately with Wray say they expect the nominee to raise the issue.
“He’ll talk to how basically the way that Director Comey handled this was completely unconventional and why it’s important to restore regular respect for the Department of Justice’s role, vis-à-vis the FBI,” said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas, who met with Wray on Monday. “I think it’ll be an important point.”
Some senior FBI officials struggled with how much to blame Comey, and many pushed back against the idea he was to blame for the bureau’s morale.
A former senior DOJ official during the administration of President Barack Obama predicted that both Democrats and Republicans will be looking to Wray to explain how closely he intends to follow in his predecessor’s footsteps, asking: “Are you going to be a celebrity FBI director like people thought Comey was?”
Will you give special counsel Robert Mueller sufficient space to conduct his probe?
Mueller, a former FBI director, is now the point person for all Justice Department work involving Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, and it means that the major questions involving this active and politically sensitive criminal investigation are best handled by Mueller.
The FBI itself does retain a strong role in the Mueller case — its cyber and counterespionage agents are among those detailed to the Mueller effort. And the acting FBI chief told a House appropriations subcommittee last month that “a great number of folks” were working with Mueller and “will do everything necessary to deliver the resources and meet the needs that he has to do that work.”
“For me, the major point is, will a special prosecutor be supported in doing his job and protected from interference?” Blumenthal said. “I may ask, you know, whether he’d quit if Mueller was fired.”
But beyond having to talk about logistics like staffing levels, Wray will have an easy escape hatch if senators get too specific with their questions.
“It gives him a way to deflect and defer,” said John Pistole, a former FBI deputy director and head of the Transportation Security Administration who was among the candidates Trump interviewed this spring for the top job before ultimately picking Wray.
What will you do to clamp down on leaks about the Trump administration?
Much like the rest of Washington, GOP senators have closely watched the steady drip of information published by news outlets that have embarrassed the Trump White House.
But Republicans are chiefly concerned with how the leaks may raise national security risks — and they’ll be looking to Wray for an answer.
“I told him that I’m very concerned about leaks and how he’s gonna handle those and he understands the problem and I think he will speak to that,” said Cornyn, who was himself in the mix for the FBI job.
Republicans have repeatedly railed against leaks on everything from Trump’s private conversations with foreign leaders and details about the ongoing federal Russia probe. Last month, Sessions — to whom Wray will report if he’s confirmed — testified that investigations into leaks are already underway.
“We’ve got to get better at tracking and then having a consequence where people are ultimately responsible for” leaks, Tillis said. “But I think it’ll be very difficult for him to answer in specifics except to have him go on record saying it’s unacceptable and they’ve got to tighten it up.”
How involved were you with the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies?
One part of Wray’s record Democrats are sure to dissect: the four years he served at the Justice Department under President George W. Bush, primarily after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
He’s likely to be asked about his views on controversial Bush-era anti-terror tactics and a series of legal memos drafted by then-DOJ official John Yoo that laid out the rationale for using enhanced interrogation techniques against terrorism suspects. So far, there is little in the public record that suggests where Wray’s personal views on the issue lie, and Wednesday’s hearing will be a chance for him to defend the controversial policies or distance himself from them.
“He was around during the post-9/11 decision-making process,” Durbin said of Wray, who served at DOJ from May 2001 to May 2005. “It’s not a red flag, but it certainly has to be asked.”
California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee who spearheaded a landmark Senate report in 2014 on the CIA’s interrogation program, also said she plans to ask about Wray’s time at DOJ.
During his 2003 confirmation hearing for assistant attorney general, Wray vowed that the government “must do everything within our power, within the Constitution and the law” to prevent future terror attacks. One year later, Wray reportedly urged Comey to “please give me a heads up so I can jump with you” when Comey, then the deputy attorney general, and other top DOJ officials clashed with the Bush White House over its warrantless wiretapping program.
Senators may also scrutinize Wray’s background while in private legal practice. His international firm, King & Spalding, has handled cases for Rosneft and Gazprom – two major state-controlled energy companies in Russia. Other clients of the Atlanta-based firm include SIBUR Holding, a major Russian gas processing company that counts Russian President Vladimir Putin’s son-in-law as a major shareholder, according to a 2015 Reuters report.
Micheline Tang, a spokeswoman for the firm, said Wray has not represented Russian companies or individuals during his 12 years at King & Spalding. And some Democratic senators say while Wray’s firm’s ties to Russian companies are fair game for questioning, they don’t see it as a major issue.
How aggressive will you be toward Russian attempts to hack future U.S. elections?
Intelligence experts say Russians, emboldened by the havoc they caused in 2016, will be back again to meddle in the 2018 and 2020 American elections. “No doubt at all in my mind,” former Obama-era Director of National Intelligence James Clapper recently told CNN.
Enter the FBI, which along with the Homeland Security Department and other national security agencies will be primed to play a key role safeguarding the ballot boxes and the overall integrity of the campaign process.
But with Trump still casting doubt on Russian interference the last time Americans voted, coupled with the president’s suggestion following last week’s summit on the sidelines of the G20 with Vladimir Putin that the two countries could work together on cybersecurity measures involving elections, the FBI chief could find himself in an awkward spot commenting about his attempts to combat new Russian interference.
Wray can also expect to get broader cyber-related questions about Russia given media reports and a joint DHS-FBI statement last week indicating Russian government hackers may have been behind recent intrusions at U.S. nuclear power stations and a company that makes control systems for the electric utility industry.
John Bresnahan contributed to this report.An RTI enquiry has revealed that a land that is valued in crores currently, has been allotted to veteran actress and BJP MP Hema Malini just for Rs 70,000.
The land measuring 2000 sq metres in Mumbai's Oshiwara area, has been alloted to the actress at Rs 35 per sq mtrs, reveals an RTI reply recieved by RTI activist Anil Galgali. Hema Malini is yet to return previously owned land as well as fulfil the financial compliance for the new one.
Interestingly, earlier Congress MP and current IPL Chairman Rajeev Shukla too had been benefitted in a similar way which had created a huge ruckus. Ultimately, Shukla's BAG company had to returm the alloted plot.
Recently, it was reported that the land was sanctioned to Hema Malini to set up a classical dance school almost 20 years after she had approached the State for a plot.
The actress had first approached the state govt with a request for the plot in 1996 which was sanctioned by late Bal Thackeray. However, later the plot was marked under CRZ and she sought for another plot which has now been sanctioned to her.
The RTI enquiry also reveals that while the proposed cost by the Dance Academy was over Rs 18.40 crores, the govt had asked it to submit a certificate stating how it would get the funds required. The Academy in its response had intimated that it has Rs 3.50 crores available while the balance will be raised through bank loans.Most oft-asked questions of the week that don’t involve coaching carousel developments like Herm Edwards to Arizona State, Mike Leach to Tennessee, Willie Taggart to Florida State and Chris Petersen to Texas A&M:
(That last one was a joke; the first one was not.)
3. Could the loser of the Pac-12 championship game make the New Year’s Six as an at-large?
2. Who’s going to win the Pac-12 championship game?
1. Why is the Pac-12 championship game at 5 p.m. on a Friday …
When traffic is awful and parking is difficult and people aren’t home from work to watch and high school playoff games are scheduled and Friday at 5 is impossible for out-of-town fans and why can’t it be on a Saturday like all the other championship games and who’s running this conference and why is it all about TV, TV, TV …
How about we focus this discussion on question No. 1:
The decision to play the Pac-12 championship on Friday night.
Yes, it’s entirely about TV, and the TV dollars that TV is willing to pay for it to be entirely about TV.
That’s not always the smart way to play it.
In this case, it is.
The audience data overwhelmingly supports playing the game on Friday night.
Permit me to dazzle you with facts:
(Note: Audience numbers taken from Sports Media Watch database, which did not include the 2011 season.)
2012: Stanford 27, UCLA 24
Network: FOX
Day: Friday
TV audience: 3.0 rating/4.9 million homes
2013: Stanford 38, Arizona State 14
Network: ESPN
Day: Saturday
TV audience: 0.9 rating/1.45 million homes
2014: Oregon 51, Arizona 13
Network: FOX
Day: Friday
TV audience: 3.7 rating/6 million homes
2015: Stanford 41, USC 22
Network: ESPN
Day: Saturday
TV audience: 1.6 rating/2.6 million homes
2016: Washington 41, Colorado 10
Network: FOX
Day: Friday
TV audience: 3.4 rating/5.7 million homes
Three Friday games on Fox averaged 5.533 million homes.
Two Saturday games on ESPN averaged 2.025 million homes.
The difference (3.5 million) is greater than the average viewership of the ESPN telecasts.
And that’s not because fans love FOX almost twice as much as they love ESPN.
It’s because of the lack of competition on Friday.
Meanwhile, the Saturday lineup is jammed with Power Five championships.
Let’s use the 2015 schedule, when the Pac-12 title game was last on a Saturday, as an example.
(All times Pacific.)
1 p.m.: SEC championship (CBS)
4:45 p.m.: Pac-12 championship (ESPN)
5 p.m.: ACC championship (ABC)
5:15 p.m.: Big Ten championship (FOX)
That’s worse than any traffic outside Levi’s Stadium, but there are no options.
* The Pac-12 can’t play in the morning window (the Big 12, which enters the fray this year, will kick at 9:30.)
* It can’t play in the early afternoon window: No way FOX or ESPN would compete with the SEC championship. Related Articles Conference crisscross: Oregon State hires Smith, Edwards to Arizona State, whither Taggart and pick for the championship game
Power ratings: USC holds, Oregon rises, Washington State drops (plus assessment of the latest playoff rankings)
Basketball power ratings: Bleak week in kingdom of the blind, where Arizona State and Washington State are the one-eyed men
* Nor can it take the #Pac12AfterDark route because the FOX and ESPN windows are booked until well past 8 p.m. for long games and trophy ceremonies.
So it’s either Saturday at 5 p.m., against the ACC and Big Ten, or it’s Friday at 5 p.m., all alone.
The decision lies with the TV partners, who paid for the flexibility.
ESPN, after seeing the disparity in audience, has followed FOX’s lead. It moved the ’17 game to Friday.
Yes, audience ratings can be manipulated. But in this case, the data supporting a Friday championship is clear and overwhelming.
Even if it means there are 15,000 fewer butts in the seats.
Even if it means a few thousand out-of-town fans cannot attend the game.
The fact that Stanford is playing on a short week while USC has a bye is the fault of the regular-season schedule, not the placement of the title game (and the flaw has been corrected for 2018).
When it comes to the showcase event, Friday is the way to go:
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*** Pac-12 Hotline is not endorsed or sponsored by the Pac-12 Conference, and the views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views of the Conference.Friends, I have been working hard on this long post for some time and I am very excited to share it with you, the eighth in my Something in the Sky series on the mysteries of No Man's Sky.
Believers in mysteries, unite!
Something in the Sky v8 -
NMS's Biggest Easter Egg
Revealed
When it comes to mysteries in No Man's Sky, I am a believer. I believe there is a hidden mystery in the game waiting for us to find it. I know there are skeptics, and I am thankful for them. The skeptics challenge us believers to think, which makes us whole persons, not just idle dreamers. Skeptics drive believers to be thoughtful, grounded and real. And when we believers find something, our job is to present what we find openly and thoughtfully while challenging the skeptics to do what they need to do to be whole persons - set aside cynicism and feel wonder and hope.
So as a believer who has been working hard to find the mysteries in No Man's Sky, I share with you this report of something I have found. First I relate my journey to this discovery, then share what I found, next set out questions for the ongoing mystery and then invite you to join me on an adventure.
My Journey to a Discovery
I have played NMS almost every day since midnight on launch night. I loved the game from the get go, largely unaffected by the tsunami of negativity that crashed into Hello Games and Sean Murray in the weeks following its debut. As I continued to play, I sought out streamers and online communities of Fellow Travelers to feel positive connection and love. I made my way slowly and steadily toward the center of the Euclid Galaxy, excited to join the hunt for mysteries there.
The invisible stars in the Haze Zone appeared a week and a half before I arrived, and then in early October, two days before I got to the edge of the Haze Zone, news of Stiikzz's discovery of the center on the PS4 spread like wildfire among my community of streamers. I was in the "he actually did it" camp and not in the "it must be a glitch" camp and began looking for clues to how Stiikzz reached the center. When news broke a couple of weeks later that the discovery was indeed an upload glitch, I was disappointed and hopeful; disappointed because it turned out to be a glitch, and hopeful because I still believed that an authentic mystery remains to be discovered.
I carried on, doggedly exploring, searching for clues, chasing vague leads and following wild ideas. I am a reasonably intelligent guy, but not a mathematical genius, so I needed lots of trial and error to make my way. And in my searches, I gathered data, and the data began to show me something.
I began to see this something when I stopped chasing wild ideas and set out for myself two guiding principles: one, if there is a mystery in the game, it has to be placed using the means with which the game was made - something woven into the procedural generation of the game and not a single place or lone object dropped like a needle in a galactic haystack for us to find among countless stars and planets; two, if the mystery is there, its discovery has to be possible with the game mechanics we have in hand.
Here is the something the data showed me. It has four interrelated parts.
What I Found
Part 1 - The Hidden Center
At the core of the Euclid Galaxy (and it seems every galaxy in No Man's Sky) is a vacant cube of space known as the Haze Zone, full of colorful gaseous formations but no star systems for some 6000 light years from side to side. In the cube is the bright shining center, visible even from the edge of the galaxy hundreds of thousands of light years away. The Galaxy Center can only be selected from the Path to the Galactic Core waypoint system in the galactic map. And when selected, it shows its linear distance as 6000+ light years, a distance that makes no sense given the easily determined dimensions of the Haze Zone. Even more strangely, a Traveler with a fully fueled warp drive can "warp" this distance, even though the maximum linear distance for warp travel everywhere else in the galaxy is 1600+ light years (now 2500+ light years with the Path Finder Update if you have a fully equipped S class Explorer ship). And infamously, if you make the jump, you do not travel to the system at the center but instead travel to the edge of a new galaxy to start your journey over again (if you choose to initialize), with your ship crashed and your technology broken.
When the invisible stars appeared in the Haze Zone starting in late September, a handful of people noted that one system showed its distance from the center as 0.0 light years and its linear distance as 3000+ light years. But the Haze Zone was thought to be glitchy, invisible star systems there seemed to come and go at random, and so no one made much of it.
This star system 0.0 light years from the center and 3000+ light years linear distance from the Haze Zone edge is called Likholuningri, and it appears consistently on the PS4 if you know where and how to look.
When you are in a specific section of the Haze Zone (the x-axis 07FF/2053 wall in the galactic coordinate system), travel to a star system as close to the center as you can find. Then, in the galactic map, select the Path to the Core waypoint and follow the path to the galaxy center, thereby selecting it. Then hit the Scan for Discoveries button. Sometimes you hear the chime for a discovery right away, sometimes it takes a few minutes, and then Likholuningri consistently appears. Its system card shows it is 0.0 light years from the center and 3000+ light years in linear distance from your location, measurements which place it at the actual center of the Euclid Haze Zone.
Part 2 - The Strange Anomolies Along the Path to the Galactic Core
Around the Haze Zone at certain set points identifiable by the galactic sector coordinate system, the path to the core does something curious - it terminates. Follow the Path to the Galactic Core in these sectors and they will take you to a particular star, usually closest to the center. Then from that star, chose the Path to the Galactic Core waypoint, and it will not take you to the center. It will not take you anywhere. The Path just terminates. I have identified eleven sectors of space around the Euclid Haze Zone where this happens, along with a twelfth sector where the path strangely turns away from the core. These twelve sectors are geometrically arranged.
Part 3 - The Arrangement of the Terminal Systems
The arrangement of the twelve points in two dimensions when looking up or down from the Z axis is this figure. Not very interesting. But when you look at the arrangement from the x axis, this figure appears.
Now, this figure can be rendered for each of the four walls of the x and y axes of the Haze Zone cube. As it turns out, Likholuningri is discoverable from only one of these walls. So in sequence by discoverability along the four walls, this is how the figures arrange.
This is a representation of the Atlas written in the galactic map with the twelve terminal Path to the Galactic Core systems and a hidden center, all set among the stars at the edge of the Haze Zone of the Euclid Galaxy. This is the Biggest Easter Egg in No Man's Sky.
Part 4 - The Timing of the Appearance of the Invisble Stars
Lastly, when you look at the discovery dates of these twelve systems, there is a possible correlation with the appearance of the invisble stars in the Euclid Galaxy Haze Zone. On September 8, 2016, the eighth of these systems was discovered by an eighth different traveler ("viralentity.com" in Region: Dohjainowag Boundary; Discovered by dirkzegel on 09/08/2016 (11:21); Class G6pf//2 Planets). Not long thereafter, the invisble stars appeared, and with them the hidden center.
The Ongoing Mystery
This data came together as I travelled across hundreds of star systems, experimenting with multiple theories and ideas. Following those theories led me to take my launch night NMS game into the Hilbert Dimension and its Haze Zone. I first found the twelve terminal points there, discovering four of them. Curiously, two of the twelve points lead the traveler away from their sector of space along the Path to the Core. And no invisble stars are discoverable as yet in the Hilbert Dimension Haze Zone. This lead me to take a second game I am running still in the Euclid Galaxy to the center. There I found all twelve systems having already identified four of them. I learned that one of them also leads the traveler away instead of terminating.
There is an ongoing mystery to all this, the Biggest Easter Egg in No Man's Sky. Here are some questions for us to seek answers to:
Did the discovery of the eighth terminal system by an eighth different traveler last September trigger the appearance of the invisible stars in the Euclid Galaxy?
Why does one of the twelve systems around the Euclid Galaxy Haze Zone and two of the twelve systems around the Hilbert Dimension Haze Zone not terminate the Path to the Galactic Core but instead lead the traveler off to a different sector of space?
Are there more terminal star systems around the Euclid Haze Zone than the twelve identified?
Is the Calypso Haze Zone arranged like the Euclid's and so discovery of eight of the twelve terminal systems by eight different travelers will reveal the invisble stars and the hidden center in the Calypso Galaxy?
Have I unintentionally closed off the revealing of the invisible stars and the hidden center in the Hilbert Dimension by discovering four of the twelve terminal systems such that only seven different travelers discovered these systems?
A Call to Adventure
So friends, there is more to study, more to understand, but there is also an adventure ahead for Travelers willing to undertake the journey. I am now making my way to the Calypso Galaxy center with my launch night NMS game. Will you join me around the Calypso Haze Zone and be one of the eight discoverers of the terminal systems there?
At this time,...
...I do not know that the pattern from the Euclid Galaxy will hold in the Calypso Galaxy.
...I do not know if having eight different Travelers discover eight of the terminal systems around the Calypso Galaxy Haze Zone will reveal the invisble stars and make accessible the hidden center there.
...I do not know, if we do reveal the hidden center, whether it will be the same star system, Likholuningri, but a little closer, or whether it will be in the same place and still inaccessible to our warp drives or whether it will be a different system altogether.
But won't it be an amazing journey to find out?
Come warp with me into mystery!
Thank you for reading Something in the Sky v8. If you enjoyed it, please check out the other posts in the series:
v1 - Who am I?
v2 - The Atlas
v3 - The Sentinels
v4 - Strange Fellow Travelers - Nada and Polo
v5 - The Long Dead Traveler
v6 - Mysteries of the Races
v7 - Strange Places - Portals, the Center and the Haze Zone- UPDATE: "We're not in the clear yet. A recent update suggests that fires burning near Safari West are again moving toward the preserve. Please continue to stay well clear of the area so emergency services can respond. We will continue to do our best to keep our friends and supporters apprised of the situation at Safari West. Stay safe out there everybody."
Many viewers have reached out to KTVU with concerns about animals at Safari West, a 400-acre private wildlife preserve, near the Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa.
KTVU has learned that all animals have been accounted for. According to the Oakland Zoo, Safari West Animal Curator Marie Martinez said some staff were able to check on the animals around 11 a.m. Monday. They were able to confirm all animals are accounted for. The animals are being assessed and could be impacted by smoke inhalation.
Erin Henderson with the Oakland Zoo says staff is on standby to see if evacuation help or veterinary care is needed.
Fire crews are putting out hot spots and at this point it appears the danger is over, according to the zoo.
Safari West posted on its Facebook page, "While the situation remains dynamic and very dangerous, we have received word that the Safari West Wildlife Preserve appears to have weathered the worst of this firestorm. The situation is still very much active and could take a turn, but for the moment, it looks like our preserve and our animals are ok."
Henderson tells KTVU Safari West was evacuated around 11 p.m. Sunday night. She said the guests and staff were evacuated, and the staff took as many animals as they could in their cars. The animals the employees were table to evacuate were mostly birds, according to Henderson.
Related: Gov. Brown declares state of emergency because of wine country wildfires
We'll update this story as we learn more.UPDATE: Sen. John McCain diagnosed with Aggressive BRAIN CANCER; POTUS Issues Statement
The office of Senator John McCain just released a statement that the Arizona Republican has brain cancer. As possible treatment options, McCain may need to undergo both chemotherapy and radiation. McCain recently underwent surgery to remove a blood clot above his left eye.
JUST IN: Sen. John McCain diagnosed with brain cancer after surgery to remove blood clot, office says in statement https://t.co/Okz2bwUl4f pic.twitter.com/Q7hZjurfOY — CBS News (@CBSNews) July 20, 2017
The Hill reports
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has been diagnosed with brain cancer, the Mayo Clinic Hospital in Phoenix said Wednesday. The tumor was discovered after the senior Arizona senator underwent a minor procedure last week to remove a blood clot from above his left eye. “Subsequent tissue pathology revealed that a primary brain tumor known as a glioblastoma was associated with the blood clot,” the hospital said in a statement. “The Senator and his family are reviewing further treatment options with his Mayo Clinic care team. Treatment options may include a combination of chemotherapy and radiation.”
According to experts, Glioblastoma is an aggressive type of tumor to cure.
Tucson.com reports:
Here is the statement from John McCain’s office:
Washington, D.C. – At the request of Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and his family, Mayo Clinic released the following statement today: “On Friday, July 14, Sen. John McCain underwent a procedure to remove a blood clot from above his left eye at Mayo Clinic Hospital in Phoenix. Subsequent tissue pathology revealed that a primary brain tumor known as a glioblastoma was associated with the blood clot. “Scanning done since the procedure (a minimally invasive craniotomy with an eyebrow incision) shows that the tissue of concern was completely resected by imaging criteria. “The Senator and his family are reviewing further treatment options with his Mayo Clinic care team. Treatment options may include a combination of chemotherapy and radiation. “The Senator’s doctors say he is recovering from his surgery ‘amazingly well’ and his underlying health is excellent.” The office of Senator John McCain also released the following statement: “Senator McCain appreciates the outpouring of support he has received over the last few days. He is in good spirits as he continues to recover at home with his family in Arizona. He is grateful to the doctors and staff at Mayo Clinic for their outstanding care, and is confident that any future treatment will be effective. Further consultations with Senator McCain’s Mayo Clinic care team will indicate when he will return to the United States Senate.”
Below is a statement from daughter Meghan McCain.
President Trump offered ‘fighter’ Senator McCain support.
TGP reported Tuesday that THE LIBERAL MEDIA IS COVERING UP JOHN McCAIN’S LIFE-THREATENING BRAIN SURGERY!
Dr. Milton Wolf told The Gateway Pundit the media is covering for John McCain.
The mainstream media is covering for McCain or they’re just completely clueless. Or both. He had brain surgery for a 5 cm intracranial hematoma. That’s a big deal. Can be life ending. Media is buying his statement that it was from a routine annual physical —brain surgery?!— and they’re saying it was “above the left eye” rather than saying brain. Clintonesque.
Dr |
in the case of the Original Dark) or felt that the added sugar had actually worked against the rum rather than with it – giving it a very uneven profile. I have given decent scores however to a couple of Plantation’s rums and their Guatemala Anejo was one such rum.
Due to the popularity and availability of Plantation rums I tend to wait for offers before buying them though I will buy a bottle if I think it is no longer in circulation or in this case not likely to last long.
Despite being a Limited Edition I was surprised to see how little this bottle cost. It was £39.99 which is no more expensive than most of Plantation’s range of aged rums. I felt that was a more than reasonable price to pay. It is bottled at a very exacting 41.2% ABV. The presentation is classic Plantation and the black and gold labelling gives it a nice touch. It looks really impressive.
Before I go any further, I am NOT going to mention “added sugar” again in this review. If you wish to see how much sugar has been added to this rum then it is featured in the Hydrometer Tests page. Please if you haven’t looked at this page before please take the time out and read my explanation for performing the tests. It is not a Witch hunt.
So I’m sure some of you are asking “What exactly is Ice Wine?” well here goes (taken from Wikipedia)
“Ice wine (or icewine; German Eiswein) is a type of dessert wine produced from grapes that have been frozen while still on the vine. The sugars and other dissolved solids do not freeze, but the water does, allowing a more concentrated grape must to be pressed from the frozen grapes, resulting in a smaller amount of more concentrated, very sweet wine. With ice wines, the freezing happens before the fermentation, not afterwards. Unlike the grapes from which other dessert wines are made”
As you can probably guess, I am expecting a very sweet profile to this rum and to be honest something quite different from any rum I have tried before.
This rum forms part of Plantation’s Single Cask Collection – as a result the back label gives no details on the heritage of this particular rum. Just information on their Single Cask ventures. It seems this particular expression has been sold to various Independent stores around Europe and labelled to highlight the name of each store. I have tried to obtain more information on the base rum but I have been, so far unsuccessful. If you have any information please feel free to share.
In the bottle and the glass the XO reminds me very much of the Anejo. It has a very vivid coppery/brown colour almost red in some light. It is very striking.
The nose is the first real surprise. I was expecting a real intense sweetness. Instead I am getting oak and vanilla. There is also quite strong mix of Cognac/wine and a grassy vegetal note. Very much like Barbancourt or heading towards an aged Agricole rhum. It is still quite a sweet smelling nose but it isn’t at all cloying and it still retains enough of the more traditional aged rum character. Complex and interesting.
Sipped the rum again shows up almost as two different rums in one glass! The aged oak notes and the light vanilla combine with the almost grassy/vegetal notes. All whilst a very thick wine like sweetness cuts across the top of each sip. The thing I like best about this Plantation rum, is probably the thing a lot of Plantation fans might not be too keen on. It burns, just a little but enough to give someone like me some satisfaction. It has a slighty heated spicy exit and if you leave it long enough in the mouth it will also start to give you a little heat.
That’s not to say this rum is rough or has a particularly hot finish – it doesn’t. Those used to a drier style of rum will not find this sensation at all off putting – in fact you will probably find it very welcoming.
I found the Guatemala Anejo to be a very nice mixer. It was a so-so sipper, as it was a bit one dimensional and too sweet really for my taste buds. Mixing this rum you can also fix yourself up a very nice rum and cola. However, I don’t think you will really want to do that as this offers a very nice and almost two sided sipping experience.
Without doubt the best Plantation rum I have tried so far and the one so far for me that justifies that they are indeed doing something different. Previously I have found that “different” has meant wrong. Not in this instance this is a very enjoyable and complex sipping rum.
Different but good with it, very good in fact.BERLIN – A man from the United Arab Emirates who was infected with a new SARS-related virus has died in Munich, German authorities said Tuesday.
The case brings the number of confirmed human cases of new coronavirus infection worldwide to 17, according to the World Health Organization. Of these, 11 have died.
The city hospital in Munich said the 73-year-old patient, who was transferred from Abu Dhabi on March 19, had been suffering from an unspecified “serious underlying condition” that meant his chances of survival had been slim.
The new virus was first identified last year in the Middle East, and most of the patients infected had travelled to Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan or Pakistan.
Read more: Superspreaders could turn new coronavirus into a SARS-like event: experts
In recent weeks two people in Britain have also died after becoming infected with the virus, most likely from family members.
The new coronavirus is part of a group of viruses that cause ailments including the common cold and SARS. In 2003, a global outbreak of SARS killed about 800 people worldwide.
Health experts still aren’t sure exactly how humans are being infected. The new coronavirus is most closely related to a bat virus and scientists are considering whether bats or other animals like goats or camels are a possible source of infection.
The World Health Organization has asked countries to notify it of all new cases of new coronavirus infection but hasn’t recommended travel or trade restrictions.At a recent family gathering, I found myself seated at a table with a family member who, for the purposes of this writing, we’ll call Frank. Frank and I hadn’t seen each other for a few months, so we were due for some catch up chit chat. He fired point blank:
“Are you still doing that no car thing?”
That no car thing.
Six months ago I sold my car. It was a long time coming—I’m a huge believer in walkable cities, and wanted to practice what I preached. A likeminded coworker and I used to go back and forth daring each other to ditch our cars, and we went through several rounds of “I’d totally do it if only I didn’t need to get to x/y/z place,” before finally saying screw it and just going for it. When I finally did it, I was pretty excited. I made an announcement to the family that I was going car free, and I assured them that I wasn’t crazy. I acknowledged the fact that I expected there to be challenges, but I also pointed out that they weren’t problems that a little extra effort and creative thinking couldn’t solve. Six months later, I stand by those claims. Yes, I’ve made trips that would have been significantly easier with a car, but never once have I regretted the decision. The pay-off has far-outweighed the slight and occasional inconvenience.
The next time I saw the family was a few weeks later at a cousin’s wedding in Camarillo, a relatively small city about fifty miles north of my home in Downtown Los Angeles. When I got there, everyone made sure to ask me how my trip up there was. But not in the usual way. The question was loaded. What they really meant was, “I’ll bet you regret your decision now, eh?” They were teasing me about not owning a car.
I’m not sure how people thought I’d gotten there—perhaps they expected I’d had to have borrowed a car from a friend, rented one for the day, or taken a really expensive Lyft—but I can tell you that they certainly didn’t expect the answer I gave them.
“The trip? Quite nice actually. I took the train.”
The incredulous look on their faces came not from the fact that I’d chosen to take the train, but rather from the fact that the train existed.
“There’s a train?” they’d ask, mostly rhetorically. And then I’d have to go and explain that yes, there is in fact a train, and it doesn’t just go to Camarillo either. It travels the entirety of the west coast. You could take it from San Diego to Vancouver if you wanted. (Though I certainly wouldn’t recommend it, as it would take you 37 hours and 15 minutes.)
Of course, the realization that I’d managed to get to the wedding just fine without a car was not enough to earn me a pat on the back. Most just came back with something like, “Yeah, but where’s the station? I bet you still had to walk from the station.”
In fact, I didn’t have to walk—I hitched a last-mile ride with my parents who were headed the same way—but even if I had, it’s hard to make me feel bad about being “forced” to take a Sunday stroll. That’s something I do regularly anyway, by choice.
Regardless, I should acknowledge that I’m not trying to refute the validity of the point everyone was trying to make. After all, it’s true that the train doesn’t go everywhere, and given slightly different circumstances, I could have been stuck trying to get somewhere far from a train station that would have been impossible without a car. Such circumstances are among the challenges of not owning a car. But still, I was convinced that having defended my carlessness so righteously, they would at the very least have understood that being without car in Los Angeles is far from radical. Sadly, I was wrong.
“Are you still doing that no car thing?”
When Frank dropped that question, it all clicked. I finally understood why rather than getting respect for doing a good thing and giving up my car, everyone insisted on teasing me about it. See, it’s not polite to tease someone about the person they choose to be, but that was irrelevant to them, because they never saw my decision to go car-free as a life choice. They never saw it as an investment in the future or a pledge of support for a sustainable Los Angeles. Nope. They saw it as a stunt—something I was doing as a last-ditch call for attention before I finally grew up and embraced normal, car-dependent, adult life. To them, I was like David Blaine, performing a weird test of endurance. I was holding my breath in a car-free world, hoping to impress everyone around me before I could bear it no longer and had to come up for air.
When I told Frank that yes, I still had no car, he gave me a weird look. “How do you get around?” he asked me, a little exasperated.
To him, I’d been holding my breath for so long that he was no longer amused by the magic trick; he wanted to know how it worked. I began an ernest explanation of how trains and bicycles actually do provide convenient and reliable transportation for a lot of people, but I’d barely begun before I could tell he’d zoned out. In his, and so many others’ minds, bicycles—a 19th century technology—couldn’t possibly be a real solution. They’re just that thing that we keep around so our kids have something to do before they turn 16. I probably should have just gone with “A magician never reveals his secret.”
I’ve done a lot of ruminating since that day, and—as is often the case when rumination—I’ve become more and more pissed off. At first I thought it was because I was being forced to defend my decision to make a positive life change to my family, but that wasn’t quite it. Then I thought it was because my family didn’t recognize my decision as a life choice at all. But finally, I landed on what I’m now quite sure is the real issue:
This is 2014. If you open a newspaper, pull up a website, or talk to any person on just about any given day, chances are one of: global warming, air pollution, gas prices, fossil fuel dependence, obesity, heart disease, poverty, poor quality of life, traffic, depression, or auto accidents is going to be a featured topic of discussion. Given that all of these problems can be helped by eschewing cars in favor of alternative transportation, I should not have to justify my decision not to drive. Rather, everyone else should have to justify their decision to drive.
It’s amazing how little guilt people feel when they step into their cars. As I mentioned in a previous article about cycling in Los Angeles, my girlfriend recently moved here from Vancouver, and has been generally shocked by our behavior on the streets. Her early observations (though frustrating) didn’t surprise me. Things like our habit of making left turns after a light has already turned red, passing on the right, and refusing to let people merge into a lane were all things that surprised her, but that were par-the-course for me. But as her sense for the city was honed, her insights became more profound. One time she caught me off guard.
“It’s amazing how little respect you get here if you’re not in a car.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
She told me about how in Vancouver, people’s behavior is reversed. Cyclists and pedestrians get the most respect, and people in cars behave humbly around them, yielding right of way, never honking, never threatening. I asked her why she thought that was, and she seemed confused as to how the answer wasn’t blatantly obvious.
“Because they know the people on bikes are better than them. They’re being better citizens, making better choices. They feel bad about it. They feel guilty driving their cars.”
She was right: that should have been obvious. Driving a car does so much more harm than it does good, so how is it that we in Los Angeles don’t feel the slightest bit bad about doing it?
Angelenos are pretty good at collectively shaming people out of doing things we know are bad for society. For example, we know that drinking and driving is dangerous, so we shame people out of trying it. Most people in this city wouldn’t dare admit to doing it for fear of losing the respect of their friends and family. It does still happen, but far less often than it would if that culture of shame didn’t exist, as in the case in places like Louisiana, where not only do they tolerate drinking and driving, they’ve gone so far as to sell liquor at drive-thru’s. (Not kidding. It’s called a go-cup. Look it up.)
More topically, we also know that wasting water during a drought is a serious problem, and we shame people out of that as well. The number of spouting sprinklers I’ve seen around town has dramatically decreased as a result, and water usage has correspondingly decreased over 10% this September compared to last year.
In both of the above cases, it would have been a lot easier to just ignore the problem than commit to fixing it. We’d never have to worry about designated drivers or cab fares when drinking, and we’d be able to keep our lush green lawns, long showers, and epic slip ‘n slides. But instead, despite the inconvenience to us, we chose to attack the problem head on out of respect for our community. So why then, do we treat driving a car so differently? We tackled drunk driving because it causes traffic accidents. We frown on water waste because it damges the natural environment. But despite the fact that driving a car causes both of those things and so much more, we continue to collectively pretend the problem doesn’t even exist.
It’s impossible to explain exactly why that is, but I believe it has a lot to do with the fact that we’re a lot less in control of our own decision making process than we think we are. We like to think that as humans, we can rationalize our way through complicated decision-making, but having spoken to LA drivers about their decision to drive, I’m not convinced that’s the case at all. After all, when faced with the threat of global warming, choosing to perpetuate the problem by making zero changes to our driving habits whatsoever is pretty much the exact opposite of a productive response. But we do it anyway.
Shaming people out of their bad habits works because shame comes from having to accept the blame for the negative consequences of a bad choice. If someone chooses to wastefully water his front lawn during a drought, he becomes the focal point of such blame. If everyone in the community worked hard to change their habits and they feel their efforts are being offset by someone who doesn’t care, that person becomes increasingly condemned, bearing a greater and greater share of the blame for the problem. And if news came out, for example, that we were still not saving enough water, everyone would blame that guy. No one wants to be that guy. The threat of that kind of reputation damage is usually enough to keep people from making bad decisions.
But unfortunately, this only works when there is already a critical mass of people who have changed their habits. Without that, the focus of the blame becomes far too blurry for it to have any impact on an individual level. In today’s Los Angeles, we’re far from that critical mass when it comes to driving. 84% of people here still rely on a car to get them to and from work every day, which means it’s way too easy for drivers to hop on the road, guilt free. In fact, we actually endorse each other’s bad habits.
Humans have a natural tendency to blindly assume that the decisions made by large groups of people must be correct. Even if we have no idea why people are behaving a certain way, the sheer fact that they are is usually enough for us to assume there must be a reason, and to follow their lead. In the context of driving, this means that in addition to being able to avoid the blame for our bad decisions, sometimes we’re even able to entirely forget that they’re bad decisions at all.
I remember when An Inconvenient Truth first came out. I saw it in the theaters with some friends, and I remember them leaving that night feeling disgusted with themselves for contributing so directly to the demise of our planet. Everyone was thinking the same thing: “How can we fix this?”
You’d think they would have channeled that disgust into making major life changes, but that didn’t happen. By the time a couple months had passed, most of my friends, and even I, had simply moved on. The memory of the movie’s message—that something terrible is happening to the planet and we need to fix it—was still there, but daily life had become so far-removed from that message that it felt almost unrelated.
Here’s what happened. Everyone who saw the movie got up the next morning and got ready for work or school as usual. Then they walked over to their car and they hesitated, because, though they probably didn’t have much choice in the way of an alternative, for a brief moment, they felt pretty bad about getting into a car. After a few seconds though, they realized, “Hey, I’m not the only one doing this. Everyone else does it too. They do it every day. If it were really that bad, they would have stopped. Somebody would have told me to stop. I’ll stop doing it when everyone else begins to stop too.”
We’re pitifully prone to mistaking large groups of people for authority figures. It actually kind of makes sense evolutionarily. For example, consider the efficacy of the “ask the audience” lifeline vs “phone a friend” in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The likelihood of one single person being highly knowledgeable on one single subject is pretty low, but the collective knowledge of the entire audience is, in almost every circumstance, of much higher quality, and we therefor trust the group over the individual. This instinctive respect for the actions of the masses is an ancient one. Simply put, it comes from the fact that the people in that group are, well, still alive. 50,000 years ago, if a large group of people all made the same decision and came out alive, you were probably going to want to make that decision too. But 50,000 years ago, we were dealing with things like hungry predators scarce food, and harsh weather. If you made the wrong choice, you might well have died from it, sometimes instantly.
Things are a bit different now though, and applying that same instinct in a modern context doesn’t make sense. Modern day threats like global warming aren’t putting our lives in immediate danger, and our decisions for how to deal with them don’t have immediate consequences. Global warming doesn’t directly affect our livelihood the way that, say, a hungry tiger does, but unfortunately, our instincts don’t know that, and we end up using the same decision-making techniques—following the choices of the crowd—that we always have, despite the fact that they’re leading us astray.
Now, if people were dropping dead left and right as a result of choosing to drive in spite of global warming, it’d be a different story. But they’re not. The consequences of poor decision-making in the context of global warming are so far removed from the decisions themselves that instead of feeling regret, we feel validated:.
I’m following everyone else’s lead, and so far, it’s working fine; I must be making the right decision.
The result of all of this is that Angelenos are stuck in a self-perpetuating cycle of not only not shaming each other for their bad decisions, but also unknowingly pacifying each others’ concerns over issues that we really should be concerned about. If Jim thinks it’s okay to drive because Jane is doing it, and Jane thinks it’s okay because Jim is doing it, there’s seemingly no way to break the cycle. Achieving the critical mass for change is impossible.
But wait. What about the drought / drunk driving shaming that we did so well? How did we reach the critical mass necessary to break the cycle of endorsement and turn on the shame machine in those instances?
While both of the above problems require extra effort and willingness to tough out an inconvenience, they’re different from giving up a car in one huge way. Everyone has the power to avoid drinking and driving. Sure, it can be more expensive, but the option is there. And if they can’t afford it, the choice to simply not enter a situation that would require drinking and driving is also on the table. Similarly, outside of drinking, eating, and basic household needs, anyone can give up water. Having a beautiful lawn is a wonderful addition to a home, but it’s not a necessity, and the power to turn the faucet off is within everyone’s grasp. But, when it comes to transportation without a car, a huge portion of Angelenos simply don’t have an alternative. They can’t participate, even if they want to.
It only takes a few people to start a movement if people have proper access to the tools of change. When that’s the case, such movements are contagious, and reaching that critical mass is easy. But in the case of driving, the pool of people who have the tools available to use an alternative is tiny, which is why reaching critical mass will be really, really hard. In order for any kind of a cultural shift in mentality to take place in this city, we need everyone we can get.
It’s impossible to ask everyone in every corner of Los Angeles to give up their car. Shaming the people who truly don’t have the ability to do anything different is never going to accomplish anything. However, if you live in Los Angeles, in an area that doesn’t necessitate a car, but you still choose to drive one anyway, you are the problem, and you deserve to be shamed.
I’m sick of feeling being treated like a freak for making a healthy decision. I want that to end. Living without a car should be acceptable and normal.
Here’s what you can do:
If you have the ability to use your car less, do it. Don’t assume that because other people are driving, it’s okay for you to drive too. Remember, not everyone has a choice like you do. If you don’t have the luxury of living near transit but would still like to be part of the solution, you have a lot of leverage against people that have the option, but choose not to take advantage of it. When you talk to those people, ask them why they’re making that decision, and remind them that it’s selfish. Ask them to justify it, not just to you, but to themselves. Driving a car when they don’t have to should make them feel uncomfortable. And make sure they know that your driving isn’t a choice, and doesn’t excuse theirs.
Somebody in a comment thread on BikingInLA today assured me that:
[Bringing proper bike infrastructure] to the US will never work. The culture will have to change, and I don’t see that happening in our lifetimes.
It’s going to be an uphill battle for sure, and if we don’t start taking the wins where we can get them, he might be right. But I believe in Los Angeles. And I believe we’re capable of a fundamental change. One that will create a culture of respect instead of disdain for those who go out of their way to make responsible choices. One that will spawn enthusiasm for the things that our city has the potential to be instead of for maintaining what it already is. One where our peers validate our positive decisions, not our negative ones. And most importantly, one where going car-free doesn’t require justification, but driving a car does.When linguists talk about unconscious or implicit language learning, they don’t mean learning while you sleep. Rather, they are talking about one of the most intriguing of all mental phenomena: the ability to learn the complex and subtle regularities that underlie a language without even realising.
For children, such ‘implicit’ language learning seems to happen spontaneously in the first few years of life; yet, in adulthood, learning a second language is generally far from effortless and has varied success.
So marked is the difference between first- and second-language learning – at least when it takes the form of classroom learning – it might suggest that implicit learning makes no significant contribution to learning a second language. Or it may indicate that typical foreign language teaching doesn’t take full advantage of the process.
The challenge that faces linguists is how to test whether implicit learning is taking place. How can you differentiate between a person consciously recognising a certain pattern or rule in the language they are learning and the same person unconsciously knowing that something sounds right simply because their brain has judged it to be right?
The new approach to solving the puzzle taken by Dr John Williams at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics and his collaborator, Dr Janny Leung from the University of Hong Kong, has been to invent an artificial language. Participants were tested to see whether they correctly acquired, over periods as short as one hour, an understanding of patterns embedded within the artificial language.
An example of their technique is to teach participants four novel forms of the word ‘the’ (gi, ro, ul and ne), telling them that the forms encode a certain meaningful dimension (e.g. gi and ro should be used for describing near objects, ul and ne for far objects). The aim is to see if the participants can spontaneously pick up a correlation with another, hidden, meaning (e.g. that gi and ul should be used with animate nouns and ro and ne with inanimate nouns). The novel forms are embedded in English phrases such as ‘I was terrified when I turned around and saw gi lion right behind me’.
Do they pick up on the concealed pattern when tested? “The answer is yes,” said Dr Williams, whose research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. “We found significantly above-chance selection of sentence constructions that were ‘grammatically correct’ according to the hidden pattern. Yet, the participants had no awareness of what they had learned or how. Moreover, we were able to show learning of the same material by native speakers of two typologically very different languages, English and Cantonese.”
Interestingly, picking up the hidden pattern unconsciously doesn’t always happen – if, for instance, the hidden pattern is linguistically unnatural, such as a correlation with whether an object makes a sound or not. “One explanation could be that certain patterns are more accessible to language learning processes than others. Perhaps our brains are built equipped to expect certain patterns, or perhaps they process some patterns better than others,” he added.
The research provides a window onto unconscious learning processes in the mind and highlights an important element that has practical implications for language teaching. In each test, the learner’s attention was directed to the part of the sentence that contained the hidden pattern. By directing attention, it seems that other elements of the sentence construction are picked up unconsciously.
“In a teaching situation, merely teaching the rules of a language may not be the only answer,” explained Dr Williams. “Instead, using tasks that focus attention on the relevant grammatical forms in language could help learners access unconscious learning pathways in the brain. This would greatly enhance the speed of acquisition of a second language.”So I started hanging out with some other people with disabilities and enjoyed myself immensely. There’s something deeply wonderful about the shared experience of difference in a friendship. And some of these new friends of mine were in relationships; some of them with other disabled people, and some with non-disabled folks. I no longer dismissed the idea of a relationship with another disabled person entirely, but there was still this nagging reluctance. It is often assumed that sexuality is a concept that simply doesn’t apply to people with disabilities. I wasn’t asked by a doctor if I was sexually active until I was 27. I always had to volunteer that information. Some doctors even responded with blatant surprise. This isn’t exactly encouraging from some of the most highly educated members of our communities, is it? A good friend of mine with mild Cerebral Palsy – very vanilla as disabilities go – was taken out of sex ed classes at school because her parents thought that the less she knew about sex, the better. Because of all this discomfort around sexuality and disability, it’s no wonder that having a relationship at all can feel like an act of rebellion. In many ways, it seems the path of least resistance is for us to have a relationship with someone else with a disability. Society seems to be more comfortable if we “stick with our own kind”. This attitude used to apply to interracial relationships as well, and some people are still quite uncomfortable with that. I’ve been in the same relationship for six years, but prior to this I got the same relationship advice from a lot of people.
“There's a guy at my gym in a wheelchair, you guys should go out.” “I know this guy with Cerebral Palsy, you guys would be really cute together.” “I bet you really like that Peter Dinklage* guy, hey?” I really resented the idea that people seemed to want to pair me off with someone else with a disability like we were a cute little matching set. Disability is further complicated by media portrayal. People with disabilities are set up by the media and painted as “undesirable”. We fall, sometimes quite drastically, outside the boundaries of what is considered conventionally attractive. We talk about non-disabled people who are attracted to us as either sexually deviant (as in the devotee fetish community), or we talk about them as being able to “look past” disability.
The notion of “looking past” disability to somehow see “the real person” is one I have come to find deeply offensive. I spent my teenage years thinking that I needed to find someone who could ignore my physical body and see my “attributes” - my intelligence and humour, my mad knitting skillz. I thought that the only logical way for someone to find me attractive would be for them to ignore what I look like. It didn't occur to me until years later that my body is also an attribute. I realised that I didn’t want that kind of relationship. I didn’t want someone to ignore my body. I wanted someone who’d look directly at it and love it, wonky bits and all. I’ve also come to realise that the wonder and acceptance I found as a 17-year-old when I started hanging out with other people with disabilities – the shared experience of difference – is one of the things that I definitely want in a relationship. In my partner (who is currently leaning over my shoulder saying “you need to make this much saucier for CityKat!”) I have found that. There’s something really wonderful about sharing your life with someone who really “gets it”. For me, that trumps my natural tendency to rebel. And really, when you strip away all the superficiality and aesthetics, isn’t that what we all want? Just because society doesn’t expect love and sex to be a priority for people with disabilities, doesn’t mean we aren’t every bit as invested in those things as everyone else. Of course there is no right way to have a relationship, whether you have a disability or not. But I’m pretty glad I stopped trying to go against what I felt I should aspire too, and just decided to do what I want. And what I want is far more important than what other people expect.
*Yes, I absolutely love The Dink. More than Ryan Gosling. Because he’s smoking hot, and I wouldn’t have to ask him to sit down before I planted one on his lovely stubbly face. ------------------------------------ Stella Young is the editor of ABC Ramp Up. Follow her on Twitter. As well as commissioning a series of guest posts while CityKat is away, brisbanetimes.com.au is also going to select one reader entry for publication. Email your submissions through to scoop@brisbanetimes.com.au with CK GUEST BLOG in the subject line. Our editorial team will take a look and select a reader entry for publication.It is difficult to imagine what it must be like to be solely responsible for two young daughters and an elderly mother when a savage war breaks out and your family’s lives are under threat.
That is what happened to single mother Ban – twice. Having escaped an abusive marriage, Ban was working for a politically affiliated women’s charity in her home country of Iraq when the Saddam regime fell and war broke out.
With the lives of her family under threat, Ban took refuge in Syria, a country where she had friends and family and found a warm welcome. She applied for refugee status and waited to be relocated through a UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) programme.
It turned out to be a long wait. War followed Ban and her family to Syria and she found herself re-living the all too familiar horrors of trying to survive through conflict – rushing to find her children after a bomb explosion, desperate attempts to find food in the shops and the constant fear of attacks. When the telephone call came from the UNHCR, Ban could hardly believe what they told her. Her family had been offered a life in the UK – at last, a chance for her family to live in peace in a country and culture she loved.
The route to the UK was long and difficult – living in a refugee camp and sharing cramped accommodation with other families and sleeping in airport lounges.
But when they finally arrived in the UK in January 2014 there was someone waiting to help them. Refugee Action caseworker Samra, from our Gateway Protection Progam. Samra, secured school places for Ban’s children and enrolled Ban in English classes. “Refugee Action has been very good to us – helped us feel welcome and settled in” says Ban “and my two daughters always speak English at home to help them integrate quickly”.
The bad memories will always remain with Ban’s family – they saw the horrors of war at first hand – the streets littered with dead bodies and constant fear when exploding bombs shook their house.
But peace and quiet and good friends are slowly but surely normalising Ban’s life. “Everything’s normal” says Ban. “It makes me able to stand again – at last there is hope for a future for my family”.The first evening of the MLG Americas Minor Championship has come to a close, with Enemy and Leader-1 scoring important Group B wins whereas SPLYCE sent EZG home in the Group B losers match (16-14 on de_cache).
Seven teams converged on the MLG Americas Minor Championship, the first of four regional Valve-endorsed Minors which all dole out $50,000 in prize money and a coveted invitation to the MLG Columbus Major offline qualifier taking place February 26-28.
Interestingly enough, Group A, which was already a team short due to two Brazilian teams encountering visa issues and compLexity dropping out due to a reforming roster, saw its only match of the day also become a forfeit win for Winterfox as Obey.Alliance's Terry "dsr" Rioux was unable to arrive at the Arena in time due to flight issues.
arya's SPLYCE struggled on the first day of the MLG Americas Minor
Group B however got to see all three of its matches play out in a full-spread and the opening match saw Michael "MAiNLiNE" Jaber lead his Enemy team to a 16-9 win on de_cache over the relatively newfound EZG eSports team, with hotshot Kenneth "koosta" Suen putting in a noteworthy performance.
MLG Americas Minor Championship Best of 1 Enemy Matchpage 16 9 EZG 16 Cache 9
Enemy K - D +/- ADR Rating 1.0 Michael 'MAiNLiNE' JaberMAiNLiNE 29 - 18 +11 - 1.73 Kenneth 'koosta' Suenkoosta 26 - 12 +14 - 1.69 Michael 'Uber' StapellsUber 23 - 14 +9 - 1.43 Skyler 'Relyks' WeaverRelyks 12 - 16 -4 - 0.79 Richard 'Lucky' VasconcelosLucky 11 - 18 -7 - 0.67 EZG K - D +/- ADR Rating 1.0 Thomas 'GrumpiX' JungGrumpiX 18 - 19 -1 - 0.94 Paul 'MORViD' BeamMORViD 19 - 21 -2 - 0.88 Adrian'recky' Golecrecky 15 - 20 -5 - 0.78 Igor 'cuse' Nikoliccuse 13 - 20 -7 - 0.69 Nick 'N4j' NormanN4j 13 - 21 -8 - 0.66
The second opening match of Group B was something of a thriller as Arya "arya" Hekmat's SPLYCE team paired up against Leader-1, an up-and-coming team from ESEA Premier.
After a close 8-7 first half on de_dust2, it was Leader-1 who pulled ahead to snatch the map away with a 16 |
Kings past the Pelicans, and has played meaningful fourth-quarter minutes in many of the contests in which he’s been active.
“Omri’s a big confidence guy, and I can tell he’s playing more confident with (the Kings) and getting more of a role and more minutes,” says Mavericks forward Chandler Parsons, who played alongside Casspi on the Rockets last season. “(Omri) can play, and play at a high level … I’m glad to see him take advantage of his opportunity in Sac.”
Casspi’s improved ball-handling – a primary area of focus during a career-defining offseason – and ability to play multiple positions has allowed the team to plug the versatile reserve at either forward slot, as well as periodically slide him to shooting guard depending on matchups.
“I love it, especially when Rudy and I sometimes play (small forward) and (power forward),” says Casspi. “I played a lot of (power forward) last year in Houston when they’d go small, and (the Kings) go small a lot, too … I’m comfortable at both positions, because our offense is set (so) that everybody cuts, moves, has the ball, doesn’t hold the ball and gets good shots.”
As the Israeli-born standout gets reacquainted with his first NBA home, he’s aiming to not only stay poised and consistent but driven to thrive alongside his emerging teammates.
“(I have) the mindset of getting better, but hopefully we, as a team, keep growing,” he says. “We have some young guys, we have some older guys, but (we’re finding) that balance of helping one another and trying to be the best team we can be with one another. I think we’re talented enough to make the Playoffs and make the next steps … the base is right there to be a really special team.”The Iraqis' fierce resistance to foreigners (us) invading their country was predictable on any number of grounds. But perhaps the most interesting is the most fundamental: the theory of "ethnic nepotism." This explains the tendency of humans to favor members of their own racial group by postulating that all animals evolve toward being more altruistic toward kin in order to propagate more copies of their common genes.
Which doesn't mean that kin groups always cooperate—they also compete among themselves, in a sort of sibling rivalry writ large. But nepotistic solidarity still matters.
Even the notoriously fractious Afghan Pashtuns think in terms of: "I against my brother. My brother and I against my cousin. My cousin and we against the world." (Note that, by maintaining a smaller footprint in Afghanistan and letting the Afghans go back to being Afghans, we've provoked much less nationalist backlash there.)
You may not have ever heard of ethnic nepotism before. That's largely because the most media savvy-explicators of Darwinism—such as Richard Dawkins, recently voted Britain's top public intellectual by Prospect magazine—are terrified that their entire field might be tarred as "racist" if the concept is given a fair public discussion.
The term "ethnic nepotism" was introduced in the 1981 book The Ethnic Phenomenon by Pierre L. van den Berghe, a white sociologist born in the old Belgian colony of the Congo.
Disgusted by white oppression of Africans, van den Berghe became a fairly conventional liberal on race. But, as he overcame his Eurocentric focus on white crimes, he realized that race-based exploitation and violence are universal human curses. This led him to sociobiology and its bedrock finding: the late William D. Hamilton's theory of kin selection and inclusive fitness—the more genes we share with another individual, the more altruistic we feel toward him.
There are no clear boundaries between extended family, tribe, ethnic group, or race. So van den Berghe coined the term "ethnic nepotism" to describe the human tendency to favor "our people."
Ethnocentrism, clannishness, xenophobia, nationalism, and racism are the almost inevitable flip sides of ethnic nepotism. (I say almost because it's important to note that you can be patriotic and work for the good of your own fellow citizens without overtly wishing ill toward any other country. Nonetheless, even patriotism still implies discrimination against noncitizens.)
The Ethnic Phenomenon is the book Karl Marx should have written. Rather than focusing on the relatively minor phenomenon of class, he should have explored the global importance of kinship.
Hamilton, the leading evolutionary theorist of the second half of the 20th Century, had figured out the mathematics and extraordinary implications of an explanation for nepotism that had been kicking around half-formed among biologists.
Hamilton pointed out that it was often useful to think of "survival of the fittest" from the point of view, as it were, of individual genes. A gene that encourages you to sacrifice your life to save two brothers or eight cousins would tend to spread.
Hamilton used his new perspective to explain a mystery that had perplexed Darwin a century before: the extreme degree of nepotistic self-sacrifice among social insects. Worker ants give up reproducing in order to help their sister, the queen, reproduce on a vast scale. Hamilton pointed out that while most species' siblings share 50 percent of their genes, ant sisters share 75 percent. This makes self-sacrifice by workers more genetically profitable.
This gene-centric viewpoint was made understandable to the reading public by Edward O. Wilson's 1975 book Sociobiology and Richard Dawkins' celebrated 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. (A better title for Dawkins' book would have been The Dynastic Gene, since your genes spread by helping promulgate copies of themselves in one's relatives).
E.O. Wilson's description in his delightful autobiography Naturalist of how he wrestled with Hamilton's epochal papers during an 18-hour train ride in 1965 is a classic:
"Impossible, I thought, this can't be right. Too simple… By dinnertime, as the train rumbled on into Virginia, I was growing frustrated and angry… And because I modestly thought of myself as the world authority on social insects, I also thought it unlikely that anyone else could explain their origin, certainly not in one clean stroke… By the time we reached Miami, in the early afternoon, I gave up. I was a convert and put myself in Hamilton's hands. I had undergone what historians of science call a paradigm shift."
In 1975, Hamilton had extended his theory to humans. In a long essay entitled Innate Social Aptitudes of Man: An Approach from Evolutionary Genetics, (which appears in the first volume of Hamilton's autobiographical Narrow Roads of Gene Land), Hamilton wrote:
"... I hope to produce evidence that some things which are often treated as purely cultural in humans—say racial discrimination—have deep roots in our animal past and thus are quite likely to rest on direct genetic foundations."
Richard Dawkins' tremendous career as a science journalist has been built on his talent at translating Hamilton's formulas into engaging prose. But he has long denied the possibility of ethnic nepotism, even though Hamilton had published an elaborate model of it the year before Dawkins published The Selfish Gene.
Dawkins' political correctness was all too apparent the 1995 interview with him conducted by Frank Miele for The Skeptic magazine:
Miele: Shortly after publication of The Selfish Gene, you wrote a letter to the editor of Nature … in which you stated that kin selection theory in no way provides a basis for understanding ethnocentrism. You said you made this statement, in part at least, to counter charges that were being made in the UK at that time by Marxist critics that Selfish Gene Theory was being used by the British National Front to support their Fascist ideology. In retrospect, do you think you went too far in trying to distance yourself from some would-be and very unwanted enthusiasts, or not far enough?
Dawkins: As to distancing myself from the National Front, that I did! The National Front was saying something like this, "kin selection provides the basis for favoring your own race as distinct from other races, as a kind of generalization of favoring your own close family as opposed to other individuals." Kin selection doesn't do that! Kin selection favors nepotism towards your own immediate close family. It does not favor a generalization of nepotism towards millions of other people who happen to be the same color as you. Even if it did, and this is a stronger point, I would oppose any suggestion from any group such as the National Front, that whatever occurs in natural selection is therefore morally good or desirable. We come back to this point over and over again. I'm definitely not one who thinks that "is" is the same as "ought."
The purpose of science, however, is not to proclaim better morals or to distance oneself from the politically unpalatable, but to help us make better predictions.
Dawkins' ostentatious fear of falling into what David Hume called the "naturalistic fallacy"—assuming "is" implies "ought"—leads him into what Steven Pinker calls the "moralistic fallacy"—assuming "ought" implies "is."
And in fact Miele easily forced Dawkins to admit that his strident pronouncement against the feasibility of ethnic nepotism was dubious:
Miele: Could there be selection for a mechanism that would operate like this—"those who look like me, talk like me, act like me, are probably genetically close to me. Therefore, be nice, good, and altruistic to them. If not avoid them?" And could that mechanism later be programmed to say, "Be good to someone who wears the same baseball cap, the same Rugby colors, or whatever?" That is, could evolution have a produced a hardware mechanism that is software programmable?
Dawkins: I think that's possible.
Hamilton could have been describing Dawkins' political weaseling when he recounted in 1996 the reception his 1975 paper on ethnic nepotism had received in a review by
"noted anthropologist, S.L. Washburn, in which, singling my paper out of the whole volume, he called it'reductionist, racist, and ridiculous.'... I wonder if people who struggle to extend the frontiers of a discipline against a current of peer disapproval sometimes need to convince themselves and other that they are not quite the heretics and outlaws everyone thinks and this need is expressed through an extra militancy against further extension in the direction they themselves have been taking… It is a pity to see scientists struggling to tie each other's hands in respect of some kinds of understanding and in effect crippling themselves …"
Interestingly, the distinguished political scientist Robert Axelrod, who had worked with Hamilton on crucial breakthroughs in the theory of altruism, published a 2003 paper on "The Evolution of Ethnocentric Behavior" showing that "in-group favoritism" was likely to evolve.
The main objection that Dawkins raises to ethnic nepotism is that Hamiltonian kin selection only applies to close kin, presumably because genetic similarity diffuses so rapidly as you move outward in your family tree.
To use Hamilton's way of calculating, you are 1/2 related to your brother, 1/8 to your first cousin, 1/32 to your second cousin, 1/128 to your third cousin, etc.
So, obviously, ethnic nepotism can't work because relatedness becomes vanishingly small, right?
Wrong! Because, as Hamilton pointed out in 1975, you can't ignore the effect of inbreeding—not in the "Deliverance" sense of marrying your sister, but in the sense that people from, say, Japan usually marry other people from Japan, not random mates from around the world.
Thus genetic anthropologist Henry Harpending long pooh-poohed ethnic nepotism until he finally sat down to do the math. Then, Harpending discovered that the effect was twice as strong as had been suggested. (This discovery is recounted in Frank Salter's important new book On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethny, and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration).
Take race denier Richard Lewontin's famous 1972 finding that only 15% of genetic variation is among population groups. This is always interpreted in the popular press to mean that, because there is more genetic diversity within racial groups than between them, therefore (non sequitur alert!) RACIAL DIFFERENCES DO NOT EXIST!!!...
Harpending says the variation between groups is even lower, more like 12.5%, so let's use that.
What Harpending discovered, and anthropologist Vincent Sarich confirmed, is that Lewontin was using Sewall Wright's way of calculating relatedness, and you need to about double it to make it equivalent to Hamilton's way. So, 12.5% times two is 25%, which is the degree of relatedness between an uncle and his nephew…which, after all, is where the word "nepotism" comes from!
In other words, on average, people are as closely related to other members of their subracial "ethnic" group (e.g., Japanese or Italian) versus the rest of the world as they are related to their nephew versus the rest of their ethnic group.
(Sarich and Miele have explained the genetics of Harpending's discovery using slightly more aggressive assumptions than I did above).
So, the genetic basis for ethnic nepotism with each racial group is roughly as strong on average as the etymologically classic case of nepotism among close kin—the uncle-nephew bond.
Ethnic nepotism isn't a metaphor. It's a reality.
And we'd better accept it—whether Richard Dawkins thinks it would be good for his career or not.
[Steve Sailer [email him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog.]CAIRO (Reuters) - Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi has driven back the biggest challenge to civilian rule by dismissing top generals and tearing up their legal attempt to curb his power in a bold bid to end 60 years of military leadership.
Taking the country by surprise, Mursi pushed Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi into retirement. The 76-year-old figurehead of the old order, he took charge of the biggest Arab nation when Hosni Mubarak fell last year and remained head of its powerful, ad hoc military council after the Islamist was elected in June.
The armed forces, which had supplied Egypt’s presidents for six decades after ousting the monarchy, have shown no sign of challenging the move announced late on Sunday, though a senior judge did speak up on Monday to question Mursi’s right to act.
Lower-ranking generals and other officers may, however, support a change that shifts power in the military to a new generation. One analyst said Mursi mounted a “civilian counter-coup” coordinated with an internal putsch in the armed forces.
State media cited a military source dismissing talk of any “negative reactions” by the generals to a decision which, given their earlier dissolution of parliament, now hands Mursi what liberal critic Mohamed ElBaradei described as “imperial powers”.
Mursi and his long-suppressed Muslim Brotherhood had been expected to roll back the influence of the army, a close ally of Washington and recipient of $1.3 billion in annual U.S. military aid; but many had predicted a process that would take years of delicate diplomacy to avoid sparking a military backlash.
Instead, just six weeks after he was sworn into office and seemingly taking advantage of a military debacle on the Sinai border that embarrassed the army, Mursi announced sweeping changes in the high command and reshaped Egypt’s politics.
“Mursi settles the struggle for power,” said a headline in the state-owned Al-Akhbar daily, a newspaper that is traditionally a mouthpiece for the army-backed establishment.
“Mursi ends the political role for the armed forces,” wrote the independent Al-Masry Al-Youm. Another, Tahrir, called it the “president’s revolution against the military”.
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Short of an outright coup d’etat, the army may now have few political avenues to reverse Mursi’s decisions - if it wanted to. But its vast economic interests and history of influence suggests its wishes cannot go completely ignored by Mursi.
Apart from some demonstrations of support for Mursi late on Sunday, there was little reaction on the streets to the president’s decision. The stock market reaction was muted, with the benchmark index rising 1.5 percent.
As well as ordering the retirement of Tantawi, the head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and Mubarak’s defense minister for 20 years, and Chief-of-Staff Sami Enan, 64, Mursi also cancelled a decree issued by the military before his election which had curbed the power of the presidency.
Mursi appointed General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, 57, from military intelligence, to lead the army and become defense minister. Enan was replaced by General Sidki Sobhi, 56, who led the Third Field Army based in Suez, on the border with Sinai.
“What we saw... in Egypt increasingly seems like a mix of a civilian counter-coup and a coordinated coup within the military itself,” wrote Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Doha Center.
The response among the high command was subdued. SCAF member General Mohamed el-Assar, who becomes deputy defense minister, told Reuters Mursi’s decision was based on “consultation” with Tantawi and the rest of the military council.
There was also little immediate public reaction from the United States, a key supporter of Cairo’s military rulers since they signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979:
“It’s too soon to say what the potential implications might be,” one senior U.S. official said in Washington.
Tantawi and Enan were appointed advisers and given honors, suggesting they will not face the same fate as Mubarak, once air force commander, who was jailed for life aged 84.
“I did not mean to send a negative message about anyone, but my aim was the benefit of this nation,” Mursi said on Sunday during a holiday speech that was pointedly diplomatic.
Egypt's new Islamist President Mohamed Mursi (C) speaks with Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi (L) and Egyptian Armed Forces Chief Of Staff Sami Anan during a soldier graduation ceremony at the Egyptian military academy in Cairo in this July 17, 2012 file photo. Mursi ordered Egypt's two top generals to retire, including Hussein Tantawi who led the nation after Hosni Mubarak was ousted, and appointed two generals in their place, the presidential spokesman announced on August 12, 2012. Tantawi, who served Mubarak as a minister for 20 years, and Chief of Staff Sami Enan were both appointed as advisers to Mursi. Spokesman Yasser Ali said the changes among Egypt's top brass were effective immediately. REUTERS/Sherif Abd Monam/Egyptian Presidency/Handout/Files
His spokesman called it a “sovereign” decision, “taken by the president to pump new blood into the military establishment in the interests of developing a new, modern state”.
Mursi had already shown he was ready to confront the military. Last month, he challenged the army’s decision, based on a court ruling in June, to dissolve the Islamist-led parliament. Mursi’s decree was then itself reversed by a court.
“ISLAMIC STATE”
There was no immediate sign of any legal challenge to Mursi’s cancellation of the constitutional declaration by the army that had curbed presidential powers before he took office.
By sweeping aside that declaration, Mursi, rather than the army, will hold legislative authority in the absence of parliament. It also means the president can appoint an assembly to draw up the new constitution if the panel now working on it fails. That body’s composition is being challenged in court.
ElBaradei, a former U.N. diplomat who has been critical of both the Brotherhood and the army, wrote: “With military stripped of legislative authority and in absence of parliament, president holds imperial powers. Transitional mess continues.”
However, a member of the Supreme Constitutional Court signaled the potential for yet another legal challenge as Egypt’s leaders make up a new politic system on the hoof.
Noting Mursi had torn up the very constitutional document under which he himself was sworn in, the court’s Tahany El-Gebaly told state-owned news portal Ahram Online: “A president has no power to abrogate a constitution, even a temporary one.”
Some liberal rivals of the Muslim Brotherhood have voiced alarm at the growing might of the Islamists, whom they fear could turn their backs on Western alliances and impose religious law on a tolerant society with a big Christian minority. “Forget Tantawi and Enan,” a critic on Twitter, Nervana Mahmoud, wrote. “This is not a soft coup, but a declaration of Islamic state.”
But many liberals are equally concerned by the continuing power exercised by the army. The April 6 youth movement, which galvanized the anti-Mubarak uprising, said Mursi’s move was a “first step towards establishing a civilian state”.
Against a background of legal wrangling, Mursi has also appointed a judge, Mahmoud Mekky, as his vice president.
Slideshow (8 Images)
Mursi’s election victory over a former general prompted renewed concerns in Israel and the West about alliances with Egypt, following the Islamists’ sweep in parliamentary voting.
Pledging to uphold democratic accountability and to stand by Cairo’s treaties, Mursi has shown impatience with the military before. After Islamist militants killed 16 border guards near the Sinai frontier with Israel and the Gaza Strip, he sacked the intelligence chief. On Sunday, officials said Egyptian troops had killed five more militants in a crackdown in the region.Canberra cafe pokes fun at botched burglary attempt for school project
Updated
A Canberra cafe has had the last laugh by poking fun at a burglar who smashed his way into the store last week but escaped with nothing more than basic first aid supplies.
After its fifth break-in in four years, the Niugini Arabica cafe in Canberra's south decided to post security footage of the attack and its unfortunate aftermath online, complete with commentary and a Benny Hill soundtrack.
The video shows the burglar at first struggling to break through the glass door of the Duffy cafe before racing around the store looking for money.
When he is unsuccessful, he appears to run off with a first aid bandage that he later drops.
The CCTV footage also shows the following morning to be just as eventful, with a staff member forgetting the door is broken and falling through it, covering herself in coffee.
"It's a habit … when you're holding two cups you push the door backwards to walk backwards through the door," cafe owner Theodore Levantis said.
"She completely forgot the glass wasn't there and fortunately, thank goodness, she wasn't hurt.
Mr Levantis said it was his son who wanted to make the video for a school project.
"He found it quite comical the way this character came in and he missed cash that was all over the shop … like the tip jar and things like that," Mr Levantis said.
"The best way to overcome a bad situation is to turn it around somehow."
Despite the fun, Mr Levantis said there remained a serious side to the story.
"The situation for small shopping centres is quite bad," he said.
"We're vulnerable to being burgled and it just happens all the time across Canberra."
Police confirmed attempts to catch the bumbling burglar were ongoing.
Topics: crime, burglary, duffy-2611, canberra-2600, act
First postedDecember 12, 2011 Kitchener, Ontario, Canada - Greg Crane has lived most of his 44 years in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. Greg has also loved working on machines since dropping out of high school to restore an old car. He now is a professional restorer of antique cars and works out of the same home and office he's had for eighteen years. So, Greg is very familiar with the landscape and sky around his place that was built on the side of a hill. The hilltop rises to the east blocking out that part of the sky. But Greg has clear views of the west, south and north.
“My gut feeling is that I do think these strange, colorful objects are alien.”
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Several news outlets have finally got their hands on a copy of the new book about the raid on Osama bin Laden's Pakistan compound, and the details emerging contradict many of the earlier reports about what happened inside the house on the night the al Qaeda leader was killed. No Easy Day is set to be released September 11, but The Huffington Post's Marcus Baram picked up a preview copy in a used bookstore, which is a common way to find pre-released books. The Associated Press bought a copy as well.
The book, written by ex-Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette (under the pseudonym Mark Owen), is a first-person account of the raid on the Abbottabad compound where bin Laden had been in hiding for years. According Bissonnette's version of events, there was no extended firefight between SEAL Team 6 members and bodyguards and bin Laden himself never got the chance to confront or even see the soldiers before they killed him. Instead, he was shot in the hallway outside of his bedroom, then "disappeared into the dark room." By the time the soldiers entered, he was already dying of wounds to the head. Bissonnette says he and another team member then shot him several more times in the chest to ensure he was dead.Tabata wants you to stop posting Final Fantasy XV spoilers
Early copies of Final Fantasy XV are out there. They’ve been out in the wild for a few days now, in fact, and with them spoilers have started to run rampant online. Square Enix is aware of the situation of course – they’ve been pulling down streams left and right but the information still persists.
To that end, director Hajime Tabata had a few words to say during the game’s launch event in London today. Namely, he asks fans to avoid spreading spoilers and says Square Enix may be looking into potential legal action to stop them from spreading further. Here’s what he had to say:
“We’re finally only one week from the release of the game, and all the development staff… we have this feeling of nervousness but we’re really excited about it and we want to be able to celebrate the release of the game alongside all of the fans out there when it finally comes out next week.
“Unfortunately there are a few things that are starting to rain on our parade, and it’s a very sad thing to say. This is mainly in Japan – really – but there are some people that may have acquired the game irregularly before the release date and are spreading spoilers across the internet.
“In Japanese we call it netabare (ネタバレ) and in English you call them spoilers – and they’re really coming out. They’re spoiling the fun for a lot of people who have been looking forward to Final Fantasy XV for such a long time. it’s causing a lot of worry for people involved in the sales of the game and in the production too. I’d really like to apologize about the fact that these kinds of problems are happening. It’s just a very sad state of affairs.
“We’re currently looking into whether this kind of activities of spreading spoilers across the internet does legally constitute an obstruction of our business or not, and if it’s found out that it does then we’ll take legal measures to stop this being posted and take it down. We apologize for all the problems caused and all the worries, but we are taking solid steps to address this. It’s just not fair to spoil their fun of the people who have been waiting for such a long time, so please stop that right now.”Local News, Nature & Weather, Seasonal & Current Events
By Save the Great South Bay Published: March 15 2013
Dr. Charles Flagg of Stony Brook's School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences has been monitoring the breach at The Old Inlet on The Great South Bay since Sandy and has yet to see any evidence...
This Guest Post is brought to you by Dr. Charles Flagg, on behalf of Save the Great South Bay, and does not necessarily reflect the views & opinions of LongIsland.com and its staff.
Because of all the excitement caused by last weekend's high waters, I have examined the water level record from Lindenhurst and compared that with the records from Bellport and Wood Hole. Woods Hole is included because it is completely in another coastal region.
Below are two figures. The first shows the de-tided records from the three stations and like the plot I sent out yesterday. It is clear that these high and low water periods have been felt all along the coast. Sometimes Bellport gets more water than Lindenhurst and sometimes the opposite happens. Those are small local effects that depend upon wind direction. Categorically, the large water level excursions have nothing to do with the breach at Old Inlet.
I then compared the tide records at Bellport and Lindenhurst before and after the hurricane and those plots are shown in the second figure. The tidal amplitudes have not changed as a result of the breach. So again the breach does not appear to have altered conditions within the Bay.
I completely understand the horror of watching the waters creep up towards ones house but it does not help the situation to insist upon closing the breach when it is clear that it is not to blame and there are clear water quality benefits to leaving it open.
Article Written by Dr. Charles Flagg
Dr. Charles Flagg of Stony Brook's School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences has been monitoring the breach at The Old Inlet on The Great South Bay since Sandy and has yet to see any evidence that the breach is contributing to flooding on The South Shore.
Photo of the Great South Bay Taken By Michael Busch.
###
About Save the Great South Bay
Save The Great South Bay was formed last August at a 35th Sayville High School Reunion, where the attendees shared their shock and dismay at what the bay had become. They determined that The Great South Bay had to be revitalized so that our children and grandchildren could swim, boat, clam and fish there. Save the Great South Bay has over 500 members since Jan 1st and has enlisted a number of local baymen and marine scientists studying the bay to the cause. It promotes new technologies, green practices and policies for healing the bay, our ponds, rivers and streams. It is a place where all those who love The Great South Bay and The South Shore can gather together to build a healthy, sustainable bay. To learn more, visit their website, "Like" the Facebook Page, join their Facebook Group, or follow Save the Great South Bay on Twitter.
To view their latest photos, check out the Save the Great South Bay Photo Album.A man posing as a Buddhist monk is aggressively panhandling in downtown Victoria, prompting police to investigate whether he is the same person who sparked complaints in Vancouver and Toronto.
Beat and bike officers responded to a complaint about a man in “Buddhist-style clothing” who was handing out gold cards, then demanding money, Victoria police spokesman Bowen Osoko said.
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Some people were so taken aback, they gave the man $20, he said. When approached by officers, the man, who is of Chinese descent and appears to be in his 40s, claims to not speak English. Officers also dealt with him a few weeks ago.
“There’s lots of indications this person is not a monk,” Osoko said. Police are looking at similar incidents in Vancouver and Toronto, and there’s a possibility the man has worked his way west, leaving cities as police catch onto him.
In Vancouver, reports surfaced about scammers dressed in traditional robes forcing people to take a small bead bracelet as a gift, then opening a notebook with names of people who had donated funds.
The bogus monks pretended to not speak English, but made gestures with their arms to communicate that they wanted money.
Similar incidents in Toronto happened in the city’s Chinatown in August last year.
Real Buddhist monks will accept donations, but do not solicit money on the street.
It is against City of Victoria bylaws to aggressively panhandle.
“People are in the giving spirit, the holidays bring out the best in people,” Osoko said.
“What’s frustrating about [the scammer] is not only is it illegal, but they’re taking away from other legitimate charities in our community.”
Police said anyone who encounters the imposter should report it immediately.
kderosa@timescolonist.comThis week, Bitcoin price, on its usual upward trajectory, barely blinked as it smashed through the $7,000 mark. The Bitcoin community obviously celebrated as the king of digital currencies shows no sign of slowing, but what is behind this latest rally?
The biggest factor behind the rally was the announcement of Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s decision to offer Bitcoin futures.
Firstly, what is a Bitcoin future and why is it causing such a buzz on main street, Wall Street, as well as on the Bitcoin price.
Banking on what lies ahead
Futures are an essential part of mainstreet trading and investing; however they are also reserved for more steady and less volatile assets. Now, with this decision, Bitcoin is being legitimized somewhat, and that has again piqued Wall Street’s interest.
Wall Street, despite their divide and their clashing of ideologies, still has an important role to play in Bitcoin price as the financial bastion has shown their influence before.
In an earlier rise, coming after the Aug. 1st fork, Bitcoin hit a massive rally that was attributed to Wall Street flooding into Bitcoin once the heat was off from the so-called ‘civil war.’
Now, this move by the CME has again given Wall Street more reason to put faith in Bitcoin and thus the demand has skyrocketed, along with the price.
Still in its infancy
Bitcoin’s step into mainstream trading, however, is also a poignant reminder that the digital currency is still in diapers when it comes to institutionalized trading and investing.
Large-scale mass adoption in trading has a long way to go as there is still room for ETFs, which would really open things up, but that is a long way off still.
The SEC has maintained their position on a Bitcoin ETF, stating that it is not on the cards while they continue to watch its volatility and nature.
Spike and drop
Bitcoin’s rally reached as high as $7,300, but quickly fell over $500 in a mini-correction. However, it has leveled off again over $7,000.
While in the world of Bitcoin that does not seem like a massive swing, it is those moves that the SEC does not like the look of.
The SEC noted that Bitcoin had “fundamental flaws” that made it a “dangerous asset class to force into an exchange traded structure.”The Live-Armor Guide
Building Custom Live Images with Debian and Grsecurity
This guide explains how to build custom live system images for security sandboxing using tools from the Debian Live Systems project and Grsecurity.
For concreteness we will focus on building a custom live image for sandboxing the Firefox web browser (also known as Iceweasel in the Debian world). However, the same tools and procedures will allow you to build any kind of Debian-based live image you want.
Motivation
The browser problem
If you're alive and technically aware in 2015, you know that Internet, operating system, and applications software are security disaster areas. End-user systems such as workstations and laptops are especially hard to protect against the growing tide of malware, most of it delivered via the Internet.
After basic security measures have been taken, such as disabling unnecessary operating system services and firewalling network access, the largest attack surface on a typical end-user system today is the web browser. Popular browsers are large and complex pieces of software, invariably written in unsafe languages for performance (although this may slowly be changing). Critical vulnerabilities are discovered in popular browsers every month, any one of which can allow a remote attacker to take complete control over the computer running the browser. While this problem is now well known and recognized by browser vendors and efforts are being made to improve the status quo, building a secure browser has turned out to be a long and difficult road. Meanwhile, users are left adrift and vulnerable, and even the technically skilled have few good options for securing web browser installations.
Live images
A live image is a complete operating system image file (usually in ISO format) that can be loaded at system boot time from CD/DVD/USB media and that runs completely from RAM. No hard disk or any other form of persistent media is required. Changes can be made normally to the running system, but all changes are lost when the system is powered down or reset. (Some live images support an optional persistence partition that allows the user to store data that persists across restarts.)
Live images are a powerful tool for sandboxing. Even if the live operating system or applications are compromised during runtime, the next reboot will restore the system to its original clean state. Simply using a live system is no guarantee of security, but it can make long-term compromise of a system significantly more difficult, especially when combined with other countermeasures as part of a top-to-bottom architecture that takes into account each layer from the lowest (physical setting) through the highest (user applications).
Prerequisites
This guide assumes you are an experienced systems administrator who is comfortable with Debian and with configuring and building the Linux kernel.
Limitations and Alternatives
The live image method is a relatively heavyweight approach to browser security. Configuring and building a custom live image takes time and skill, and using one is harder than using a browser directly. All browser customization must be done as part of live system configuration, which means that making even simple persistent changes to the browser requires updating the live configuration and rebuilding the live image. This is more work than most users are willing to put up with.
There are a few alternatives:
Use a pre-built live system. This obviates the need to configure and build the live image yourself, and is ideal if you can find such an image that you trust and that closely matches your needs. Unfortunately, few such images seem to be available today that are built with security in mind. An exception is Tails, but it may not be suitable unless you want to route all data through Tor.
Use a chroot jail. Setting up a secure chroot environment is a difficult task, and should only be attempted if you are fully aware of the security weaknesses of vanilla chroot environments and employ kernel hardening measures to guard against them, such as the chroot restrictions available in Grsecurity kernels. A chroot jail provides a relatively thin barrier between the guest and host environments and does not in itself provide the "clean boot" property of a live image.
Use a namespace/cgroups jail. Newer Linux kernels provide a range of other features that can be used to create container or jail environments. As with chroot, such |
in settings. The tutorial is made up of two brief experiences, each designed to get you used to the varied capabilities of your new controllers.
The first space you’ll find yourself in is an ethereal white-grey environment where a silky female voice walks you through the most basic features of Touch. This unseen narrator will guide you through the unique buttons, analog sticks, and gesture controls on each device. Once you’ve proven to your all-seeing guide that you can manipulate each controller, you’ll be teleported into the next experience in the tutorial and that is where things get truly interesting.
First Contact is, as the name suggests, the first real VR experience in which you’ll utilize your new Touch controllers. It’s the “World 1-1” of Oculus Touch and, just as the famous Super Mario Bros. level did decades ago, it teaches you what you’re capable of in this new digital world without ever stating too directly what it is you’re supposed to do.
First Contact only takes about five minutes to complete if your goal is just to blaze through it, but first timers will likely spend longer enjoying all that the brilliantly crafted demo has in store.
A helpful robot companion hands you a variety of cartridges inside of a tinkerer’s trailer. Each unlocks a new tool that can be manipulated using Touch and each drops a different use case for the controllers into your mind for later use. Physics based inputs, gunplay, picking things up, throwing, waving etc. It’s all covered in this brief walk through.
Overall, First Contact is a well-crafted tutorial that does a good job getting even the most inexperienced VR novice up to speed. And it does so with style and personality.
Functionality
Functionality and ergonomics are the two areas where Oculus Touch really puts its competition to shame. Touch can simply do everything that an HTC Vive or PlayStation Move controller can do with even more thrown in on top.
Just like a Vive wand, Touch lets you pick up virtual objects with a side grip button, fire virtual firearms with a trigger, and it eschews the click/touch pad of the Vive wand for a pair of classic, clickable analog sticks. This gives Touch all of the viability of the Vive wands, and quite a bit more than the PS Move controller, which lacks a dedicated analog stick facsimile, but it doesn’t stop there.
Touch is the first commercially available VR controller to enable gesture-based controls through the movement of your fingers. These are mostly limited to raising your thumb and forefinger, but the use cases for these natural gestures in different gaming and social experiences are surprisingly varied. For example, rather than simply mashing a full hand into an elevator button you can now extend your index finger to select a specific button just like in real life. Or, you can raise a quick thumbs up to a friend while you battle zombies together, or even once you’ve vanquished her in some multiplayer experience.
The ability to execute such nuanced inputs may sound simple, but they actually go quite a long way toward making Oculus’ VR experiences feel like the most interactive and immersive in the industry thus far.
Ergonomics
Oh boy you’re in for a treat here. The Touch controllers’ ergonomic design is nothing short of a masterpiece. These little beauties are so impossibly light and well designed that they simply melt away in your hands. This is exactly what you want for VR which is all about limiting any reminders of the outside world once you put on that headset.
Because of the intentionally crafted shape and design of Touch, squeezing the grip button or the triggers to pick up a gun and fire it feels realistic and natural. Other VR controllers feel like you’re holding sticks that become virtual objects, Touch feels like you’re picking up that virtual object itself.
The action on the triggers, buttons, and analog sticks are all just right. There’s just enough resistance to give you some nice tactile feedback, but not enough to fatigue your fingers when you’re gripping or shooting for extended periods.
The haptic feedback from inside Touch is impressive as well. The vibration motors in each controller feel mighty, capable of providing subtle jolts when you pick a machine gun up or letting loose a real kick when you fire it. The one drawback here is that they are also almost shockingly loud for controllers their size. This is never a problem once your ears are nestled between the built-in Oculus headphones, but it is something to be aware of when it comes to spouses, roommates, and coworkers.
Performance
This is the trickiest category to quantify when it comes to Touch. The performance of these controllers is directly related to the performance of the Oculus positional tracking system itself. The Oculus sensors detect and map infrared lights placed on the headset, and now on the Touch controllers as well. As long as the sensors can “see” the controller’s lights they work absolutely perfectly. The problem, however, is that the sensors sometimes forget their glasses. When we didn’t set up the sensors properly for full coverage, the virtual hands just sort of floated away and then disappeared when tracking is lost. This didn’t happen when we strictly followed the Oculus recommended setup, so your mileage may vary quite a bit if you don’t set up the sensors right.
The long and short of it is this: if you have the space and resources to run an ideal setup with the sensors positioned the way Oculus recommends then you’ll likely have no troubles with your hands or desk occluding the lights and causing your virtual hands to fail. If you can spring for a three camera, roomscale setup then even better. However, if you’re trying to make due with a smaller space or an irregular area, then it may take some trial and error to find the sweet spot without any dead zones.
When you don’t set up the sensors properly for full coverage, the virtual hands just sort of floated away and then disappear when tracking is lost. For us, this didn’t happen when we strictly followed the Oculus recommended setup, even when reaching all the way to the ground, so your mileage may vary quite a bit if you don’t set up the sensors the way they were intended.
Software
As always, Oculus and its Facebook dollars have done an incredible job fleshing out the launch library for Touch. Dead and Buried, Ripcoil and The Unspoken are some of the best multiplayer VR games we’ve seen thus far. Quill and Medium are set to give Tilt Brush a run for its money as king of immersive, 3D artwork. And the multi-platform titles like Arizona Sunshine, I Expect You to Die, and Job Simulator feel fantastic on Touch.
There are over 50 games to play with Touch right away from within the Oculus Home Store, which is a huge library by any standard, several of which are free. With millions of dollars to play with and visionaries like Jason Rubin driving content at every opportunity, this lengthy list of awesome experiences is just the beginning. Not to mention all of the Steam VR titles that should work with little issue.
Final Verdict
Oculus Touch is the best VR controller made to date. Period.
Its design is as close to perfect as we’ve seen and Touch has enough software between Oculus Home and Steam to keep you captivated for months. It performs perfectly in recommended setup conditions, and its finger controls should be a standard-setting innovation for the rest of the industry.
Touch is a major step forward for VR hardware and we wouldn’t be surprised to see its basic construction and key features built upon by competitors and future Oculus iterations for years to come.
Tagged with: controllers, Hardware, oculus, oculus touch, reviewOTTAWA -- Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz is crediting the Liberal government's Canada Child Benefit program with the country's strengthening economy, calling it "highly stimulative."
The federal government introduced the amended formula for providing money to parents of children under 18 years old as its first order of business in 2015. It wasn't promoted as a stimulus measure, but as part of a package to help middle-class families.
In an interview with CTV's Omar Sachedina, Poloz credited the child benefit cheques with improving the economy.
"It's important to bear in mind that the government's efforts at stimulus are embedded in our view of the economy," Poloz said in an interview to air Wednesday on CTV National News.
"For instance, the changes to the [Canada] child benefit program has been highly stimulative. You can see that in the consumption figures. So we would not be where we are today if that had not occurred. We would be waiting longer for the output gap to close than later this year as we suggested."
On Wednesday, Poloz announced the Bank of Canada was raising its benchmark lending rate slightly from 0.5 per cent to 0.75 per cent. It's the first rate increase in almost seven years.
Trade protectionism'most important risk'
The government has promised $180 billion in infrastructure spending over 12 years, in part to stimulate the economy. But that funding has been slow to get out the door.
Poloz says the stimulus needs to continue, and noted the infrastructure spending is a particular type of stimulus that adds to productivity.
"This we expect over time to actually add to Canada's trend growth rate... That's got its own positives which are separate from stimulus," he said.
With NAFTA renegotiations looming next month, Poloz says the potential for increased trade protectionism is the biggest risk to Canada.
"Trade is the lifeblood of the Canadian economy. If you're in a business that relies on NAFTA to do your everyday transactions and that could change, well that matters a lot and that's why you're hesitating to invest, it's why you're not growing your business or adding new jobs," he said.
"Those things will only turn positive when that uncertainty is lifted. So we need to know, well, what's going to happen to NAFTA one way or the other. The uncertainty is what is holding things back, not necessarily the details."
Poloz says he looks forward to more clarity on the trade file.
"Because for sure even though investment is doing better right now, it's doing less well than it would without that uncertainty… When it's truly firing on all the cylinders, it'll be when every company can see clear daylight ahead."When Hayao Miyazaki left Japan’s legendary studio, Hiromasa Yonebayashi took the reins. He speaks about the shadow cast by his predecessor, animation in the age of Pixar and how men and women approach fantasy differently
When Hayao Miyazaki announced his retirement from Japan’s greatest animation studio in 2013, his young protege Hiromasa Yonebayashi wasn’t worried. The master had already retired five times before. “He was always saying, ‘Oh this could be the last film.’” Yonebayashi shrugs. “He’s still in the office.”
Match the Studio Ghibli screenshot to the movie – quiz Read more
You get the feeling that’s not entirely a comfort. Miyazaki is not the only director at Studio Ghibli, the animation company he co-founded in 1985, but he is behind the three most successful Japanese anime of all time. Princess Mononoke was Japan’s highest grossing film until Titanic – bested four years later by Spirited Away, the first non-western film to win the animation Oscar. Miyazaki’s career has been built on drawing the mutual awe between humankind and nature: no wonder he inspires David Attenborough levels of devotion in Japan.
Ostensibly, his mantle has now been passed to the man perched on a London hotel sofa before me, a slightly awkward 42-year-old in a flat cap with two directorial credits to his name. Even the studio seem faintly concerned that Yonebayashi, despite having landed an Oscar nomination for When Marnie Was There, doesn’t stand quite as tall as Miyazaki: he is accompanied by producer Yoshiaki Nishimura, to flex a bit of corporate Ghibli muscle.
In true studio tradition, When Marnie Was There boasts a young female protagonist, Anna, who isn’t trying to win over a boy and isn’t even particularly nice. A reclusive girl with an undiscovered talent for drawing, she is sent by her harried single mother to live with her aunt and uncle in the countryside. There, she discovers an abandoned manor house that springs to life to reveal the beautiful, princess-like Marnie, Anna’s spirit guide to a more glamorous existence.
Neither Marnie nor Anna are saints (though Marnie may be a ghost), but part of the film’s appeal is how it generates sympathy for the unsympathetic. “That was actually the most difficult part,” says Yonebayashi. “But you can see Anna grows up a little bit – at the beginning she can’t see eye to eye with anybody, but by the end she can see and talk to another person.”
Like 2010’s Arrietty, which took inspiration from The Borrowers, When Marnie Was There is adapted from a British children’s book, its characters transplanted from Norfolk to Sapporo but Marnie, crucially, is kept as a westerner. “One is Japanese and one is a blonde foreign girl,” he says, “but in the end I thought that added another dimension.”
Made in the wake of the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami, the film is full of references to a conservative ideal of Japan: a traditional festival, an idyllic countryside, and a secret that connects Anna to her ancestors, through which she learns to accept herself. “So many people lost their lives and so many others lost loved ones,” Yonebayashi says. “Anna loses her relatives as well.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Female-led … Spirited Away. Photograph: BFI
So is Anna Japan? Yonebayashi cocks his head and gives the longest and quietest of many pauses. “Could be. Anna is a lonely girl. At the moment, so many Japanese people feel lonely even though they’re connected by technology. I’m not sure if Anna and Japan itself are the same, but people in Japan should be able to understand her.”
He describes Anna as “an androgynous character, in the transition between child to adulthood, a very sensitive age” but offers up an intriguing reason for choosing another female-led story : “I’m male myself, and if I had a central character who was male, I’d probably put too much emotion into it, and that would lead to difficulty in telling the story.”
Will Ghibli ever employ a female director? Nishimura fields this question. “It depends on what kind of a film it would be. Unlike live action, with animation we have to simplify the real world. Women tend to be more realistic and manage day-to-day lives very well. Men on the other hand tend to be more idealistic – and fantasy films need that idealistic approach. I don’t think it’s a coincidence men are picked.”
It may be a moot question if Studio Ghibli’s financial struggles continue. The company was groundbreaking in the 1980s for hiring full-time staff rather than drafting in contractors: an expensive production model that allowed Ghibli to train the next generation of brilliant animators, including Yonebayashi himself.
Now Ghibli is facing the hard industry truth: hand-drawn animation is ever more expensive and risky to make, especially not outsourced to cheaper countries. Even Miyazaki has tacitly admitted as much – a short film made for the Ghibli museum in Tokyo will be his first in full CGI. The studio’s next feature is a collaboration with Europe’s Wild Bunch studio directed by Dutch film-maker Michaël Dudok de Wit.
“The slim-down process has begun,” says Nishimura. “There is no in-house production at the moment. As for the shadow of Miyazaki, we must feel his presence, as well as that of Takahata-san, the two maestros who established Ghibli and gave not just Japan but the whole world courage. It’s not just the technique of animation – it’s the storytelling, what we tell, who we tell, and the aspiration of that film-making. That’s what we have to carry on.”
For now, Miyazaki’s Oscar stands alone on the shelf: Yonebayashi lost at last year’s awards to Disney Pixar. But tellingly, Inside Out was an honest story about a young girl. Miyazaki has already trained the next generation, in more ways than one.Want to see a video more focused on Game play?
I gave a preview to Slushy, a friend of mine who does this stuff better than I can. He spent part of his weekend playing the game and gave a pretty good preview/review. He's not a scientist, but from how fast he picked up concepts in the game, I can tell he's a pretty smart guy. You can check out his website here.
~~~<=> The Story
Back in 2008 I wanted my own dinosaur. But I didn't want just any dinosaur, I wanted my own customarily evolved dinosaur which was unique to me. Genetic Engineering would take years, and a lot of other repercussions. I thought a better Idea was that there should be a video game for this. So I taught myself how to program an created my own video game.
The initial attempt I titled Evolve and tried to encompass all of evolution, but I soon found out Evolution was too big of a concept for one video game to handle. So breaking it up to highlight the features in each subject in biology has to offer would be better. Bacillus is the first step - representing microbial life. This game is meant to highlight the diversity, variety, and uniqueness of the Prokaryotes (Bacteria and Archaea)
In Bacillus, you control a population of bacteria. Your goal : Survive.
Here's a list of key features :
A large open world to explore with 20+ unique micro-environments and hidden features
A wide variety of upgrades to customize your bacteria
A bunch of different nutrients to eat and custom design your metabolism with. (Did you know that some bacteria can gain energy from Uranium? In this game you can do that)
Play against hundreds of different species of bacteria - each uniquely evolved for your game
Evolution! The game evolves as you play. Every species in the game has a genome which realistically changes over time.
A unique ecosystem forms each time you play based on the evolutionary history generated when you start the game.
Genetics!- Each bacteria in the game has its own genome for which its traits are based on.
A changing world with events to change how you play, and seasonal/daily/monthly/yearly effects.
Play with your friends to survive with multi-player support.
For the PC, Linux and Mac.
Here's a list of Scientific Concepts in the Game
Genetics - Each bacteria has a genome, composed of genes, composed of nucleotides (A's, T's, C's and G's). The traits of the bacteria are based on reading these genes
- Each bacteria has a genome, composed of genes, composed of nucleotides (A's, T's, C's and G's). The traits of the bacteria are based on reading these genes Evolution - These genomes mutate over time, mixed in with a selection system (both natural and artificial), and BAM evolution
- These genomes mutate over time, mixed in with a selection system (both natural and artificial), and BAM evolution Quorum Sensing - A way bacteria communicate with each other in the natural world is in the game allowing you to communicate with bacteria.
- A way bacteria communicate with each other in the natural world is in the game allowing you to communicate with bacteria. Chemotaxis - Is a way bacteria move to find nutrients and defines how you move in the game
- Is a way bacteria move to find nutrients and defines how you move in the game Soil Types - There isn't just Dirt in the game, but different kinds of soil based on Clay, Silt and Sand composition in the area.
- There isn't just Dirt in the game, but different kinds of soil based on Clay, Silt and Sand composition in the area. Redox Metabolism - A way of understanding how bacteria obtain energy has been translated into a powerful tool in the game allowing you to create endless combinations in how you get your energy (Did I mention you could eat Uranium - well how about also Gold, Iron or Lead - Note : Bacteria do not use Gold or Lead to obtain energy in real life, but you can in the game, for fun).
- A way of understanding how bacteria obtain energy has been translated into a powerful tool in the game allowing you to create endless combinations in how you get your energy (Did I mention you could eat Uranium - well how about also Gold, Iron or Lead - Note : Bacteria do not use Gold or Lead to obtain energy in real life, but you can in the game, for fun). Enzymes - Bacteria naturally secrete enzymes to favorably modify their environment - so why shouldn't you be able to do that in the game.
- Bacteria naturally secrete enzymes to favorably modify their environment - so why shouldn't you be able to do that in the game. AND MORE!
So I bet you're thinking : awe dang, I have to know all this science stuff to play the game... WRONG, you don't have to know any of it. The game is designed so a person who doesn't even know what a bacteria is can start playing. BUT be warned, over time you will slowly learn and become familiar with the topics, as they help your survival. So there might be some learning involved.
My goal in creating Bacillus is to create something completely unique and share bacteriology with people who normally don't think about these things. Now that it's almost done I need one final push to get it to the quality I want.
So here's what your money is going towards :
Polishing up the game
Research (can never have too much science in a science game)
Animations
making me warm and fuzzy inside
Legal junk
Some recording equipment for sound music
Miscellaneous (just cause I can't think of everything at the moment)
More funding will allow me to create a better game overall. Heck, if this gets funded enough, I might just start making a sequel immediately.
More Money = Better Game
I also put this project up on kickstarter because I want you to be able to put your creativity into the game, hence the rewards....
<=>~~~~ REWARD GUIDELINES ~~~<=>
General Guideline: nothing inappropriate, no profanity, and no copyright/trademark violations (duh).
Species Naming (Binomial Nomenclature) :
When submitting a name for a bacteria I'm fine with pretty much anything just don't break the general guidelines written above.Oh - and I wouldn't recommend using a Bacteria name that already exist, because I already added most of them.
What goes into the name? Each name consists of two parts : Genus and species. An example from a famous bacteria : Escherichia coli (or E. coli). Genus = Escherichia Species = coli. You might be aware of the scientific name of Humas as Homo sapiens. Homo = genus sapiens=species.
I'd like for most of the names to sound'sciencey' to fit with the game. A simple trick is that most bacteria names end in one of these common endings
ia
i
ii
ae
a
us
u
s
es
um
os
Here's an example : My last name is Halter - the scientific name I made out of it "Haltera". My full name could be Haltera johnii
T-Shirts
I have multiple designs for shirts and you can pick your favorite. In addition to that, I can make the bacteria on the shirt any color you want. So- Full customization for your own personal shirt.
Designing a Bacteria
In the game, there are two functional bacteria designs. One is for the player (playable design), the other is for all other bacteria in the game (NPC). Here's a breakdown of the features each entails...
Playable Bacteria = a design a player can use
When playing the game you can play as your design.
The design comes in two parts - an outer (membrane) design and inner (cytoplasm) design.
Designs are limited to the Bacillus (rod) shape
Basically, you are limited in design to a rod shape, but you get to play as this bacteria
NPC = a design the other bacteria can use
Your design will be randomly assigned to a Bacteria species for the game
Shapes are not limited just Bacillus (rod) shape
Basically, you get to be more creative with the design, but will only see this design on enemy bacteria.
For Both
The designs will be featured in all versions of the game.
The design must work with the aesthetics of the game, I will work with you on that, and can easy design if for you following your lead.
Follow the General Guideline rule
Geological Features Naming
When naming a geological feature the general guideline (see above) applies.
The second rule for naming is what it is has to be in the name. Ex. Mt. Everest is a mountain, Mississippi River is a river, Lake Ontario is a lake.
The same general Guidelines apply here. For this reward you don't have to be a business, but here's what you get. Two images which are shown in the game.
The first - a small logo to be shown in the credits. (200 X 200 pixels png file).
The second - a large image shown while the game is loading (1200 X 1200 pixels png file). Somewhere on the image it should say something along the lines of you helping this video game being made - " Bacillus was supported by... ", "the game brought to you by...." or any other thing you want to say. The rest of the image is up to you. This image will be posted when the game is loaded.A Buddhist monastery near Kathmandu is enjoying a surge in popularity after its spiritual leader directed its 300 nuns to use martial arts techniques.
Enrolment is rising and Buddhist nuns as far afield as the Himachal Pradesh in India want to become kung fu instructors.
The Druk Gawa Khilwa (DGK) nunnery near the Nepalese capital teaches its nuns a mixture of martial arts and meditation as a means of empowering the young women. In Buddhism, like many religions, the voices of women have traditionally been muted. But the leader of the 800-year-old Drukpa – or Dragon – order, to which DGK belongs, is determined to change all that.
"As a young boy growing up in India and Tibet I observed the pitiful condition in which nuns lived," says His Holiness the Gyalwang Drukpa, the spiritual head of the Drukpas.
"They were considered second-class while all the privileges went to monks. I wanted to change this."
Although nuns have usually carried out only household chores in Buddhist monasteries, the nuns of DGK, who come from places as far apart as Assam, Tibet and Kashmir, are taught to lead prayers and given basic business skills. Nuns run the guest house and coffee shop at the abbey and drive DGK's 4X4s to Kathmandu to get supplies.
But for many, the breakthrough was the introduction of kung fu three years ago, shortly after the Gyalwang Drukpa visited Vietnam and observed female martial arts practitioners there.
"Spiritual and physical wellbeing are equally important for our nuns," says the leader.
Sister Karuna, a soft-spoken young nun from Ladakh in the north of India, says kung fu has given the nuns self confidence and also helps in meditation. "We love kung fu," said Karuna, as she prepared to swap her maroon prayer robe for a martial arts suit with a bright yellow sash. "Now we know we can defend ourselves. We also have the fitness for long spells of meditation."
Jigme Thubtem Palmo, 32, who left her family and a career as a police officer in Kashmir six years ago to join the monastery, says young women in the region are now more interested in becoming nuns than before. "We will soon build facilities for 500 nuns," she said.
The shaven-headed DGK nuns recently stunned an audience with a colourful martial arts display at the third annual Drukpa council summit held in Ladakh.
Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, a former librarian at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, says she will introduce kung fu at the nunnery she has set up in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh.
"It's excellent exercise, good for discipline, concentration and self-confidence," says Palmo. "Also, when any young men in the area know nuns are kung fu experts, they stay away."Franco Baresi ( Italian pronunciation: [ˈfraŋko baˈreːzi]; born 8 May 1960) is an Italian football youth team coach and a former player and manager. He mainly played as a sweeper or as a central defender, and spent his entire 20-year career with Serie A club Milan, captaining the club for 15 seasons. He is considered one of the greatest defenders of all-time and was ranked 19th in World Soccer magazine's list of the 100 greatest players of the 20th century.[1] With Milan, he won three UEFA Champions League titles, six Serie A titles, four Supercoppa Italiana titles, two European Super Cups and two Intercontinental Cups.
With the Italy national team, he won the 1982 FIFA World Cup. He also played in the 1990 World Cup, where he was named in the FIFA World Cup All-Star Team, finishing third in the competition. At the 1994 World Cup, he was named Italy's captain and was an integral part of the squad that reached the final, although he would miss a penalty in the resulting shoot-out as Brazil lifted the trophy. Baresi also represented Italy at two UEFA European Championships, in 1980 and 1988, and at the 1984 Olympics, reaching the semi-finals on each occasion.
The younger brother of former footballer Giuseppe Baresi, after joining the Milan senior team as a youngster, Franco Baresi was initially nicknamed "Piscinin", Milanese for "little one". Due to his skill and success, he was later known as "Kaiser Franz", a reference to fellow sweeper Franz Beckenbauer.[2] In 1999, he was voted Milan's Player of the Century. After his final season at Milan in 1997, the club retired Baresi's shirt number 6.[3] He was named by Pelé one of the 125 Greatest Living Footballers at the FIFA centenary awards ceremony in 2004.[4] Baresi was inducted into the Italian Football Hall of Fame in 2013.
Club career [ edit ]
Originally a Milan youth product, Baresi went on to spend his entire 20-year professional career with Milan, making his Serie A debut at age 17 during the 1977–78 season on 23 April 1978.[5][6] He had initially been rejected by Internazionale, who chose his brother Giuseppe instead, while Milan signed Franco Baresi. The following season, he was made a member of the starting 11, playing as a sweeper or as a centreback, winning the 1978–79 Serie A title, Milan's tenth overall, playing alongside Fabio Capello and Gianni Rivera.[5]
This success was soon followed by a dark period in the club's history, when Milan was relegated to Serie B twice during the early 1980s. Milan were relegated in 1980 for being involved in the match fixing scandal of 1980, and once again after finishing third-last in the 1981–82 season, after having just returned to Serie A the previous season, after winning the 1980–81 Serie B title. Despite being a member of the Euro 1980 Italy squad that had finished fourth, and the 1982 World Cup-winning team, Baresi elected to stay with Milan, winning the Serie B title for the second time during the 1982–83 season and bringing Milan back to Serie A. After Aldo Maldera and Fulvio Collovati left the club in 1982, Baresi was appointed Milan's captain, at age 22, and would hold this position for much of his time at the club, becoming a symbol and a leader for the team. During this bleak period for Milan, Baresi did manage to win a Mitropa Cup in 1982 and reached the Coppa Italia final during 1984–85 season, although the team failed to dominate in Serie A.[2][3]
During the end of the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, Baresi was at the heart of a notable all-Italian defence alongside Paolo Maldini, Alessandro Costacurta, Mauro Tassotti and later Christian Panucci, under managers Arrigo Sacchi and Fabio Capello, a defence which is regarded by many as one of the greatest of all-time.[a] When the attacking Dutch trio of Marco van Basten, Ruud Gullit and Frank Rijkaard arrived at the club in the late 1980s, Milan began a period of domestic and international triumphs, and between 1987 and 1996, at the height of the club's success, the Milan squad contained many Italian and international stars, such as Roberto Donadoni, Carlo Ancelotti, Marco van Basten, Ruud Gullit, Frank Rijkaard and later Demetrio Albertini, Dejan Savićević, Zvonimir Boban, Marcel Desailly, George Weah, Jean-Pierre Papin, Brian Laudrup and Roberto Baggio. Under Sacchi, Milan won the Serie A title in 1987–88, with Baresi helping Milan to concede only 14 goals. This title was immediately followed by a Supercoppa Italiana in 1988 the next season, and back-to-back European Cups in 1988–89 and 1989–90.[5] Baresi was also runner-up to teammate Van Basten for the Ballon d'Or in 1989, finishing ahead of his other teammate Frank Rijkaard, and was named Serie A Footballer of the Year in 1989–90. Milan also reached the Coppa Italia final during the 1989–90 season.[2][3]
Baresi went on to win four more Serie A titles with Milan under Fabio Capello, including three consecutive titles in 1991–92, 1992–93 and the 1993–94 seasons. Baresi helped Milan win the 1991–92 title undefeated, helping Milan to go unbeaten for an Italian record of 58 matches. Milan also scored a record 74 goals that season. During the 1993–94 season, Baresi helped Milan concede a mere 15 goals in Serie A, helping the club to finish the season with the best defence. Baresi also won three consecutive Supercoppa Italiana under Capello, in 1992, 1993 and 1994. Milan also reached three consecutive UEFA Champions League finals during the 1992–93, 1993–94 and 1994–95 seasons, losing to Marseille in 1992–93 and Ajax in 1994–95. Baresi won the third European Cup/UEFA Champions League of his career in 1993–94 when Milan defeated Johan Cruyff's Barcelona "Dream Team" 4–0 in the final. Baresi also managed to win the 1994 UEFA Super Cup, although Milan were defeated in the 1994 Intercontinental Cup, the 1993 UEFA Super Cup and the 1993 Intercontinental Cup. Under Capello, Milan and Baresi were able to capture another Serie A title during 1995–96 season, Baresi's sixth.[2][3]
Baresi retired at the end of the 1996–97 Serie A season, at age 37. In his 20 seasons with Milan, he won six Serie A titles, three European Cup/UEFA Champions League titles (reaching five finals in total), two Intercontinental Cups (four finals in total), four European Supercups (five finals in total), four Supercoppa Italiana (five finals in total), two Serie B titles and a Mitropa Cup.[5] He scored 31 goals for Milan, 21 of which were on penalties, and, despite being a defender, he was the top scorer of the Coppa Italia during the 1989–90 season, the only trophy which he failed to win with Milan, reaching the final twice during his career. His final goal for Milan was scored in a 2–1 win against Padova on 27 August 1995. In his honour, Milan retired his number 6 shirt, which he had worn throughout his career.[5] The captain's armband, which he had worn for 15 seasons, was handed over to Paolo Maldini. Milan organised a celebration match in his honour, which was played on 28 October 1997 at the San Siro, featuring many footballing stars.[2][3]
International career [ edit ]
At age 20, while still playing in the Italy under-21 side, Baresi was named in Italy's 22-man squad for the 1980 European Championship (along with his older brother Giuseppe) by manager Enzo Bearzot. The tournament was held on home soil and Italy finished fourth. However, unlike his brother, Franco Baresi did not play a single match in the tournament. Euro 1980 would be the only time the two brothers were on the Italy squad together at a major tournament. At age 22, Baresi was named in Italy's squad for the 1982 FIFA World Cup.[15] The Azzurri won their third World Cup, defeating West Germany in the final, but Baresi, once again, was not selected to play a match throughout the tournament.[16] Baresi was also a member of the Italy squad that took part in the 1984 Olympics. Italy finished in fourth place after a semi-final defeat to Brazil, and losing the bronze medal match to Yugoslavia. Baresi scored a goal against the United States during the group stage.
Baresi won his first senior international cap in a 1984 UEFA Championship qualifying match against Romania in Florence, on 14 December 1982, a 0–0 draw.[15] Italy, however, ultimately failed to qualify for the final tournament.[2][17]
Baresi was not included in Italy's squad for the 1986 World Cup by coach Enzo Bearzot, who saw him as being more of a midfielder than a defender (although his brother Giuseppe was selected as a defender for the World Cup, as well as Roberto Tricella).[15] He returned to the team for the 1988 European Championship, playing as a |
According to his spokesman, he only said Palestinians won’t recognize Israel as a Jewish state.Lawmakers have set up a lame-duck showdown over a long-stalled issue: whether to give states more authority to tax Internet sales.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid Harry Mason ReidSenate confirms Trump court pick despite missing two 'blue slips' Can Lindsey Graham take the politics out of judicial battles? Bottom Line MORE (D-Nev.) put the online sales tax legislation at the top of his priority list, when he shared his post-November to-do list before leaving Washington to campaign.
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“That is long, long overdue,” Reid said of the online sales tax bill, known as the Marketplace Fairness Act (MFA).
He said he’d do “whatever it takes to get that done.”
Supporters have seen their efforts fall short before. But they believe they’ve found the perfect vehicle for getting a bill across the finish line this year — linking it to an extension of a widely supported law that bars local taxes on Internet access, the Internet Tax Freedom Act (ITFA).
Lawmakers extended the moratorium on Internet access taxes, which was scheduled to expire on Nov. 1, until mid-December in the stopgap spending measure they passed last week.
The short-term spending bill expires on Dec. 11, giving supporters a chance to pair the Marketplace Fairness Act with a longer extension of the online tax moratorium.
The lame-duck session is poised to be crucial for both sides.
If the online sales tax bill doesn’t become law this year, supporters will have to restart the legislative process in 2015 — after watching the Senate pass a version of the Marketplace Fairness Act in the first part of last year.
Opponents of the bill — including prominent GOP lawmakers and conservative organizations — are also ready for a fight, acknowledging that online sales tax advocates have found a viable vehicle with the Internet Tax Freedom Act.
Both sides are also grappling with the uncertain political atmosphere they will face after November’s elections, with control of the Senate in January still up for grabs.
At issue is a bill that would allow states to collect sales tax revenue from online retailers outside their borders. Right now, states can only collect sales taxes from a business with a physical location in that state.
Supporters of the bill say it would give states a $23 billion influx of revenue from taxes that are already owed, but rarely paid, and level the playing field between online and brick-and-mortar companies. But opponents say the measure would serve as a de facto tax increase, taking $23 billion out of the economy, and would burden smaller retailers.
Lobbyists pushing for the Marketplace Fairness Act insist a proposal could pass the House — the focus for both supporters and opponents since the Senate passed its bill in May 2013.
But both Speaker John Boehner John Andrew BoehnerEx-GOP lawmaker joins marijuana trade group Crowley, Shuster moving to K Street On unilateral executive action, Mitch McConnell was right — in 2014 MORE (R-Ohio) and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte Robert (Bob) William GoodlatteIt’s time for Congress to pass an anti-cruelty statute DOJ opinion will help protect kids from dangers of online gambling House GOP probe into FBI, DOJ comes to an end MORE (R-Va.) have said they oppose the MFA in its current form.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz Jason ChaffetzTop Utah paper knocks Chaffetz as he mulls run for governor: ‘His political career should be over’ Boehner working on memoir: report Former GOP lawmaker on death of 7-year-old migrant girl: Message should be ‘don't make this journey, it will kill you' MORE (R-Utah) has worked to broker a compromise, and lobbyists working on the issue say a measure could be released after November’s election. A spokeswoman for Chaffetz said it was too soon to know whether a bill could be ready by year’s end.
“We’re always working to find something that will attract the necessary votes in the House to pass,” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin Richard (Dick) Joseph DurbinKids confront Feinstein over Green New Deal Senate plots to avoid fall shutdown brawl Overnight Energy: Trump ends talks with California on car emissions | Dems face tough vote on Green New Deal | Climate PAC backing Inslee in possible 2020 run MORE (D-Ill.) said last week. Durbin is one of the bill’s top supporters, along with Sens. Lamar Alexander Andrew (Lamar) Lamar AlexanderWhite House pleads with Senate GOP on emergency declaration Overnight Health Care: Senators grill drug execs over high prices | Progressive Dems unveil Medicare for all bill | House Dems to subpoena Trump officials over family separations Schumer urges GOP to reject Trump's 'destructive' national emergency MORE (R-Tenn.) and Mike Enzi Michael (Mike) Bradley EnziWill Senate GOP try to pass a budget this year? Presumptive benefits to Blue Water Navy veterans are a major win If single payer were really a bargain, supporters like Rep. John Yarmuth would be upfront about its cost MORE (R-Wyo.).
“We’re working with them in an effort to find some language that’s mutually acceptable,” added Durbin, who said he’d spoken with Chaffetz about the matter.
Still, supporters of the online sales tax measure have expressed confidence for years that the MFA would eventually get to President Obama’s desk, only to see it stall on Capitol Hill.
Jason Brewer, of the Retail Industry Leaders Association, a supporter, said that pairing the two tax bills allowed retail groups to make the case that their measure wasn’t an “Internet tax.”
“For every member that is saying, ‘Let’s get ITFA done,’ there’s another member saying, ‘Let’s get both done,’ ” Brewer told The Hill.
Reid, though, faces opposition from within his own party.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden Ronald (Ron) Lee WydenTreasury official: Tax withholding guidance wasn't manipulated for political reasons Cohen grilled by Senate Intelligence panel Senate confirms Trump court pick despite missing two 'blue slips' MORE (D-Ore.) warned his colleagues last week that anyone trying to combine the two bills was “holding the Internet economy hostage.”
“Anyone who votes for passing MFA alongside ITFA is voting to repeal the Internet Tax Freedom Act,” he said.
That sets up the lame-duck session as a test for Wyden, who already saw Reid and Democratic leaders reject his proposals for highway funding and the so-called Medicare “doc fix” this year.
Democratic leadership bypassed the Senate Finance Committee to pass the online sales tax bill under Wyden’s predecessor, former Sen. Max Baucus Max Sieben BaucusOvernight Defense: McCain honored in Capitol ceremony | Mattis extends border deployment | Trump to embark on four-country trip after midterms Congress gives McCain the highest honor Judge boots Green Party from Montana ballot in boost to Tester MORE (D-Mont.).
Oregon and Montana are among the handful of states with no sales tax.
Steve DelBianco, of NetChoice, a group lobbying against the online sales tax bill, said opponents were worried that powerful lawmakers like Reid could muscle the Marketplace Fairness Act into law more easily in a more chaotic lame-duck session.
“But my hope is that House leadership understands that, in a new Congress, they can pursue alternatives,” he said, adding that ITFA could be passed retroactively next year.
Pushing the issue into the next Congress, though, could aggravate tensions between Democratic supporters on Capitol Hill and the generally GOP-friendly business groups who back the online sales tax bill.
Durbin, for instance, has long said he was frustrated that groups like the Chamber of Commerce don’t do more to call out Tea Party Republicans standing in the way of issues important to them.
“It gets to be a burden after a while that the Democrats are being asked to explain to the quote, party of business, unquote, that they better stand up and take control of their own party,” Durbin told reporters.
Brewer said he understood Durbin’s frustrations but also said that the business lobbies were doing a lot behind the scenes to shore up support for the measure.
“We’ve done quite a lot to push House Republicans,” he said. “A lot of work has gone into building our vote count in the House.”
Julian Hattem contributed.The Wizards are coming off arguably their most disappointing loss of the season to the Cleveland Cavaliers in overtime, but they’ll have a chance to redeem themselves tonight against the surging Minnesota Timberwolves. The game will tip off at 7:00 PM from the Verizon Center.
Key Match Up:
Averaging nearly 27 points and 14 rebounds per game, Kevin Love has played at an MVP level this season and is by far the best player at his position. Love presents a huge problem to virtually every team in the NBA, given the fact that he can score in the post as well as he can from the perimeter. He’s shooting a career high 36% from beyond the three point arc (remember when Wizards coach, then T-Wolves coach, Randy Wittman told Love to stop shooting threes?) which makes him unstoppable on the offensive side of the floor.
With that said, the Wizards are going to need all the effort they could get to contain Love tonight. Nene has done a surprisingly good job defending forwards that stretch the floor this season, but Love is an entirely different player. Even if his shot isn’t falling, he’s still capable of dominating the glass which is an area Nene has struggled with his entire career. Nene hasn’t been a particularly great rebounder this season and he’ll need to step it up against Love, or else this game will become ugly fairly quickly. Oh, and Love is paired up with the Balkan Bulldozer, Nikola Pekovic, who’s not too shabby himself. Needless to say, the T-Wolves will present a lot of problems for the struggling Wizards tonight, especially their front court.
Notes:
Eric Maynor, who the Wizards brought in to replace A.J. Price as their primary backup point guard, has fallen out of the rotation. Price now plays for the Timberwolves.
Minnesota is third in the NBA in points, scoring 108.5 points per contest. The Clippers and Rockets are the only teams ahead of them.
The Timberwolves also have the sixth best defense in the league.
As I noted already, Randy Wittman’s last stop as a head coach before landing in the nation’s capital was with the Timberwolves. He was fired after a 4-19 start.
Prediction:
A lot has to go right for the Wizards to pull out a win tonight.
Minnesota has looked great right out of the gate and they’ve shown no signs of regressing as the season progresses. Kevin Love is a bonafide superstar and it doesn’t hurt that he’s surrounded with an unselfish point guard, knock down shooting guard, and a bruiser down low. Ricky Rubio, Kevin Martin, and Nikola Pekovic have all blossomed into very good NBA players and Love finally has a supporting cast that will help him put W’s in the win column.
On the other hand, the Wizards need to start winning games and it wouldn’t hurt to start tonight at home. John Wall has spoke about wanting to attack the basket more, which is an area he hasn’t been consistent in at all this season. Bradley Beal and Martell Webster have to become more reliable from three, since they have a tendency to be streaky at times. If the Wizards’ big men could contain Love and Pekovic, they should be able to compete tonight.
I don’t see them finishing on top tonight. Minnesota will sneak out with another close victory.When rumors first emerged that Glenn Beck was likely to lose his perch on the Fox News Channel, he responded with the confidence of a Messianic warrior saying “I will find another way to get my message out on a platform that will be a thousand times more powerful!”
Well, the rumors proved to be true and Beck was cast off of Fox and hurled into the cacophony of the Internet. Since then he has frantically stumbled around searching for an identity and grasping at phantom opportunities to keep his movement humming. He began by launching GBTV, a subscription Internet video blog that he delusionally described as a television network. Despite his assertions that it was a huge success, he submerged it into his web “news” site The Blaze.
Now Beck is making another u-turn with the announcement that he is re-branding his entire operation as a “global Libertarian news network,” whatever that means. He claims that he will be opening three foreign bureaus in cities that are “important to America” (presumably that nixes Paris, Caracas, and Beijing), and will relocate his staff to a new facility in Manhattan that “will piss everyone off” (He must have found space at 30 Rock between MSNBC and Chuck E. Cheese).
Beck, one of the most hostile and divisive characters in modern media, now says that he wants to distance himself from the left/right squabbles of cable news saying that “We’re not gonna play in that crazy space.” Apparently he has a whole new crazy space that he’d like to pioneer. But it’s hard to see where he would fit in the Libertarian realm. With his overtly evangelical appeals to religion, he is more aligned with theocracy than the secular oriented individualism of Libertarians. And after spending the last several years bashing liberals as “a cancer on America,” it’s unlikely that a rational, centrist audience is going to find him credible.
It is telling that Beck says that “I’m a lot closer to Penn Jillette than I am to Chuck Hagel.” So Beck is confessing that he is more like an entertainer whose specialty is to create illusions, than he is like a mainstream Republican legislator and veteran.
Beck has had so many public personalities it is difficult to keep track of them all. When the Tea Party was new Beck introduced his own version that he called the “912 Project.” Then he attempted to recruit followers to join his “Watchdogs.” Then he unveiled an ambitious bit of lunacy he called “The Plan,” a 100 year blueprint for the restoration of an America. Then there was his pitch for political activism, “In or Out 2010,” aimed at lobbying the politicians in Washington he had previously dismissed. And there was something he called the “Refounders,” an homage to America’s founding fathers whom he had elevated to the status of saints. And who could forget his “E4 Solution” that he promised would “chart a course boldly into the future.” All of these excursions were launched with a glorious fanfare, and all were later abandoned in the trash heap of discarded publicity stunts.
So now Beck is dressing up in new costume that, like all the rest, is designed to capture media attention and boost his publicity and bank account. If he is able to scare up any support from Libertarians, it will only be those of the most shallow (and gullible) variety who aren’t put off by his insistence that all rights are granted only by God, and that Armageddon is upon us so ye had better purchase over-priced gold coins from his sponsor. However a more likely scenario is that, when this scheme fails, he will ditch it and get out the trumpets to announce another re-invention in hopes of drawing in few more suckers.A 27-year-old son received no money and a charge for home invasion after failed attempt to rob his mother at knifepoint.
Austin Smith, of Pekin, Illinois, had nine knives and wore a mask in his attempt to steal the woman's credit cards and cash, but he did not leave the house with anything.
The would-be robber, who tried but failed to tie his mother up to prevent her from calling the police, was arrested 90 minutes after the attempted theft around 12.45pm Friday afternoon.
Austin Smith, 27, of Pekin, Illinois, was charged with home invasion after allegedly breaking into his mother's house and holding her at gunpoint but failing to get any money
It is assumed the mother recognized her son despite his mask, Pekin Police's Mike Eeten told the Pekin Daily Times.
Smith's mother had told him not to come by the house.
The son did not live at the address where he is thought to have broken a rear window and was arrested at a apartment complex about a mile away.
He had been released on bond for a residential burglary two weeks ago before the latest incident.
Smith has been charged with home invasion and is being held pending a bond hearing.
The suspect has two misdemeanor theft convictions from 2012 as well as 28 traffic violations in the past 12 years.
The type of mask Smith wore was not made known.
Pekin has an estimated population of 34,000.European Commission Press release Strengthening Europe's preparedness against natural and man-made disasters The European Commission today presents a package consisting of two parts: The EU strategy on adaptation to climate change sets out a framework and mechanisms for taking the EU's preparedness for current and future climate impacts to a new level; and, in a related measure, the Commission also adopted a Green Paper on insurance in the context of natural and man-made disasters. This public consultation launches a wide debate on the adequacy and availability of existing insurance options. Connie Hedegaard, European Commissioner for Climate Action, said: "Cutting the world's greenhouse gas emissions must remain our top priority in order to keep global warming below 2°C and avert dangerous climate change. But the adverse impacts of the changing climate are increasingly evident today in Europe. Adapting to these changes is one of the most fundamental challenges for territorial development in Europe. Our strategy will help decision-makers in Europe to choose the best solutions to the benefit of their citizens. This will stimulate growth and jobs and prevent potentially high human, economic and environmental costs later on." Internal Market and Services Commissioner Michel Barnier said “Natural and man-made catastrophes are on the rise, while the capacity of the insurance sector to insure against them is not fully utilised. European-level solutions to bridge the insurance gap need to be explored, along with common means of prevention and ways of raising awareness among citizens and companies. This Green Paper launches an important debate on the issues and will also allow us to get a more complete overview of the situation in different Member States.” Kristalina Georgieva, European Commissioner for International Cooperation, Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response, said: "Well-designed insurance policies can also work as a market-based instrument to discourage risky behaviour and promote risk awareness and mainstream disaster-proofing in economic and financial decisions." Strategy focuses on three key objectives Promoting action by Member States: The Commission will encourage all Member States to adopt comprehensive adaptation strategies (currently 15 have strategies) and will provide funding to help them build up their adaptation capacities and take action. It will also support adaptation in cities by launching a voluntary commitment based on the Covenant of Mayors initiative.
'Climate-proofing' action at EU level by further promoting adaptation in key vulnerable sectors such as agriculture, fisheries and cohesion policy, ensuring that Europe's infrastructure is made more resilient, and promoting the use of insurance against natural and man-made disasters.
Better informed decision-making by addressing gaps in knowledge about adaptation and further developing the European climate adaptation platform (Climate-ADAPT) as the 'one-stop shop' for adaptation information in Europe. Creating jobs, saving costs The strategy puts strong emphasis on adaptation options that are low-cost, good for the economy as well as the climate and which make sense for a variety of reasons. It will promote sustainable growth, stimulate climate-resilient investment and create new jobs, particularly in sectors such as construction, water management, insurance, agricultural technologies and ecosystem management. Estimates of future costs and benefits indicate that each euro spent on flood protection could save six euros in damage costs. Floods killed more than 2,500 people, affected more than 5.5 million and caused direct economic losses of more than €90 billion over the period 1980-2011. The minimum cost of not adapting to climate change is estimated at €100 billion a year in 2020 and €250 billion in 2050 for the whole EU. Green Paper on disaster insurance Like many other regions of the world, the European Union is vulnerable to nearly all types of natural disasters. Disasters not only cause human losses but also damage to the value of billions of euros every year, affecting economic stability and growth. Disasters may have cross-border effects and can potentially threaten entire areas in neighbouring countries. Even where costs of major disasters are locally concentrated, if costs are inadequately covered by insurance then individual Member States may carry large fiscal burdens, which could cause internal and external imbalances. This is thus an important issue for citizens, companies and governments across the Union. The Green Paper poses a number of questions concerning the adequacy and availability of appropriate disaster insurance. The objective is to raise awareness and to assess whether or not action at EU level could be appropriate or warranted to improve the market for disaster insurance in the European Union. More generally, this process will also expand the knowledge base, help to promote insurance as a tool of disaster management and thus contribute to a shift towards a general culture of disaster risk prevention and mitigation. Next steps The Communication setting out the adaptation strategy is addressed to the other EU institutions for their responses. The Commission will hold a stakeholder conference on the strategy on 29 April in Brussels. The Green Paper public consultation is open until 30 June 2013. Once the Commission has examined the responses received, it will decide on the most appropriate follow-up, which could take several forms, legislative and non-legislative. Background Europe is warming faster than many other parts of the world, with the European land temperature over the past decade on average 1.3°C higher than in the pre-industrial era, compared with a global average rise of 0.8°C. Impacts vary across the EU depending on climate, geographic and socioeconomic conditions but all Member States are exposed to climate change. Some extreme weather events have increased, with southern and central Europe seeing more frequent heat waves, forest fires and droughts. Heavier precipitation and flooding is projected in northern and north-eastern Europe, with an increased risk of coastal flooding and erosion. A rise in such events is likely to increase the magnitude of disasters, leading to significant economic losses, public health problems and deaths. In Europe the Mediterranean basin, mountain areas, densely populated floodplains, coastal zones, outermost regions and the Arctic are particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts. In addition, three quarters of the population live in urban areas which can be exposed to heatwaves, flooding or rising sea levels. Further information DG CLIMA adaptation page European climate adaptation platform MEMO/13/334 MEMO/13/335 Contacts : Isaac Valero Ladron (+32 2 296 49 71) Stephanie Rhomberg (+32 2 298 72 78) Chantal Hughes (+32 2 296 44 50) Carmel Dunne (+32 2 299 88 94)Nearing the end of its fourth season, the NWSL is worried about expansion, not contraction, and there are plenty of interested parties. We survey the scene:
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The National Women's Soccer League is the first U.S. women's professional soccer league to make it to a fourth season. More than ever, the chatter heading into the offseason is about expansion rather than contraction or the potential that the league on the whole might not even make it.
With the uptick in fan interest in the U.S. women's national team and the sport in general has come an increased interest in business leaders looking to get involved, including those who already own Major League Soccer teams.
Some have gone on the record with their interest. Others are ongoing whispers with varying levels of legitimacy. And an important note is that markets should be viewed not only as expansion candidates, but possibilities for the relocation of any NWSL team which just can't break through in its market.
We explore nine markets -- or, in some cases, entities -- which could be in the mix for an NWSL team, from the shoo-ins to the more speculative:
Salt Lake City
At one point, Real Salt Lake looked like a shoo-in to be the NWSL’s 10th franchise, and the third such one to be partnered with an MLS club. Instead, Orlando’s late surge, inspired by the bump in women’s soccer’s profile post-World Cup and the ability to land the sport’s most recognized face, Alex Morgan, meant the Orlando Pride moved up in the pecking order.
But RSL is still in the mix and ostensibly the clubhouse leader in this increasingly competitive expansion landscape (words the 2013 me never thought he’d type). Real Salt Lake owner Dell Loy Hansen has been the most vocal of any other would-be owner, and Real Salt Lake’s women’s team would have the option of playing games at the 20,000-seat gem that is Rio Tinto Stadium or at a cozy 5,000-seat stadium 30 minutes south of downtown at the club’s $50 million training facility set to open in August 2017. RSL continues to look like a ‘when, not if’ scenario for NWSL.
-- Jeff Kassouf
Los Angeles
Expansion into the Los Angeles market seems inevitable, with one recent report confirming a Southern California team may be closer than we think. Thank you, LAFC.
Mia Hamm’s involvement as one of LAFC’s 6,723 co-owners* would be a welcome addition to any fan, but the move also speaks to the changing mission of North American soccer clubs. No longer are MLS expansion teams seeing themselves as mere soccer teams. Now, the opportunities are broader, be those opportunities commercial, cultural or, more simply, in terms of second and third teams.
Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
That’s proving to be a boon for the NWSL. Inherent in LAFC’s vision, as well as that of others on this list, is to provide opportunities to all of the community, not just half of it. Women play, watch, and spend money on soccer, too. They’re kind of a big deal.
LA’s new MLS franchise seems eager to serve the greater Los Angeles area, possibly pushing the envelope for its inevitable rival. The Galaxy has been the standard in Southern California for 20 years, but LAFC may be ready to push it beyond its comfort zone. The Galaxy could yet have something to say about who gets the NWSL’s LA team. And FC Barcelona might, too…? (Keep reading.)
* - unofficial count
-- Richard Farley
Bay Area
Part of that expanded vision involves facilities. Take the San Jose Earthquakes, for example. ‘We have this great facility, we control it, but we’re only playing 20-some games a year at home. What do we do with it the rest of the time?’ Concerts, high school football games? Sure, but with the low cost of operating NWSL franchises -- a cost that gets offset if you have preexisting, MLS infrastructure -- a women’s soccer team is a no-brainer.
With memories of FC Gold Pride still flickering in the South Bay, San Jose makes sense. Like many MLS teams, the Earthquakes have developed a deep, loyal fanbase, one that’s easy to market to. If the conversion rates we’ve seen in Portland, Houston, and Orlando can hold up, expanding to San Jose is an obvious choice, particularly with so many seasoned women’s soccer minds ready to be re-engaged in the Bay Area.
Could the USL’s Sacramento Republic FC and its lofty goals come into play? Maybe. And about that Barcelona stuff…
-- RF
FC Barcelona
This one is truly a wild card. FC Barcelona -- yes, that FC Barcelona -- president Josep Bartomeu proclaimed last week in New York that the Spanish club and world superpower is very interested in joining the NWSL. In a follow-up interview with FourFourTwo, Arno Trabesinger, the managing director of FCB North America LLC, said that “it’s our clear goal” to have a women’s team in the U.S., and the club is targeting New York, Los Angeles or the Bay Area.
But despite the most public of proclamations, Trabesinger says talks are still preliminary. FFT confirmed independently that NWSL commissioner Jeff Plush has met with Barcelona, but it remains unclear just how serious this is. Many team executives across the league were only first hearing of Barcelona’s intent when Bartomeu went public with it, which brings a significant dose of skepticism.
And Sky Blue FC has right of first refusal on the New York market. Would Barcelona buy out the club, which will finish bottom of the attendance standings for the fourth straight season this year? City Football Group also has its eyes on the market. Would Barce boot LAFC or the Galaxy from the LA market? Unlikely. And the Bay Area also has an MLS team. Perhaps, if this is a serious bid, it could mean Barcelona taking over one of the franchises currently finding less success away from the field.
-- JK
North Carolina
Just as the Rocky Mountains are currently a huge geographic gap on the NWSL landscape, so, too, is the American South. Between the triangle formed by Orlando, Houston and Washington, there’s nothing to serve the growing population bases of Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. When it comes to pro sports teams, the South kind of gets screwed.
The North Carolina Triangle is an obvious expansion choice. Not only is there the culture cultivated by the Tar Heels’ women’s program but there’s the legacy of WUSA’s Carolina Courage, as well as significant numbers of prominent players and ex-players who call the area home.
Photo Courtesy Carolina Railhawks/NASL
With the new Carolina RailHawks owners showing refreshing ambition and declaring public interest in the NWSL, an ownership group may already be in place. Like an MLS partnership, this NASL link would be ready-to-go. But as sports and entertainment events -- including the 2016 Women’s College Cup and other NCAA events -- pull out of the state for its controversial HB2 law, even the right ownership and infrastructure could prevent this from happening in the short term.
-- RF
Atlanta
Atlanta’s instance is somewhat different; somewhat a combination of Carolina and the Bay Area. With Atlanta United set to join MLS next year, you’ll have another team that controls their facility who can use a team to fill in more dates filled on the calendar. You’ll also have a group with an infrastructure that can support the NWSL commitment, one that can leverage the practical and cultural benefits of linking with an MLS club. (Where that all leaves the proposed Atlanta Vibe, which made a public push for a team last year, is unclear.)
Then there’s the demographics. The South, in general, is underserved by the NWSL despite the women’s collegiate game being strong in the region. Atlanta, specifically, is one of the biggest, most important cities in the country, one that serves as both an economic and cultural hub of the region. Putting a growing league in a growing city makes sense, particularly given how much the city already supports the sport.
-- RF
Dallas
Like Atlanta, Dallas’ is a name that comes up often, and often without real links to an actual expansion effort. Beyond that (admittedly very, very important detail), though, things make sense. With its unparalleled youth development on the boys’ side and an already established ECNL (soon to be U.S. Soccer Development Academy) team, Dallas clearly has a formula for engaging the community and developing its talents. Inhabiting an enviable complex in Frisco, outside of Dallas proper, FCD has the infrastructure and facilities to take on another first-division team. It’s just a matter of desire.
Geographically, too, this makes sense. Chris Canetti and Houston made the leap into the NWSL in 2014 without a reasonable regional foe. When the league pairs up teams to serve as rivals for scheduling purposes, Houston gets paired with Orlando, a mere 850 miles away. The distance from Houston to Dallas? 225 miles.
And don’t forget, Texas is a hotbed for strong youth clubs even beyond FC Dallas.
-- RF
New York (City Football Group)
City Football Group chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak said in June that the organization, which operates Manchester City in England, NYCFC in MLS, Melbourne City in Australia and has a minority stake in Yokohama F. Marinos in Japan, is interested in “potentially” operating a women’s team in New York. Sources have told me that CFP starting a women’s team as part of its NYCFC brand is a matter of when, not if.
Such scenario would almost certainly require CFP and NYCFC to absorb Sky Blue FC, the central New Jersey club which has been a part of the past two professional women’s soccer leagues in the U.S. but finished last in average and total attendance in all three NWSL seasons to date and is will do the same in this fourth season.
Sky Blue walked away from the negotiating table with the New York Red Bulls following the 2013 NWSL season, a move which has left the club stuck in neutral and still largely irrelevant. If and when NYCFC and the City Group money come calling, Sky Blue may not be able to say no -- literally, if other owners around the league force the sale.
-- JK
Vancouver
Vancouver, the beautiful city that it is, may sit atop the list of places which everyone always wants to revisit as a potential home for a professional women’s team. It’s the de facto home of the Canadian women’s national team. It hosted a World Cup final last year. The Whitecaps were once the best-run team in the USL W-League. Well...the Whitecaps also pulled the plug on their semi-pro women’s team three years ago, once NWSL started.
Since then, the brass of the MLS franchise has said little of detail about interest in the NWSL other than it being a possibility “down the road.” Portland Thorns and Timbers owner Merritt Paulson tweeted last month: “prediction...Van to NWSL in 2018...call it a hunch”. Perhaps there is more going on behind the scenes in Vancouver. A quick look at other candidates on this list suggests some stiff competition for what looks like it could be a pair of expansion spots in 2018 and two more in the year or two following that.
-- JK
More features at FourFourTwo.com/us/ | USWNT | NWSL
Jeff Kassouf is the editor of FourFourTwo USA. Follow him on Twitter @JeffKassouf.
Richard Farley is the West Coast Editor of FourFourTwo USA. Follow him on Twitter @richardfarley.While a transition is under way from paper to digitally stored information, it is still necessary, with some paper documents, to provide physical proof of ownership or other certification, such as a person's birth certificate. Paper documents, however, can be vulnerable to fraud. Smartrac has released a Near Field Communication (NFC) radio frequency identification solution to ensure that documents and their related data cannot be altered or forged. Smartrac's dLoc solution stores encrypted data about a document that can only be unlocked and read by authorized parties using hash-value technology. The system is expected to be made commercially available next month.
The dLoc solution, intended for document verification and authentication, employs Smartrac's own NFC transponders and Smart Cosmos cloud-based software platform. The blockchain technology (software dedicated to secure the storage of sequential blocks of data) used in the system was provided by data security technology firm Factom. Banks, property rights companies, hospitals and other businesses are currently in conversations with Factom and Smartrac about using this technology to store the unique ID number associated with a document, along with the data printed on that document or its history, such as the previous owners of a vehicle or other property.
The system is geared toward banks and mortgage companies that may store loan origination or mortgage paperwork, as well as for the medical sector regarding vaccination certificates, x-rays or other personal medical data. In addition, agencies that store land titles, vehicle registration and other property rights documents might benefit from the technology, says Mitch Deyoung, the product manager and VP of Smartrac's secure ID and transactions business division.
The solution consists of an adhesive dLoc NFC tag with a built-in Smartrac Bullseye NFC inlay, which comes with one of a variety of chips, depending on a user's particular needs, with storage capacity ranging from 1 to 64 kilobytes. A user can apply the sticker to a document, and then utilize an NFC reader built into a smartphone or reading device to capture the tag's unique ID number, write information to the tag and link data about the document to that tag ID.
Factom's blockchain software then creates a 32-bit hash value—a fixed, 32-digit string representing the chip's unique ID (UID), the form control number and the document data—which is stored in the Smart Cosmos software, as well as in a public blockchain. That value can only be accessed by other authorized parties equipped with an NFC reader using a private key.
The hash value provides greater security than simple encryption, Deyoung says. "Security is everything," he explains, when it comes to document authentication. Although NFC or RFID tags can be encrypted, that does not guarantee that a tag has not been changed. "It is very difficult, if not practically impossible, to infer the original input, given only the output from the tag. The degree of difficulty depends on the strength of the encryption used."“To where the Whortleberries lure I hie,
Thinking of tasty whortleberry pie;
A most delightful, delicacy it
To set before the epicure is fit!
The picker’s task, maybe, is tedious,
Gathering the blue-black globules of the bush.
Now once again is whortleberry time,
Down westwards in our glorious summer climb,
And soon I hope the fruitful spot to make
So of that luscious tart I may partake,
Adding thereto of Devon’s richest cream,
And so fulfil the banquet of my dream!
Yea, whortleberry time is here! is here!
The tempting harvest of the Moorland’s Year!”
Mooroaman (F. Y. Symes – 1932).
At one time whortleberries or ‘Hurts‘ as they are known on Dartmoor were an important wild commodity gathered by the moorfolk either for sale or for personal use. As can be gathered from Mooroaman’s poem above they made a traditional and famous local pie which graced many a table. So much were they part of everyday life that a branch of the Baskerville family included them on their coat of arms. (Argent, a cheveron, gules between three Hurts).
Vaccinium mrytillus, in Scotland they call it a blaeberry, in Wales it is known as a whimberry, in England they are bilberries, in Devon they talk of whortleberries but on Dartmoor ‘tiz a ‘hurt‘. Call it what you want it tastes delicious and it is a chore to pick, you seem to spend hours plucking, squashing and eating them just to end up with a paltry amount. You probably will |
money.
There are a lot of different media related networks on the web today; and you have a healthy choice of major platforms for which to go view different types of media. But, where do you go to view all of that content in one place? And, most importantly, where do you go to make money off your OWN content that you create?
Any creator can start monetizing their work by posting to the Yours platform. YouTuber? Wordpress blogger? Instagram celebs? We want to help empower your creations from all over the web.
We hope you join us for the soft launch in May. Visit our site at http://yours.network to site up to be notified with information about the preview, and check out our Engineering blog: http://engineering.yours.networkImage copyright PA Image caption The issue of fracking has prompted protests in parts of England
Scotland's energy minister will oppose moves to remove the right of householders to object to fracking companies drilling beneath their homes.
The UK government is consulting on plans which would make it easier for firms to drill under residential areas.
Companies would be given automatic access rights, but only for drilling at a depth of more than 1,000ft (300m).
Fergus Ewing told BBC Scotland any decision should be taken at Holyrood, rather than Westminster.
Fracking is the controversial process of drilling down into the earth before a high-pressure water mixture is used to recover gas and oil from shale rock.
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, would only occur at far greater depths of 5,000 ft (1.5km) or more.
Industry sources say the UK government proposals would bring oil and gas companies into line with the water, gas and electricity sectors.
In return, communities would receive a one-off payment of £20,000 for each horizontal well of more than 200m in length.
'Cautious approach'
But Mr Ewing told BBC Scotland News: "We have to have a proper debate about this.
"Simply proceeding by threatening to remove people's rights without any consultation with the people of Scotland is quite simply wrong.
"We are taking a cautious approach yes, we are taking an evidence based approach. We are looking at matters further and if we decide that it may provide opportunities for Scotland, then perhaps it should be done in a controlled considered way, in appropriate parts of Scotland."
A 12-week consultation on the proposals was announced in May by the then Business and Energy Minister, Michael Fallon.
He said: "Britain needs more home-grown energy. Shale development will bring jobs and business opportunities.
"We are keen for shale and geothermal exploration to go ahead, while protecting residents through the robust regulation that is in place.
"These proposals allow shale and geothermal development while offering a fair deal for communities in return for underground access at depths so deep they will have no negative impact on landowners."
In a statement, the trade body United Kingdom Onshore Oil and Gas said: "The industry supports UK government proposals to give automatic access rights to underground land below 300 metres, bringing it in line with other industries such as water, gas, electricity and sewerage.
"This underground activity will not be noticeable at the surface and will not impact on the enjoyment landowners have of their property."
The Scottish Greens said they had been calling for the proposals to be blocked since earlier this year.
'Clear message'
The party's co-convener Patrick Harvie MSP said: "These comments from Fergus Ewing are a good step. Holyrood should reject the UK Infrastructure Bill when it gets the chance to do so by way of legislative consent motions.
"Meantime Scottish ministers should continue to consider the use of existing regulations to ban unconventional gas completely. We are risking our economy, not just our environment, if we encourage yet more fossil fuel extraction."
The Scottish government's opposition to the proposals has been welcomed by anti-fracking campaigners.
Dr Richard Dixon of Friends of the Earth Scotland said: "The United Kingdom government has been completely gung-ho for fracking the whole country and this puts a spoke in the works because it won't be able to make this change in Scotland.
"It's also a very clear message for the industry that Scotland is a place where it will be much harder to do business."A bizarrely bittersweet ceremony marks both the beginning and end for one longtime couple
In a tale of love lost that is either touching or weird, a Thai man held a combination funeral and wedding last week (see a photo below) for his longtime girlfriend who died, unexpectedly, before they could wed officially. Here, a short guide to this bittersweet event:
Who is this guy?
Chadil Deffy, also known as Deff Yingyuen, is a TV director from North Eastern Thailand. For the past 10 years he has focused on his continuing education and budding career since graduating from the Eastern Asia University, where he met his girlfriend Sarinya "Anne" Kamsook.
SEE ALSO: Disaster at sea: A visual timeline of the Costa Concordia capsizing
What's their story?
After falling in love at the university and staying together for a decade, Anne had wanted to get married, but settled for a promise of matrimony while Deff got his professional life in order. But Anne died on Jan. 3, 2012, in an accident, leaving Deff's promise unkept. The bereft boyfriend decided, however belatedly, to honor his word.
What was this ceremony?
Friends and family were invited via Facebook to the wedding-cum-funeral rite at a local temple in Surin Province. The grieving TV director had a small film crew to capture the event and reportedly invited a novice monk, which in the Thai Buddhist tradition ensures a loving marriage. Deff wore a tuxedo, top hat, and white bow-tie, while his bride, laid out on wooden platform, wore a short white dress, fishnet stockings and gloves, and a veil. In front of a small group of family friends, Deff placed a wedding ring on his bride's finger, kissed her hand, and her forehead.
SEE ALSO: Scotland's 'explosive' push to secede from the U.K.
How are people responding?
After photos of the ceremony were posted on Deff's Facebook page, the public response ranged from sympathetic to skeptical of the groom's motives. But as one friend wrote in an op-ed in the Bangkok Post: "The "wedding" was [Deff's] attempt to right a wrong, however belated the gesture might have been."
SEE ALSO: India's 'deplorable' 'human zoo'
Sources: Huffington Post, Pattaya Daily News, Tan Network
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The design, development, documentation, analysis, creation, testing, or modification of computer systems or programs, including prototypes, based on and related to, user or system design specifications.
The documentation, testing, creation, or modification of computer programs related to the design of software or hardware for computer operating systems.
The employee is highly skilled and is proficient in the theoretical and practical application of highly specialized information to computer systems analysis, programming, and software engineering. A job title shall not be determinative of the applicability of the exemption. The employee’s hourly rate of pay is not less than $41.00 [the rate in effect on September 19, 2000]. The Division of Labor Statistics and Research shall adjust this pay rate on October 1 of each year to be effective on January 1 of the following year by an amount equal to the percentage increase in the California Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers. Click here for adjusted rate information (pdf). The exemption described above does not apply to an employee if any of the following apply: The employee is a trainee or employee in an entry-level position who is learning to become proficient in the theoretical and practical application of highly specialized information to computer systems analysis, programming, and software engineering. The employee is in a computer-related occupation but has not attained the level of skill and expertise necessary to work independently and without close supervision. The employee is engaged in the operation of computers or in the manufacture, repair, or maintenance of computer hardware and related equipment. The employee is an engineer, drafter, machinist, or other professional whose work is highly dependent upon or facilitated by the use of computers and computer software programs and who is skilled in computer-aided design software, including CAD/CAM, but who is not in a computer systems analysis or programming occupation. The employee is a writer engaged in writing material, including box labels, product descriptions, documentation, promotional material, setup and installation instructions, and other similar written information, either for print or for onscreen media or who writes or provides content material intended to be read by customers, subscribers, or visitors to computer-related media such as the World Wide Web or CD-ROMS. The employee is engaged in any of the activities set forth in nos. 1 through 4 above for the purpose of creating imagery for effect used in the motion picture, television, or theatrical industry.
employees in the healthcare industry
"Employees in the healthcare industry" means any of the following:
Employees in the healthcare industry providing patient care; or Employees in the healthcare industry working in a clinical or medical department, including pharmacists dispensing prescriptions in any practice setting; or Employees in the healthcare industry working primarily or regularly as a member of a patient care delivery team. Licensed veterinarians, registered veterinary technicians and unregistered animal health technicians providing patient care.
employer
Any person, association, organization, partnership, business trust, limited liability company, or corporation who directly or indirectly, or through an agent or any other person, employs or exercises control over the wages, hours, or working conditions of any person.
ERISA
Employee Retirement Income Security Act, a federal law.
executive exemption
A person employed in an executive capacity means any employee:
Whose duties and responsibilities involve the management of the enterprise in which he or she is employed or of a customarily recognized department or subdivision thereof; and Who customarily and regularly directs the work of two or more other employees therein; and Who has the authority to hire or fire other employees or whose suggestions and recommendations as to the hiring or firing and as to the advancement and promotion or any other change of status of other employees will be given particular weight; and Who customarily and regularly exercises discretion and independent judgment; and Who is primarily engaged in duties, which meet the test of the exemption. An executive employee must also earn a monthly salary equivalent to no less than two times the state minimum wage for full-time employment. Full-time employment means 40 hours per week as defined in Labor Code Section 515(c).
With respect to the requirement that management duties must be exercised over the entire enterprise or a customarily recognized department or subdivision thereof, it is important to note that the phrase "customarily recognized department or subdivision thereof" has a particular meaning. The phrase is intended to distinguish between " a mere collection of employees assigned from time to time to a specific job or series of jobs" and " a unit with permanent status and function." Thus, in order to meet the criteria of a managerial employee, one must be more than merely a supervisor of two or more employees. The managerial exempt employee must be in charge of the unit, not simply participate in the management of the unit.
The IWC Orders require as a basic condition for the executive exemption that the manager must supervise two or more employees. This may be one full-time and two half-time employees. It has been the experience of the DLSE that a managerial employee supervising as few as two employees rarely spends as much as 50% of his or her time primarily engaged in managerial duties.
Regarding the requirement for the exemption to apply that the employee "customarily and regularly exercises discretion and independent judgment," this phrase means the comparison and evaluation of possible courses of conduct and acting or making a decision after the various possibilities have been considered. The employee must have the authority or power to make an independent choice, free from immediate direction or supervision and with respect to matters of significance. With respect to the executive exemption, the most frequent cause of misapplication of the phrase "discretion and independent judgment" is the failure to distinguish discretion and independent judgment from the use of independent managerial skills. An employee who merely applies his or her memory in following prescribed procedures or determining which required procedure out of the company manual to follow, is not exercising discretion and independent judgment.
exempt
Exempt status deprives an employee of certain protections of the Industrial Welfare Commission Orders.
The exemption has far-reaching ramifications since exempt status deprives the employee not only of the right to overtime compensation, but also to many of the other protections afforded to nonexempt employees by such orders. Some of the protections that do not apply to exempt employees are:
Section 3, overtime premium;
Section 4, minimum wage;
Section 5, reporting time pay;
Section 7, requirement of records under the IWC Orders (but not records required by the Labor Code);
Section 9, requirement that employer furnish uniforms and equipment (except, of course, that any expenditure by an employee is recoverable under Labor Code Section 2802).
Section 10, requirement that meals and lodging amounts be limited;
Section 11, meal period requirement; and
Section 12, rest period requirement.Donald Bell/CNET
Vizio's upcoming 8-inch Android Via tablet could soon find itself on the shelves at Wal-Mart selling for $349, according to an apparently leaked photo.
Displaying what appears to be a photo of the product's placard, tech enthusiast site This is My confirms some of the tablet's specs, including a high-resolution capacitive touch screen, a front-facing camera, and built-in GPS. Though no release date was revealed, the site asserts that the tablet should reach the market soon.
Vizio, which is primarily a maker of LCD TVs, demoed Via--its first tablet--at CES in January.
A hands-on look from CNET found the touch screen to be very responsive and the user interface to be quite fluid. Beyond the specs listed by Wal-Mart, the tablet offers Wi-Fi (b/g/n), Bluetooth, an accelerometer, and an ambient light sensor. The Via also includes a mini-HDMI port, a Micro-USB port, and a slot for SDHC memory expansion.
An infrared remote integrated into the tablet can also turn it into a universal remote control, allowing users to control TVs, DVD players, and other video devices.
Adding further fuel to the rumors that the tablet may soon debut is a pointer from Engadget to a recent video that showed NBA basketball star Blake Griffin being given a tech tour of his Via tablet. Early on in the video, the Vizio representative tells Griffin that "we're getting ready to introduce our new Vizio tablet."
Vizio did not immediately return CNET's request for comment.× Missouri man smells so bad that police remove him from City Hall
HANNIBAL, Mo. (AP) – It wasn’t loud noise or an argument that led to a peace disturbance call at Hannibal City Hall, it was a person’s unpleasant odor.
The Hannibal Courier-Post reports that several city hall workers on Tuesday called police to complain that a person who came into the building smelled so bad they wanted him removed. The northeast Missouri town’s municipal code allows people to be cited for peace disturbance because of a “noxious and offensive” odor.
The man agreed to leave the building. A short time later, workers at a neighboring business called police, the same person had gone there, the smell following with him.
The person left that building, too, at the urging of police. No arrest was made.
___
Information from: Hannibal Courier-Post, http://www.hannibal.netMike Westhoff would not let Muhammad Wilkerson get away from the Jets if it was up to him.
The former special teams coach and current SNY analyst said he would place the franchise tag on Wilkerson to keep him on the roster, if that's what it came down to.
"I really like Mo," Westhoff said. "I like him as a leader."
Jets GM Mike Maccagnan said this week that the team is open to any type of deal with Wilkerson and will have a meeting with the player and his agent soon.
"He's a guy that scares you," Westhoff said. "Mo is a difference maker."
Wilkerson, 26, earned $6.96 million in the final year of his rookie deal last season and would earn $15.5 million next season under the franchise tag. ESPN's Adam Schefter reported earlier this month that Wilkerson was the likely candidate to receive the franchise tag from the Jets.
Wilkerson recorded 12 sacks, two forced fumbles and 64 combined tackles last season for the Jets. New York's first-round pick in the 2011 NFL Draft, Wilkerson has missed just three games through his first five seasons in the league.
Teams have until 4 p.m. on March 1 to designate players with the franchise tag, or else they can become a free agent. Players who receive the franchise tag will receive a one-year deal worth the average of the five highest-paid players at the position. Teams can still negotiate a long-term deal with players under the franchise tag.This summer, I sat in a massive pitch-black room and muttered “Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy shit…” over and over again. I couldn’t stop repeating “Holy shit” for maybe for five minutes. I’d been anticipating this moment for nearly a year. I was somewhere underneath New York City. I was waiting to be shown The Underbelly Project. Technically, I was there to take photos, but really I didn’t care at all if images came out or not. Really, I just wanted to see firsthand what was going on 4-stories below the streets of New York City.
Imagine Cans Festival, FAME Festival or Primary Flight: Some of street art and graffiti’s best artists all painting one spot. That’s kind of like The Underbelly Project. Except that The Underbelly Project took place in complete secrecy, in a mysterious location and without any authorization. Over the past year, The Underbelly Project has brought more than 100 artists to an abandoned and half-finished New York City subway station. Each artist was given one night to paint something.
Workhorse and PAC, the project’s organizers, have put countless hours into their ghost subway station, and now they’re finally ready to unveil it to the world, sort of (more on that later). So I guess that’s why I was in that dark room, sitting in silence, waiting for them to give me a flashlight. I’m still not sure why I’d been extended the invitation to see the station firsthand, but I couldn’t be more grateful for the opportunity. The Underbelly Project is going to be part of street art history.
Eventually, Workhorse and PAC came over to where I was sitting and lent me a flashlight. I stood up, already coated in dust and probably dirtier than I’ve ever been, and got a full tour of the station. I’m not somebody who is good at estimating the size of a space, but The Underbelly Project took place in a space that was meant to be a subway station, so I guess it was the size of a subway station with a few tracks. The station is like a concrete cavern: random holes who-knows how deep into the ground, dust thick like a layer of dirt, leaky ceilings and hidden rooms. Except the whole station is covered in art. Think of FAME Festival’s abandoned monastery transplanted to beneath New York City. I’m not an urban explorer, so I had no idea that there are abandoned subway stations throughout New York, but The Underbelly Project seems like just about the best possible use of one.
Of course, having been down there myself, I’m going to be prone to hyperbole. Even at it’s simplest, even if The Underbelly Project is “just another mural project,” it’s a story that the artists can tell for years, and it may even be evidence that street art isn’t so far gone and corporate as some people have suggested.
The list of artists who painted for The Underbelly Project goes on and on, but here are just a few:
Swoon
Gaia
Know Hope
Revok
Roa
Dan Witz
Jeff Soto
Faile
Mark Jenkins
Elbow-toe
TrustoCorp
On my visit, The Underbelly Project wasn’t finished. In fact, somebody was painting there that night. Nonetheless, the space was already substantially painted and postered. I spent that night wandering around the tunnels, taking photos and getting lost (and also scared – Damn you Mark Jenkins! You can’t put a sculpture like that at the end of a darkened hall. I thought it was a person!).
And what now? The walls have all been painted and the artists have moved on to new projects. When the last artist finished painting the last wall, Workhorse and PAC made access to The Underbelly Project nearly impossible by removing the entrance. Even if any of us wanted to go back (and I do), even if we could remember how to get there (and I don’t), we can’t. Nobody can. For now, The Underbelly Project has become a time capsule of street art, somewhere in the depths of New York City.
Brad Downey once explained to me why he thought Damien Hirst’s diamond skull is interesting. It had something to do with what people would think of the skull in 1000 years, when its original meaning has been lost to time. That’s when the skull is going to become a true icon and object with immense power. In some ways, The Underbelly Project is like Hirst’s skull, without the price tag. One day, decades from now hopefully, somebody may rediscover that old subway station and have no idea what they’re looking at. Hopefully, they’ll just feel that it’s something incredibly special.
Here are some more images from The Underbelly Project, and expect more over the coming days on Vandalog and around the blogosphere… Or you can pay £1 to read an in-depth article about it in today’s Sunday Times.
Photos by RJ Rushmore, Workhorse and PACPresident Donald Trump believes Alabama voters should determine for themselves whether allegations of sexual impropriety against Senate candidate Roy Moore are true and whether to elect him, his press secretary said Thursday.
"The president believes that these allegations are very troubling and should be taken seriously, and he thinks the people of Alabama should make the decision about who their next senator should be," Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters at the White House.
Moore, 70, has been accused by an Alabama woman of sexual assault when she was 16 years old. Six other women have told The Washington Post on the record Moore sought romantic relationships with them when they were teenagers and he was an adult, and one said he initiated a sexual encounter with her.
A seventh woman told AL.com, the website for several Alabama newspapers, Wednesday that Moore grabbed her buttocks in 1991, when she was 28 and was visiting his law office on legal business.
Sanders said Trump continues to believe "if any of these allegations are true" Moore should withdraw from the race. That led to a series of questions from reporters about how the allegations might be substantiated. Sanders said "that should be determined, possibly, by a court of law," but it is "a decision the people of Alabama should make, not the president."
Trump also supports the National Republican Senate Committee, the fundraising body for Senate Republicans, ending financial support for Moore, she said. He has no plans to campaign with Moore, she said.
But he has not formally withdrawn his endorsement of Moore over Democrat Doug Jones.
Moore won the Republican nomination for the Senate seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and the special election is Dec. 12. He has denied the allegations and has refused to withdraw from the race.
"I look forward to serving in the United States Senate," Moore told reporters Thursday without taking questions.
Story continues below this video.
Anything the president says about the matter risks resurfacing allegations made against Trump last year, during the presidential campaign. At least 11 women accused him of sexual improprieties before his election.
"The president has certainly a lot more insight into what he personally did or didn't do," Sanders said Thursday, in answer to a question about the allegations against Trump. "He spoke out directly about that during the campaign, and I don't have anything further to add to it."
Trump has also been silent, so far, on Sen. Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat who faces his own accusation of sexual misconduct. A broadcaster and former model, Leeann Tweeden, said Thursday that Franken forced himself on her and groped her while she slept during a 2006 United Service Organizations tour of the Mideast.
Franken issued a statement apologizing to Tweeden and calling for an investigation of himself by the Senate Ethics Committee.
"It appears that the Senate is looking into that, which they should," Sanders said. "We feel that's an appropriate reaction."India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks to the media inside the parliament premises on the first day of the winter session in New Delhi, India, November 16, 2016. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi
By Sanjeev Miglani
AMRITSAR, India (Reuters) - India and Afghanistan are planning to set up an air cargo service to help increase trade that both say is stymied because of their tense political relations with Pakistan that lies between them, Indian and Afghan officials said on Saturday.
The cargo service will aim to improve landlocked Afghanistan's connectivity to key markets abroad and boost the growth prospects of its fruit and carpet industries while it battles a deadly Taliban insurgency, Indian officials said.
An announcement on the service is expected after a meeting between Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday in the northern Indian city of Amritsar, a short distance from the Pakistan border. The two leaders are attending the Heart of Asia conference aimed at stabilizing Afghanistan.
Afghanistan depends on the Pakistani port of Karachi for its foreign trade. It is allowed to send a limited amount of goods overland through Pakistan into India, but imports from India are not allowed along this route.
Nuclear-armed India and Pakistan have gone to war three times and remain bitter foes while ties between Pakistan and Afghanistan have become strained despite their shared religious and cultural identities.
Pakistan's top foreign policy official Sartaj Aziz, who was due to attend the conference on Sunday, arrived a day earlier opening the possibility of a meeting with his Indian hosts to try and break a chill in ties.
Indian officials have been steadfast that there cannot be any dialogue with Pakistan until it acts against militant groups operating from its soil. Islamabad denies the allegation and says New Delhi must hold talks on the future of Kashmir, the dispute at the center of nearly 70 years of hostility.
Afghan director general for macro fiscal policies Khalid Payenda said the potential for trade with India, the largest market in the region, was far greater than allowed by land and so the two countries had decided to use the air route.
"We have a lot of potential for trade on both sides. On our side, it's mostly fruit and dried fruit and potentially through India to other places for products like carpets and others," he said in Kabul ahead of the conference.
He said that a joint venture involving an Afghan and an Indian cargo firm would be set up and that the two governments were working to build the infrastructure at Kabul and Delhi airports.
An Indian government source attending the meeting in Amritsar said air cargo route details were still being worked out and could include Kandahar as a point of origin for shipping fruit directly to India.
Indian foreign ministry official Gopal Baglay, who oversees Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, said several proposals were being discussed to improve Afghanistan's trade and transport links.
"There have been very many ideas on how to enhance connectivity, overcome current challenges and also expand the trade basket," he said.
Afghan ambassador to India Shaida M. Abdali said measures to fight terrorism was key. Afghanistan says Pakistan has failed to rein in the militant groups operating from its soil.
"Unless we take a collective measure to fight terrorism, to fight the breeding ground for terrorism, the safe sanctuary, we will not be able to bring peace and stability either to Afghanistan or to anywhere else in the region, including India," he said in Amritsar.
Pakistan says it is itself a victim of terrorism and says India is using its close ties with Afghanistan to stir trouble in its restive Baluchistan province.
(Additional reporting by James Mackenzie in Kabul; Editing by Nick Macfie and Clelia Oziel)We Love ALL Cats
We love big cats, small cats, wild cats, tame cats, friendly cats, fierce cats and YES, hybrid cats. It is because we love all cats, for who they are, that we fight so hard to protect them. Hybrid breeders will tell you that we seek legislation that will take your hybrids from you and that is a lie. We do not support laws that displace existing cats from where they are, except in extreme cases of abuse and neglect. We support bans on breeding and private ownership of wild cats and hybrid cats, but always make sure there are “grand-father” clauses that allow people to keep the wild cats or hybrid cats they have; they just won’t be allowed to buy, breed or sell more.
The hate and fear mongers will tell you anything to try and have you protect their “right” to breed, sell and exploit wild cats. If you really want the whole truth, please read through to the end of the page.
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Allowing the private possession of exotic cat hybrids is like strapping a nuclear warhead to the feral cat problem.
I’ve had more than 30 years experience with wild cats and am the founder and CEO of Big Cat Rescue, the world’s largest accredited sanctuary that is dedicated entirely to exotic cats. We rescue and provide a permanent home to non-domestic cats, and almost never even consider rescuing hybrid cats because that problem is too vast.
We are seeing an alarming escalation in the number of hybrid cats who are being abandoned by their owners. While we track the number of wildcat species who are abandoned each year, we have never accurately tracked the number of hybrids in peril because those numbers have been too huge. This is a serious and growing problem in America for a number of reasons.
1. Current laws, where they exist, are impossible to enforce because they often include language that states what percentage of wild blood is allowed, or what generation of breeding from the wild is allowed, or some other vagary that depends on the honesty of the person selling a cat that is derived from great misery to the animals. It is actually much easier to breed Servals, Leopard Cats, Jungle Cats and other truly wild species of cat than hybrids, so these animals have been sold and misrepresented as hybrids to evade prohibitions on wildcat ownership. Over the years I have been asked by law enforcement on several occasions to identify cats that were thusly mislabeled. The only way to enforce a ban on exotic cats and hybrids is to include language that includes all lookalike crosses. By the 4th generation away from a wild parent, the vast majority of cats lose that wild “look.” If it looks wild, it probably is.
2. Despite the fact that we do not have space for all of the hybrid cat requests that we get for placement, we have had to rescue a number of them because we are registered with the state as wildlife rehabbers, in addition to being licensed as a sanctuary. If someone thinks they have a Florida Panther trapped in their garage, I am the one who gets the call to go do something about it.
When someone reports that a bobcat has killed their domestic cat, dog or livestock, I am the one who goes to check it out.
When someone traps a “panther” because it’s been lurking around their house and stalking their children, I get the call. One such call was that of a “Florida Panther” stalking a little old lady. This call and most of these calls turn out to be hybrid cats.
Animal Control and local Humane Societies know that hybrid cats almost never work out as pets. The liability is just too great so in most cases they are euthanized with no attempt to adopt them out. When I end up in the field, rescuing some terrorized family from a hybrid cat, I know that I either have to build it a cage or it will be killed. Because of that, I’ve had a number of hybrid cats and can attest to the fact that they:
A. Hybrids suffer from genetic defects that usually require surgery and special diets because they cannot properly digest their food. The most common ailment that I have seen is inflammatory bowel disease and projectile diarrhea.
B. Hybrids bite. Even in play, even if they love you, they bite and I have scars all over my hands from them. Hybrids are far too rough to live with domestic cats and dogs and are certainly not safe to have around children or the elderly.
C. Hybrids spray. Their wildcat parents would have been hard wired to mark many square miles of territory, and this is actually the number one reason I hear from people trying to get rid of their hybrids. Male or female, neutered or not, hybrids spray copious amounts of acidic, foul smelling urine all over everything, and everyone, that they want to mark as theirs.
D. Hybrids are notorious for loud howling throughout the night. Neither their wild parent, nor their domestic parent is known for this, but it seems to be ubiquitous among hybrids. This sound is chilling and very loud and I’ve never found anything that will curb it or even limit it to normal human waking hours. It seems to accompany carrying toys around in their mouths and is yet one more sad reminder of how confused these cats are.
E. There are no rabies vaccines that are approved for use in wild cats, nor their hybrid offspring. Exotic cats will often die from being vaccinated with traditional modified live virus vaccines like those used on domestic cats. We use a killed virus vaccine on our wildcat species and on our hybrids, but there is no way to know if it is effective on either.
3. The menace to native wildlife, as stated at the beginning, is probably the most pressing reason to ban the private possession of hybrid cats. If a person asks what will happen to their hybrid cat if they turn them in to Animal Control or a local Humane Society, they will learn that there is no hope of the animal being adopted. This results in people abandoning their hybrid cats to the wild.
Hybrid cats are much better hunters, due to their recently wild genes, and thus can do much more damage to the eco system than feral cats alone. Add to that the likelihood of breeding with the feral cat population and you end up with much larger cats, capable of killing bigger and a wider array of native wildlife, including amphibious species because wild cats will readily go in the water after prey.
Introducing wild cat traits into the feral cat population also imbues them with the wild cats’ enhanced ability to evade humans, avoid traps, cross rivers and travel much farther distances, which can spread the devastation into pristine areas that do not currently have feral cat populations. Because hybrid cats are susceptible to all of the same domestic cat diseases (and now we are learning that they are contracting domestic dog diseases, including canine distemper and parvo and parasites and diseases that were previously carried primarily by raccoons) hybrid cats can spread these diseases into the wild populations as well.
These hybrid cats not only compete with other natural predators but may even cross breed with bobcats and eventually cougars over time, thus causing even more damage to existing native species.
There are so many reasons why private ownership of exotic cats and their hybrids should be banned, and yet only one reason to allow it; ie: ill gotten gain.
What about hybrid cats?
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Allowing the private possession of wild cat/ domestic cat hybrids is like strapping a nuclear war head to the feral cat problem.
I get e-mails every day, asking what I think of hybrids as pets. The hybrids in questions are usually Bengal Cats (leopard cat and domestic cross), Chausie or Stone Cougars (jungle cat and domestic cat cross) and Savannah (Serval and domestic cat cross) and Safari Cats (Geoffroy Cat and domestic cat cross). In the case of Stone Cougars the polydactyl feet and dwarf body style which are typical of severe inbreeding are encouraged to make the cat look less cat-like. Some people ask about Pixie Bobs, but I don’t know of any compelling evidence that suggests they really have any bobcat blood. Sometimes, when people are talking about hybrids, they are talking about lion/tiger crosses or serval/caracal crosses and much of what is true about the domestic crosses is more so of the wildcat hybrids.
In a nutshell, it is an irresponsible thing to do and there is no redeeming reason to cross breed these cats nor to support those who do by buying one. It almost never works out for the individual cat and in the rare case that it does, the number of animals that had to suffer in order for this one rare cat to exist is staggering.
While the rest of this article refers to Bengal Cats, the same is true of all of the hybrid cats. Some people have beautiful, fifth generation Bengal Cats that are reported to eat cat food, live quietly with domestic and use the litter box fastidiously. This may well be the case, but the breeders tend to keep breeding back to the wild Leopard Cats in order to get the exotic markings. The idea was to glean the best of both worlds: a fabulously spotted or striped cat with all the gentleness of thousands of years of domestic history. Unfortunately, what more often happens is that you get the ordinary cat coat and a wild personality.
Even after 4 or 5 generations, that wild personality is a dominant trait and while it is marketed as being just like having a tiny tiger in your home, most people don’t know what that really means. As someone who is not trying to sell you a $2000.00 kitten that you will one day take to the dog pound out of frustration, let me tell you what it is like to live with a hybrid.
We have had a bunch of them that were former pets. We have had to turn away many, many more because most of them cannot run free outside and have to have the same cages as bobcats and |
have easily stayed out of harm’s way, having been married to a wealthy French businessman and being able to travel where she pleased (she was born in New Zealand). However once she saw Hitler march his stormtroopers into France, she vowed to do whatever necessary to kick their arses out.
And boy did she do whatever was necessary…
She used her wealth to purchase a safe house where she would hide Royal Air Force pilots who were shot down by the Nazis. She purchased fake passports and papers, and even bribed guards and soldiers. She sabotaged Nazi weapons factories, derailed their train transportation, and engaged in shootouts with the SS.
She was actually captured once, but the Gestapo couldn’t easily verify her identity. They tortured her for four days before deciding to let her go. She told them nothing. Not even her name.
How did it all end for the woman at the top of the Gestapo’s Most Wanted List? She unfortunately lost her husband (who had also joined the war and was captured and killed), but she emerged victorious, and was the most decorated woman who served the Allies during WWII.
She died peacefully in August 2011.
Talk about Warrior Princess–this descendant of Indian royalty left the safety of England to join the French Resistance. She engaged in dangerous radio broadcasts where she would pass along secret codes, alert Allies and Resistance fighters regarding Nazi movement and plans, and when she was captured and imprisoned, she fought so fiercely that her captors grew afraid of her.
In fact, they wanted her to sign an agreement stating she would no longer attempt to escape.
Needless to say, she turned down their offer, and they condemned her to “Nacht und Nebel” (Night and Fog), which is basically disappearance without trace. She was whisked away to a prison in Germany before finally being transferred to the Dachau concentration camp where she was executed.
Some witnesses testified that the last word on her lips was “liberté.”
* * *
There are at least three or four other amazing women I could add to this list (perhaps I’ll add one each week of this month?). I hope you enjoyed what I’ve shared, and perhaps some of these stories could make their way into a history class covering WWII. This certainly would’ve piqued my interest!
The title of this post “Don’t Call Us Girls” is a reference to Doris Bohrer, who said all the men around her addressed each other as Lieutenant, Colonel, or some official title, while the female spies were simply “the girls.”
When a group of male spies teased her about it, she pulled out a grenade and set it on the lunch table they were at. When the men saw her reach for the pin, they panicked and ran, some even jumping out of windows. Don’t worry, the grenade wad disabled, and Doris sat there and finished her salad.
These women definitely have sparks of audacity and humor I enjoy, but most of all their courage–especially in the face of death–are truly inspiring and make up a part of history. They should not be forgotten, because they are true heroines, and more than simply, “the girls.”
Happy Women’s History Month!Huma Abedin wrote that she was going to send a secure phone by 'fedex' when
Hillary Clinton and a senior aide discussed sending a secure cell phone to the secretary of state by FedEx or a personal courier - who worked for Anthony Weiner, according to emails released Thursday.
The astonishing revelation is the latest from WikiLeaks and underlines just how much Weiner was trusted by Clinton.
Weiner is now the target of an FBI investigation after sexting a 15-year-old - leading to the bombshell revelation that his estranged wife Huma Abedin is also being looked at because 650,000 of her emails were found on a laptop he handed over to agents.
The exchange from 2010 begins with Clinton confidante Huma Abedin telling her boss that she would mail the secure phone from Washington before her husband, then-Congressman Anthony Weiner, takes her to the airport. Clinton asks if one of Weiner's assistants could make the delivery.
Hillary Clinton (pictured in 2010) talked to Huma Abedin about Fedexing a secure cell phone to her while she was secretary of state - or asking a personal courier who worked for Anthony Weiner to do it
Off the trail: Huma Abedin has not been at Clinton's side since the revelation that the FBI has found emails'relevant' to the Clinton email probe on a computer they seized from Anthony Weiner
'OK I will (redacted) just fedex secure cell phone from dc. Anthony leaving office to bring me to airport now so hopefully will make it just in time,' Abedin writes in the afternoon of Aug. 2, 2010.
'Maybe one of Anthony's trusted staff could deliver secure phone?' Clinton responds four hours later.
The email does not explain how Clinton had become separate from the phone.
The State Department said either approach - a delivery company like Fedex, or a courier - would have been acceptable, if the telephone was rendered inoperable for the journey.
The emails show the degree of trust Clinton had for Weiner before he was hit by scandal. Abedin is perhaps Clinton's closest aide and Bill Clinton officiated at her wedding to Weiner.
Abedin recently separated from Weiner after the latest in a series of sexually explicit text messages surfaced from the one-time rising star of the Democratic Party.
Clinton and Abedin wrote to each other using private email addresses outside the State Department's system, a practice that has roiled the Democratic nominee's campaign for the presidency.
Clinton has apologized for using a private email account connected to a server in the basement of her New York home.
The FBI announced last week it was examining emails found on a computer seized from Weiner during its unrelated investigation of his sexually explicit texts to a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina, which were first revealed by DailyMail.com.
Weiner resigned his seat in Congress in 2011 after accidentally posting on Twitter a picture of himself in his underwear, which he intended as a private message to a woman who was not his wife.
Longtime Clinton aide Abedin recently separated from Weiner after the latest in a series of sexually explicit text messages surfaced from the one-time rising star of the Democratic Party. Abedin is perhaps Clinton's closest aide
Seen together: Weiner is seen campaigning for Clinton to become senator in October 2000
In 2013, the publication of further messages killed his campaign for New York mayor.
It is unclear where Clinton was at the time of the emails. State Department schedules listed no public events for her between July 27 and Aug. 2, 2010.
State Department spokesman Mark Toner said it was unclear how the phone might have been delivered, or if it was at all. He said officials wouldn't speculate.
But Toner stressed that the options mentioned by Clinton and Abedin would have been appropriate, if the necessary safeguards were taken.
'In 2010, secure cell phones were available to State Department employees, and they could be configured in such a way as to render them suitable for transport.
'When configured in this manner, the device would be inoperable until paired with additional components,' Toner told The Associated Press.
A secure cell phone would be shipped through a carrier that provides tracking, like FedEx, and an individual outside the State Department would be allowed to deliver the device.
The use of secure cell phones is commonplace among State Department staff when traveling to countries with advanced cyberespionage capacities, such as China or Russia.
This is what happens when you give Weiner a phone: The sexting obsessed pervert was undone by a series of scandals including sending a picture of himself in bed - with him and Abedin's son at their side - and then he was revealed to have sent this image to a 15=year-old
When the FBI interviewed Abedin as part of its emails probe, she told investigators that Clinton's team 'would sometime use secure cell phones when they were traveling but they were not used on every trip.'
'Secure phones were only used when traveling in hostile operational environments,' Abedin said, according to the FBI's notes of the interview. 'The secure phones were maintained by Diplomatic Security (DS) and would be provided to the team.'
The exchange over the secure phone was among 1,280 pages of emails that the department released Thursday.
The department received the documents from the FBI and received a court order to release them under the Freedom of Information Act.
The documents weren't among the 55,000 pages of emails Clinton provided to the department in 2014 and which have already been published online.
Of those previously released, the department classified more than 2,000 emails, mostly at the 'confidential' and next-highest'secret' levels. Twenty-two emails were withheld entirely from publication on grounds that they were 'top secret.'
No new classifications were made Thursday. Many of the new documents are 'near duplicates' of those previously released, Toner said.
FBI director James Comey announced last week the agency was examining emails found on a computer seized from Weiner
What makes them stand out from other emails - especially the WikiLeaks disclosure from John Podesta's Gmail - is their mention of Weiner.
In the Podesta files he barely features, except for a reference to a revelation that police became involved in 2011 when he and a 17-year-old girl communicated privately online.
But Weiner was long a part of the Clinton circle thanks to, first, his status as a New York representative when Clinton was senator for the state, and then as Huma Abedin's husband.
The email disclosed Thursday was sent the month after their wedding, which was conducted by Bill Clinton.
It was reportedly Hillary Clinton who suggested that they go on a date.
Abedin ended the marriage in August when yet another sexting scandal hit the by then disgraced ex-congressman and failed mayoral candidate - this time with him sending a picture of himself in bed, clearly aroused, with his son beside him.
A month later Weiner as hit by the DailyMail.com revelations about his sexting a 15-year-old. He is now in rehab to try to deal with his cybersex addiction.
The FBI investigation into that led to the discovery of emails'relevant' to the closed probe into Clinton and her staff's handling of classified material on her Clintonemail.com server.
When that bombshell was disclosed to Congress last Friday by FBI director James Comey, Abedin was on the campaign trail but has been off it since then.
Clinton, who had once called her a surrogate daughter, called her 'one of my staffers' as she addressed the revelation.When looking for a cheap, reliable way to track gestures, Robert Wang and Jovan Popovic of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory came upon this notion: why not paint the operator's hands (or better yet, his Lycra gloves) in a manner that will allow the computer to differentiate between different parts of the hand, and differentiate between the hand and the background? Starting with something that Howie Mandel might have worn in the 80s, the researchers are able to use a simple webcam to track the hands' locations and gestures -- with relatively little lag. The glove itself is split into twenty patches made up of ten different colors, and while there's no telling when this technology will be available for consumers, something tells us that when it does become available it'll be very hard not to notice. Video after the break.Just received a nice letter from Rob Wang, who points out that his website is the place to see more videos, get more info, and -- if you're lucky -- one day download the APIs so you can try it yourself. What are you waiting for?Though Donald Trump's name was never explicitly mentioned, the United States president weighed heavily on politics in Canada this week, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government publicly set out its own foreign policy objectives.
In a speech before the House of Commons, Chrystia Freeland, Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs, took what many experts have described as Canada's boldest position in the face of the Trump administration to date.
Freeland stressed that "international relationships that had seemed immutable for 70 years are being called into question" in Europe, Asia and North America, and her speech was peppered with references to the US' shifting role in the world.
"The fact that our friend and ally has come to question the very worth of its mantle of global leadership, puts into sharper focus the need for the rest of us to set our own clear and sovereign course," Freeland said on June 6.
She also said Canada was "deeply disappointed" to see the US withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change.
Freeland: It's time for Canada to set its 'own clear and sovereign course'
Avoiding Washington's 'quagmire'
"The last thing the federal government wants to convey is that it's going to be in lock step with the Americans, particularly when they're acting in ways that certainly appear to be contrary to global interests," said Donald Abelson, chair of the political science department at the University of Western Ontario.
Abelson said he believed the minister "struck the right tone," and that her speech was as important for Canadians as it was for audiences in the US and abroad.
He explained that while Ottawa will continue to try to maintain good relations with the US, it "cannot be dragged down into this quagmire that is unfolding in Washington."
The speech "reassures world leaders that [Canada is] an independent, sovereign country that for the most part joins the consensus emerging in the global community," Abelson told DW.
Freeland also listed a series of distinct priorities for Canada, including the fight against climate change, multilateral institutions like NATO, an investment in the Canadian armed forces and international trade with other partners.
Last Wednesday, a day after Freeland's speech, Ottawa also announced it would sharply boost military spending by 70 percent over the next decade, up to 32.7 billion Canadian dollars (21.6 billion Euros, $24.3 billion).
Reaching out
The Canadian prime minister has also quietly called Canada's allies in Europe and Asia in the last week, according to The Canadian Press.
Canada's government last week announced a sharp hike in military spending
Justin Trudeau had conversations with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and French President Emmanuel Macron, among others, to zero in on key issues like climate change, international trade and sustainable development.
But whether the dual foreign policy and military announcements were "a product of inevitability rather than a deliberate drawing of a line in the sand is an open question," opined Canadian political commentator Chantal Hebert in The Toronto Star.
Laura Dawson, director of the Canada Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington,said the timing of Freeland's speech was "really well considered," coming after "the Trudeau government gave as much time as possible to really listen to and internalize the positions" of the Trump administration.
"There's been a lot of patience while Canada has sort of waited to see what from President Trump's campaign rhetoric translates into reality," Dawson told DW.
Concern over 'America First'
Canada and the US are the world's largest trading partners, exchanging $700 billion worth of goods and services in 2015. "Canada has no closer friend, partner, and ally than the United States," Trudeau said in a statement after Trump was elected.
During his first visit to Trump at the White House, Trudeau also stressed that strong Canada-US ties were unshakable, and would help to bolster the middle class in both countries.
Trump's new tariffs on softwood lumber were slammed in the Canadian press
But Canadians have become increasingly anxious as the US administration pursues its "America First" policy.
The US president has threatened to scrap the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) entirely, and he also imposed duties on Canadian softwood lumber exports into the US, a move Canadian media described as "an attack" on the sizable industry.
Still, Dawson said Freeland's speech should not be seen as a shot against the US, or as overtly critical of the policies coming from south of the border.
"The message to me was: in areas that we can work together with the United States, we want to continue to do so, but in areas where we diverge, we are going to continue on these paths," she said.
Canada remains dependent on the US, and it must strike a balance between its own values and beliefs, "and the recognition that [it] cannot fully go it alone," Dawson said.
"One administration does not make a lasting schism in the relationship," Dawson said. "Canadians and Americans have weathered a lot of differences between their leaders, and continue to have a very strong partnership."This marks the beginning of a new column, "India's Descent". About two years ago, I asked several learned people the question did you see the rise of India, from a poor economy to one with a challenging shot at being a global economic power? Everybody was honest, and everyone said no, we did not see it coming. Today, and over the last six months, I have asked the same people, and more did you foresee the steep descent of India? Universal answer no. To be sure, the pessimists among us pointed to the possibility that India could be sluggish in the short term, especially given Greece and Europe. But the steep descent of India into unimaginably retrograde economic policies, and politicians banning (becoming?) cartoons, and the confidence in the Indian economy at the same low level as in pre-reform India of the 1990s no, not even the worst pessimist got the descent right.
Hence, the need for a new column, one dedicated to explaining India's descent since 2007. How did it happen? Who were the contributors? What were the policies that made this decline possible? Who will answer for bringing India down so steeply? The long-running column "No Proof Required" will still be written, but when emphasis is on understanding what went and is going wrong, "India's Descent" will take over.
India is performing miserably, and way below potential. Now there are some who argue that India is growing at 6 per cent, when most of the rest of the world has a GDP growth below this level. True but in a list of 60 economies whose data are published in the back of the Economist every week, India's industrial production growth, at -3.5 per cent, year-on-year in April, is the lowest for an economy outside of Greece-afflicted Europe. Even Great Britain, with industrial production growth at -2.6 per cent, performed better than India. In China, the growth rate was 9.3 per cent, in United States 5.2 per cent, and the euro area, -2.2 per cent. These figures are for March or April 2012, a full two months before the full onslaught of the crisis in Greece and the eurozone. The last few years, we have patted ourselves on the back for doing so well, but it was premature self-praise: it's time to recognise that we are doing very badly. And begin to ask the question as to why India is in the state it is today. And begin to ask, who will answer?
The second important hole in the full-of-holes defence that India is doing okay, let alone better, is that comparisons of growth rate are made only with reference to potential, or likelihood, and not with reference to an all world or own average. No one hears the Americans saying that GDP growth of 2.5 per cent is great, and better than Europe growing at zero per cent, or better than the US in the recession year 2009. No the discussion is around the fact that in previous recoveries, the US grew at something above 4 per cent, while this recovery is registering a growth that is half in magnitude. The higher-than-recession and higher-than-Europe is a stupid comparison, and no sensible economist or policymaker in the US ever makes that comparison. Why do we do so in India?
So what has caused India's decline? As readers of my columns know, I believe a large part of the answer lies with the socialist policies engineered by UPA 1, policies that would embarrass even a Venezuelan Hugo Chavez. In the later stages of UPA 1, the Sonia Gandhi led government accelerated the decline and the nadir (I hope) was reached by the retrograde, worst-ever fiscal budget 2012-13 presented by the ostensibly able finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee. Future articles in this will explore, and dissect, the contributions of various leaders, political parties and institutions, to this decline in the life and fortunes of the aam aadmi in India.
But for today, I just want to point to three summary conclusions. First, the embarrassing excuse that Congress party officials and leaders offer when confronted with the facts of their gross misrule. The Congress refrain is, what can we do, we are running a coalition government and you know how irrational our own allies are. The first refuge of failed leadership blame others, and do not refrain from blaming your own allies! Well, there are precious few democracies in the world that do not have a coalition government, and India itself has had a coalition government since 1989. Recall that the most significant economic reforms in India occurred with a non Nehru-Gandhi led coalition government.
The second refrain, and pushed by lazy analysis, is that there is policy paralysis in India. This is a sister argument to the blame being put on coalition governments. There is no policy paralysis in India but it is the case that the paralysis is caused by the onslaught of misguided policy actions taken by the Sonia Gandhi led UPA 1 and UPA 2. Whether it be populist policies like outlandishly high procurement prices (responsible for India's high inflation), or wasteful welfare expenditures, or non-populist and non-sense policies like retrospective tax implementation, there is no paralysis of action, just a commission of very bad policies.
Third is the refrain of some that perhaps an economic crisis will change personnel and policymakers within the Congress party. I subscribe to that view with one correction. India is already in a full-fledged economic crisis, a crisis brought about by the policy actions of UPA 1 and UPA 2. Like Greece, can we have a referendum on whether there has been gross mismanagement of the Indian economy, please?
The writer is chairman of Oxus Investments, an emerging market advisory firm
ALSO READ The taper tigers
Please read our terms of use before posting commentsImage caption Mr Brown was found dead at his farm in Norfolk
A farmer being investigated over allegations of cruelty to pigs has been found dead.
The body of Stephen Brown, 52, was found at Harling Farm, near Thetford, Norfolk.
Secret filming showed pigs being kicked, slapped and beaten with iron bars, which the RSPCA said was "some of the most shocking" footage it had seen.
Police said Mr Brown's death, whose body was found at about 07:30 GMT, was not being treated as suspicious.
A Norfolk police spokeswoman said: "Police were called to a property at Eccles Road in East Harling... to reports of a sudden death.
"Officers attended and found the body of a 52-year-old man.
Footage 'dramatised'
"At this stage there do not appear to be any suspicious circumstances to the death and an inquest will be held in due course."
Animal rights group Animal Equality sent an undercover investigator to work at the farm for two months last summer.
The organisation gathered more than 200 hours of footage and 300 photographs.
In an interview with BBC Look East on Monday, Mr Brown said: "It does look bad but the only thing I feel is that some of it has been dramatised."
The RSPCA said it had launched an investigation.Argo star Clea DuVall shares lesbian kisses with female friend during day of passion in the park
Throughout her career, she has played a number of gay characters, most recently a closeted school teacher in American Horror Story: Asylum.
And it seems life imitates art somewhat for actress Clea DuVall who indulged in a passionate kissing session with a female friend in a Los Angeles park on Sunday.
The 35-year-old lay on a blanket for the afternoon with the mystery female, and the pair kissed and cuddled in the sunshine.
Making out in the park: Argo star Clea DuVall enjoyed a public make-up session with a female friend in the park in Los Angeles on Sunday
Dressed casually in denim jackets, jeans and T-shirts, the ladies seemed oblivious to passers by and park goers exercising nearby.
Clea, who is not thought to have publicly made any kind of statement on her sexuality, recently said she isn't worried about being typecast in gay roles.
'I don’t think it matters much anymore,' she told website Vulture last October. 'There was a stigma playing gay characters before that there just isn’t now.
Passion in the park: Clea DuVall and her companion were oblivious to passers by as they smooched
Cosy: Clea and her female friend snuggled close to each other during their afternoon out
'When I started acting in the early nineties, that was a bigger consideration, but now it doesn’t feel like that much of a big deal,' she said.
'You look at how many gay characters are on television and in movies and actors just aren’t afraid to do that any more. I think because there are more of those roles, the fear and the novelty of it have kind of gone away.'
The star engaged in a lesbian kiss in 1999 film But I'm A Cheerleader and has played gay characters in Carnivale, Ghosts of Mars and Saving Grace.
Low key: Clea and her female friend both sported denim jackets, jeans and T-shirts
Park life: The couple happily embraced next to a path in the sun soaked park
Coming up for air: Clea smooched her friend while lying down together on the grass
The star recently starred in Ben Affleck's Oscar nominated film Argo, playing one of six American embassy staff who escape an siege in Iran.
Clea revealed how she and the rest of the cast had to stay in a house together to prepare for their roles.
'We weren’t allowed to go outside,' she told Vulture. 'There was one cast member who did repeatedly go outside to go swimming in the pool -Tate Donavan. And he justified it by saying that his character goes outside in the movie, so it was okay.
Closeness: Clea laughed and chatted with her companion as they soaked up the Los Angeles sunshine
Time to go: The actress and her friend packed up their blanket after their afternoon of passion
Double denim: The ladies looked made for each other in their matching jackets
'But the rest of us stayed inside the entire time. No cell phones, no computers. There was a phone in the house for emergencies, but we weren’t allowed to talk on the phone.
'And they stocked the house with all magazines and newspapers and movies from the seventies. And during the day, we did research and watched movies. And then at night, we would eat dinner, and we would get drunk. And play games.'
Stars of the show: Clea DuVall (far left) as Cora Lijek in Oscar nominated film ArgoEmployment of individuals with disabilities. Provides that the policy (policy) of the state is to promote competitive and integrated employment, including self-employment, as the first and preferred option when providing services to individuals with disabilities who are of working age. Provides that the policy applies to programs and agencies that provide services and support to help obtain employment for individuals with disabilities. Provides that the primary objective and preferred outcome of transition services provided as part of a special education program or related services to a child with a disability who is at least 14 years of age is to
Employment of individuals with disabilities. Provides that the policy (policy) of the state is to promote competitive and integrated employment, including self-employment, as the first and preferred option when providing services to individuals with disabilities who are of working age. Provides that the policy applies to programs and agencies that provide services and support to help obtain employment for individuals with disabilities. Provides that the primary objective and preferred outcome of transition services provided as part of a special education program or related services to a child with a disability who is at least 14 years of age is to
assist the child in obtaining competitive and integrated employment. Establishes an employment first task force to: (1) establish baseline data regarding the number of individuals with disabilities in competitive and integrated employment and set annual goals for increasing the percentage of individuals with disabilities in competitive and integrated employment; (2) identify and resolve barriers to employment for individuals with disabilities; (3) analyze current state agency policies concerning the provision of services to individuals with disabilities and recommend changes; (4) assist state agencies in the implementation of the policy; and (5) provide an annual report to the governor and the legislative council concerning the employment of individuals with disabilities. Provides that the director of the division of disability and rehabilitative services serves as the task force chair.Hours after her arrival in Beijing on Thursday morning at the start of a three-day visit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel addressed China's role regarding Iran's nuclear ambitions in a speech to a Chinese think tank.
"The question is more how China can use its influence to make Iran understand that the world should not have another nuclear power," she told the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).
Merkel arrived in Beijing on Thursday morning with an entourage of top business leaders and members of parliament from all the major German political parties.
Economy tops the list
In her speech, Merkel said Europe was growing closer in the crisis
Bilateral economic ties are likely to dominate the agenda of Merkel's trip. Before addressing the CASS, her first appointment was a lunch meeting where she spoke with representatives from the financial sector.
Merkel called for better regulation of financial instruments like hedge funds, and also said credit ratings agencies had become too influential and were worsening the eurozone's debt-related problems.
One of Merkel's goals is to convince the Chinese government to invest some of its currency reserves in eurozone sovereign bonds. She praised recent EU efforts to deal with its debt difficulties, saying the single European currency had "made Europe stronger."
"Europe is growing closer together in the crisis," said Merkel. "Every country has to do its homework, but we're staying united, because a collective currency should be defended collectively."
This seemed to be a response to Chinese financial experts who had said in the run-up to Merkel's visit that it was unlikely the government would invest heavily in the troubled eurozone.
"The European Union has a unified currency, but no unified financial system ensuring that each country keeps its promises to reduce its debt," economist Shen Jiru said in an interview with the Global Times newspaper. "Pumping more money in won't solve the problem."
Merkel arrived in Beijing on Thursday morning
Merkel also said in her speech that China could help solve Europe's debt problems, without elaborating on how.
The chancellor was also set to meet young Chinese people who had spent time studying in Germany.
She will then be received with full military honors by Prime Minister Wen Jiabao at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Thursday afternoon.
Syrian resolution 'necessary'
On an international level, Merkel and Wen are expected to discuss recently-imposed EU sanctions - primarily targeting the oil industry - against Iran, and the ongoing unrest in Syria.
Germany has been one of the countries leading the push for a UN Security Council resolution condemning violence against Syrians by President Bashar al-Assad's security forces.
Merkel said in Beijing that she "thought it important that we try to find a common tongue" on the issue. "It is necessary that the UN Security Council passes a collective resolution," she concluded.
China has so far refused to impose sanctions against Iran, saying they would achieve nothing, while also arguing against any Security Council resolution against the Syrian regime that might lead to forced regime change or military intervention.
mz/msh/cmk (AP, AFP, dapd, dpa)Then-White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci blows a kiss to reporters after a daily briefing on July 21. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Ousted White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci criticized President Trump’s unwillingness to single out white nationalist and white supremacy groups in addressing the violence that erupted Saturday in Charlottesville.
“I wouldn’t have recommended that statement. I think he needed to be much harsher as it related to the white supremacists and the nature of that,” Scaramucci told George Stephanopoulos, referring to his former boss’s broad and vague condemnation of hatred and violence.
Scaramucci’s appearance Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” marked his first interview since his brief tenure as communications director ended abruptly about two weeks ago.
Scaramucci wouldn't have recommended Trump Charlottesville statement, "He needed to be much harsher as it related to white supremacists." pic.twitter.com/l5cbwUF63c — This Week (@ThisWeekABC) August 13, 2017
Trump has been widely criticized, including by members of his own party, for not singling out white nationalists and white supremacists in his condemnation on Saturday after hundreds of neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members clashed with counterprotesters in Charlottesville.
In a brief speech at his resort in Bedminster, N.J., Trump condemned “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.” He did not mention whose hatred and bigotry he was condemning — even after a car plowed into counterprotesters, killing a 32-year-old woman and injuring 19.
Speaking from his resort in Bedminster, N.J., on Aug. 12, President Trump said, "The hate and division must stop. And must stop now." (The Washington Post)
Arrested for second-degree murder and other charges was 20-year-old James Alex Fields Jr. of Ohio. A photograph shows Fields standing among members of Vanguard America, a group associated with the white supremacy movement, although the organization has denied that he’s a member.
[Trump didn’t call out white supremacists. He was rebuked by members of his own party.]
During the ABC interview, Scaramucci said he disagrees with his former boss over the vague statement on Saturday.
“He likes doing the opposite of what the media thinks he’s going to do,” Scaramucci said. “I think he’s also of the impression that there’s hatred on all sides, but I disagree with it.”
He also said that Trump’s aides and advisers are “probably reluctant” to be truthful with him and suggested that the president’s eldest daughter, Ivanka, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, would be the ones who can do that.
“I don’t think you’re going to change the president,” Scaramucci said. “The president’s going to do what he wants to do, how he wants to do it, but I think it’s important for the people around him to give them direct advice, to be blunt with him.”
[Anthony Scaramucci removed as White House communications director]
Scaramucci went on to criticize Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, saying the president has to “move away from that sort of Bannon-bart nonsense.”
“It’s not serving the president’s interests. He’s got to move more to the mainstream,” Scaramucci said. “He’s got to be more into where the moderates are and the independents are, George, that love the president.”
Trump fired Scaramucci, a wealthy New York financier, on July 31, just days after naming him as communications director. The Washington Post reported that the move was at the request of new White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly.
Scaramucci’s brief tenure had been marked by turmoil as he feuded publicly with then-White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. Scaramucci’s arrival at the White House prompted press secretary Sean Spicer to resign in protest, The Post’s Abby Phillip and Damien Paletta wrote.
After he was named to the West Wing post, Scaramucci vowed to crack down on the stream of leaks coming from the White House, saying he was willing to “fire everybody.”
READ MORE:
The Scaramucci fiasco shows that the White House will never escape chaos
New White House Chief of Staff Kelly flexes muscle on first day; Scaramucci fired
Scaramucci probably can’t stop leaks, even if he does ‘fire everybody’We've been singing 'Tutira Mai Nga Iwi' for nearly 60 years, but the composer's daughter says we've got the words wrong.
The waiata was written in a car the 1950s, while Canon Wi Te Tau Huata was driving past Lake Tūtira.
His daughter, Ngatai Huata says he was teaching her and her siblings the words as he made it up.
“Our father was a mobile, walking, talking tohunga, so everywhere we travelled he would write songs... about the area we were in.
“He’d write songs about mountains and about land and about who’s genealogy it was, and that’s how he taught us.”
Photo: Te Ara / Public Domain
The song became popular in the 1960s when the Ministry of Education published the song in schoolbooks.
Ngatai Huata says this's where the mistake began.
“Some people can’t understand how it happened, but actually I can tell you clearly … it was colonised basically. Corrupted.
“Dad taught it in all his Sunday schools, bible classes, all his kapa haka … and then it just caught on.
“We didn’t realise that actually the Ministry of Education … had gone and published it right through all the schools. They didn’t even seek consent [or] bother to wonder who wrote it.”
Photo: Screen capture
So what's the error?
The original third-to-last line in the song was "kia tapatahi" not "kia ko tapatahi" as it has been taught for generations.
Kia tapatahi is another way of saying ‘stand as one’, or ‘stand shoulder to shoulder’. “There’s no such word as ‘kia kotapatahi’. That’s just some English [speaking] person bastardising our language,” says Huata.
She explains how the song came about, and what she remembers the correct words and tune to be:
Hear the Huata whānau singing the correct words here:Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday that Democrats will try to tack on a measure to must-pass legislation that would provide a pathway to citizenship for "Dreamers" if GOP leaders don't bring the bill up for a vote by the end of the month.
"Congress has an ability and an obligation to act, which is why we today are calling on Speaker Ryan and Leader McConnell to immediately put the DREAM Act on the floor for a vote in the House and Senate," the New York Democrat said at a press conference Wednesday.
"But let us say this, and I think I speak for the Leader as well, if a clean DREAM Act does not come to the floor in September, we're prepared to attach it to other items this Fall until it passes," he added.
Congress' agenda expands to include immigration reform
The DREAM Act has been reintroduced in this Congress by |
doesn’t put Seoul at risk. At Saturday’s briefing, Mattis didn’t offer a direct answer to what those options are or how and when they would be used.
“Our military options as I mentioned are designed to buttress the diplomats’ efforts to maintain a deterrence stance and denuclearize the Korean Peninsula,” he said. While the allies are committed to deterring North Korea, they also need “many different military options that would realistically reduce that threat as low as possible,” Mattis said.
“And yes, we do have those options,” he said.
The North says it needs nuclear weapons to counter what it believes is a U.S. effort to strangle its economy and overthrow the Kim government.
This was Mattis’s second visit to South Korea since taking office in January. He made a point of going to Seoul and Tokyo on his first overseas trip in February, saying he wanted to emphasis the importance he places on strengthening alliances and partnerships.
On Friday he visited the Demilitarized Zone that forms an official buffer between the two Koreas. He appeared there with Song in what they both called a show of solidarity.
U.S. government officials for decades have confidently but mistakenly predicted the approaching collapse of North Korea, given its economic and political isolation.
Twenty years ago, Mattis’s predecessor five times removed, William Cohen, said as he peered into North Korea from inside the DMZ that its communist system was “decaying and dying.” His view was widely shared in Washington, but, like others, he underestimated the resilience of Pyongyang’s family dynasty, which began with Kim Il Sung. The current ruler assumed control of the country shortly after his father, Kim Jong-Il, died in December 2011, and has accelerated the country’s nuclear and missile programs.You heard it here first. For years, now, language mavens have been discussing the creep of the nominative pronoun in constructions calling for the objective case. Although voices have been raised in favor of “hypercorrection” as an explanation for this deviance, they have been mostly overwhelmed by explanations that rely on coordinate constructions. But I’m here to tell you that we have passed through the wall.
Let’s back up. Initially the concern was focused on phrases like Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s “My father John and my mother Moira … migrated to this country with my sister and I.” The “rule of prestigious deviance,” according to some, allowed for the use of the nominative (“I”) for the second member of a coordinate construction. According to this theory, perfectly rational speakers of English would say “with my sister and I” or “with her and I,” but they would never say “with I.” This locution, therefore, was not so much a hypercorrection stemming from years of scolding over sentences like “Me and him robbed a bank,” as a rhetorical choice.
Next came phrases like Mitt Romney’s saying of Newt Gingrich, “I like he and Callista.” Once again, some floated the notion of hypercorrection, but we still had a coordinate construction: “I like Callista and he” had established its place, and reversing the order of the coordinated objects didn’t seem that much of a stretch.
Next—sticking with politicians—came Colin Powell’s recent testament of support for President Obama: “I’ll be voting for he and for Vice President Joe Biden.” Here we have two “for”s, so, strictly speaking, “he” and “VP Joe Biden” are not coordinated objects. But there remains coordination, allowing one commenter to the Language Log post in which this example appeared to write, “No matter the history, it seems clear that both patterns are instances of the coordination breaking the connection between the large-scale position of the pronoun and its form, and something else moving in to take over the decision making in those cases.”
Which brings us to this week. Although I’ve given examples from public figures, my attention on a daily basis goes to my students. And for reasons I haven’t investigated, this past week I received two student stories with new examples of the nominative pronoun used in the objective position. The first wrote, “I didn’t think I was in love with he, but I couldn’t be sure.” The second wrote, “For they, it wasn’t that important.” No coordinator in either example. And then, at a social gathering, I overheard a woman say, “She gave it to I—I mean to me—oh, I don’t know any more.”
Feels a little like Alice with the Mad Hatter, doesn’t it?
“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.
“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least—at least I mean what I say—that’s the same thing, you know.”
“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “You might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”
Well, all right, not quite the same. But as I’ve said before, people want rules. Students, for instance, take notice when they start reading “to the Senator and I” in the newspaper, and when “with she and her brother” receives tacit approval from writing instructors. They may even notice that “I like he and she” has started sounding OK. A little time passes, and they begin to doubt whether me, him, us, and them ever were correct to say in a predicate construction or prepositional phrase. So they write the transitive verb or the preposition, and then they’re a bit stumped. Then gingerly, doubting themselves, they pass through the wall... to “with he.”
The task before linguists, I assume, is to note this transition, possibly to name it. The task for professors who teach writing (which is almost all professors) is to guide our students toward usage that will be considered acceptable in the fields where they will try to flourish. The students are behaving reasonably, inferring from a slipping set of usages where the trend is heading. But writing, “This experience was important for I” will not cut it in a cover letter. Draw the line in the sand for me! the students beg us. So where do we draw it, and when do we let the tide wash it away?Earlier this year, at its I/O developer conference, Google announced that it would soon turn on delta updates for apps running on Android 2.3+ and it looks like this feature is now up and running. With these smart updates, users don’t have to download the complete app when there is an update. Instead, only the parts of the app that have changed need to be downloaded. When Google first announced this feature, its engineers estimated that smart app updates would only be about a third of the size of a full update, saving users bandwidth and extending battery life.
Developers, Google said at I/O, won’t have to do anything to enable this feature and according to the folks over at Android Police, this feature quietly went live late last night or early this morning. We have contacted Google to confirm this and will update this post once we get official confirmation that this is indeed the case.
According to Android Police, an update of the popular ezPDF Reader, which would usually weigh in at about 6.3MB, now clocks in at under 3MB. An update to Instagram, which went out this morning, is now a 3MB download instead of 13MB for the full app.
These numbers should be even more dramatic for larger apps and especially games. After all, instead of having to download all the graphics assets for a game again, you now only have to download the parts needed to enable that new level or feature.0 SHARES Facebook Twitter
Ubisoft is up to its old tricks again, and it’s really frustrating. This time, it’s surrounding their HDR support or lack of it for the PC version of Assassin’s Creed Origins. While they originally stated that all platforms would see a patch to enable HDR, PlayStation 4/Xbox One/PC. It looks like they’ve backtracked on the PC version getting HDR support.
What’s worse is that instead of them being honest about it, they’ve tried to remove any mention of it. They previously they stated HDR would come to all platforms via a post on the Assassin’s Creed Origins blog, here. Thankfully, the internet has ways of caching that, as seen here.
There will be another Title Update available in early November, which will most notably include 4K and Dolby Atmos support for Xbox One X and support of HDR displays for all platforms.
The original claim that HDR was indeed coming for all platforms. Sadly, this wasn’t going to remain as Ubisoft had claimed.
When it was asked if the PC version would get HDR support, Ubisoft replied via Twitter that it would not be supported.
Hi there, we have no official plans to release HDR on PC at this point in time. — Ubisoft Support (@UbisoftSupport) November 3, 2017
And that very same post on the Assassin’s Creed Origins blog was updated to reflect a change that omits the PC version.
There will be another Title Update available in early November, which will most notably include 4K and Dolby Atmos support for Xbox One X and additional support for HDR on Xbox One S/Xbox One X and PS4/PS4 Pro.
See how the PC version is now missing? There was no press release to reflect the change. Ubisoft didn’t attempt to contact those who pre-ordered and purchased the PC version. There was nothing that I’ve seen that indicated the updated change. No, instead it was quietly swept under the rug, with Ubisoft hoping that no one noticed the change.
We’ve reached out to Ubisoft for a comment on the change and will update this article when and if we hear back from them.
Editor’s Note: I really hope that Ubisoft either makes good on their original word. Or lets everyone who purchased this to be refunded, if they want one. Claiming that HDR support was indeed coming, then backtracking is false advertising/bait and switch. They need to get behind this and play damage control or they could false some sort of action. It wasn’t too long ago that the director of the game was claiming that the PC version “was getting a lot of love”. If this love, I don’t want it.
We're putting a lot of love into the pc version — Ashraf Ismail (@AshrafAIsmail) August 5, 2017
Assassin’s Creed Origins is now available for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC. HDR support is now only coming to the PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One versions of the game.Tom Lee, co-founder and strategist of the Fundstrat market research company, claimed that the value of the main Bitcoin cryptocurrency will continue to increase. Cryptocurrency will make substantial gains because the millennials are interested in it, according to Lee.
He added that the way millennia will feed Bitcoin today is similar to the way baby boomers supported the stock market in the 1980s.
In an interview at CNBC's "Squawk Box" on December 12, 2017, Lee said millennials are very interested in digital businesses, social media and Bitcoin. He added that the population group is still more than 20 years old before its number is at its maximum.
"I think the viewers must appreciate, it's a millennial story." The baby boomers were 25 years old in 1982, while that's the baby boomers have driven from 1982 to the maximum population of baby boomers, which was in 1999. The S & P 500 … The Millennials are very interested in digital businesses, social media and Bitcoin. "
Lee's Earlier Predictions
In an interview in October 2017, Lee predicted that the Bitcoin price would continue to rise to $ 25,000 by 2022
During the year 2017, Bitcoin recorded 1700% growth to reach more than $ 17,000 in December, and if this momentum continues until 2018, the prediction of Lee may not be too far away.
Bitcoin Futures Launched by C The ME Group and Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) should propel the Bitcoin price and pave the way for the introduction of a Bitcoin Exchange Traded Fund (ETF), which could affect the course.NHL.com's midseason edition of Trophy Trackers attempts to project winners of the major individual awards. Today we predict the winner of the Hart Trophy, an annual award given to the player judged to be the most valuable to his team.
The best evidence of Sidney Crosby's value to the Pittsburgh Penguins might have come during a four-game stretch late in December.
Missing from the roster during most or all of those games were four defensemen with a combined four Stanley Cup rings and more than 2,000 games of NHL experience, a 40-goal scorer and a two-time Art Ross Trophy winner.
Sidney Crosby Center - PIT GOALS: 23 | ASST: 40 | PTS: 63
SOG: 144 | +/-: 11
With Evgeni Malkin, James Neal, Rob Scuderi, Brooks Orpik, Paul Martin and Kris Letang all injured, the Penguins went into those games with six or seven players who started the season in the American Hockey League on the roster.
So when the Penguins needed their best players to be their best players, Crosby stepped up to total two goals and four assists as the Penguins went 3-1-0 with their depleted lineup and remained the top team in the Metropolitan Division. He scored or set up six of the Penguins' 10 non-shootout goals in that span.
The way Crosby elevated his game when his team needed him the most is the reason he is NHL.com's pick for the Hart Trophy as the NHL's most value player at the halfway point of the season.
Crosby's League-leading 63 points in 44 games tops all players and puts him on pace for his first 100-point season since 2009-10. He has either scored or set up 45.3 percent of the Penguins' 139 non-shootout goals. And he's been just as good at home (11 goals, 35 points in 22 games) as he has on the road (12 goals, 28 points in 22 games).
And he's done it all against some pretty tough competition. According to advanced statistics site BehindtheNet.ca, Crosby's quality of competition rating is second-best among Penguins skaters to play at least 20 games, and 14th among NHL forwards.
The Pittsburgh captain has been the League's most valuable player through the first half of the season, although a number of outstanding performers are keeping themselves in consideration for the honor. But for now, the award is Crosby's to lose.
FINALISTS
Ryan Getzlaf, Anaheim Ducks -- The Anaheim captain has been the best player on one of the best teams in the Western Conference. He leads his team with 48 points and is on pace to set career-highs in goals and points. He's also had a hand in 33.3 percent of the Ducks' goals this season. Perhaps most impressive, his best play has been at even strength, where his 16 goals are second on the team.
He's also been productive while staying out of the penalty box; he's on pace for 28 penalty minutes, which would be a career low for an 82-game season. That's allowed him to average 21 minutes of ice time per game, including 2:03 shorthanded, second among the team's forwards.
And Getzlaf has done it while facing the toughest competition of any player on the team, according to BehindTheNet.ca.
Jonathan Toews, Chicago Blackhawks -- If there's something the Blackhawks need during a game, Toews is the player they turn to, regardless of the situation.
He has 15 goals, 44 points and a plus-21 rating in 45 games, all of which rank in the top four on the team. He leads Blackhawks forwards in ice time at 20:27 per game, including 1:23 per game shorthanded. He's also won 56.8 percent of his faceoffs while taking the fifth-most draws in the League.
And much like Crosby and Getzlaf, Toews has been productive while facing some of the League's toughest competition. According to BehindTheNet.ca, Toews has faced the third-toughest opposition on the team, first among the club's forwards.
---The vice-presidential nominee and governor of Indiana endorses a law that's making life dangerous for LGBT people in his state. It must be overturned, writes Kris Hayashi of the Transgender Law Center.
This week, Transgender Law Center joined MALDEF to file a lawsuit The Wall Street Journal described as “bringing together two of the country’s hottest political issues” — transgender rights and immigration.
It’s true that much of the heated rhetoric, discriminatory legislation, and violence that has marked this year has centered on questions of gender and citizenship. “No men in women’s restrooms” and “build that wall” are currently battling it out for bigoted catchphrase of the year.
But for people like our plaintiff, these aren’t two hot-button political issues. They’re his life. Along with his roles as a husband and a father, they make up his identity, the daily facts and fears of his existence — stamped large on an Indiana State ID that uses his female birth name and thus outs him as transgender person every time he presents it.
The Indiana law that prevents our client, like all noncitizens in the state, from changing his name was passed in 2010, a year of sweeping legislative attacks on immigrants. It was the same year Arizona passed its infamous Senate Bill 1070, which has since largely been struck down by the Supreme Court. Even though our client received asylum and before that benefited from the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, he is blocked from changing his name to match his identity because of a law that stereotyped immigrants as fraudsters and criminals — much as, in passing House Bill 2 this year, North Carolina legislators stereotyped transgender people as imposters and predators.
The consequences for our client have been devastating. He fears going out anywhere he might be asked for an ID, and with it asked to explain why a man like him has a woman’s name. “Normal things like going to the doctor are really stressful and scary for me,” he’s said. He’s gone into the ER for pain, and instead of providing compassionate care, a group of nurses gathered around to gawk at him and then laughed out in the hallway. Once, when he was pulled over, a cop demanded that he stop playing games and show his real ID or he would be arrested. The officer only calmed down when our client’s wife came and explained the situation, at which point the officer told her to take “it” away with her.
Our client’s experience is familiar to many. Yet since we filed the lawsuit, some in the transgender community have questioned why, when transgender citizens are so often denied our rights, we are fighting for the rights of those who are not citizens. The reason is simple. The discrimination and violence that transgender individuals face is not limited to citizens. Bias and discrimination affect all transgender people, including green card holders, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants.
The U.S. Constitution makes clear that every person in the country has rights, regardless of their citizenship status. The Indiana law violates our client’s and others’ rights to equal protection, due process, and freedom of speech. More to the point, though, the kind of thinking behind these questions relies on the same dangerous reasoning that colors all attacks on transgender people’s rights in this country, citizens or not. To say that we should prioritize the rights of transgender people who are citizens before the rights of those who are not is akin to saying we should prioritize the rights of women and girls who are not transgender over those who are.
Humanity, dignity, and equal treatment under the law is not a zero-sum game, where to grant it to some requires denying it to others. You might say the opposite is true: Denying humanity to some is to deny it to all.
Pivotal moments in our movement have long been led by people who understand this — by the trans women of color who resisted police brutality at Compton’s Cafeteria and Stonewall, by the transgender immigrants fighting for not one more deportation.
The Indiana law, though perhaps designed to “just” target immigrants, in effect harms transgender immigrants most of all. It denies yet another trans person the dignity and respect of being able to go about his day safely and without being questioned.
Gender doesn’t end where xenophobia and racism begin.
You can show your support for our client and other immigrants impacted by this law by signing our petition to Indiana Gov. Pence here.
[RELATED: You Got Served, The Mike Pence Edition]
KRIS HAYASHI is the executive director of the Transgender Law Center. Follow the center on Twitter @TransLawCenter.Welcome to your official resource hub for information on PlayStation VR. We’re covering everything, from the setup requirements to the technical specifications and beyond. If you have a question about PS VR, this guide should have an answer. And if it doesn’t have what you are looking for, just leave us a note in the comments below. We’ll do our best to update this continually before, during, and after launch.
Now… on to the Ultimate FAQ!
New Questions Added October 2, 2017
Is there a new PlayStation VR model? How is it different?
A hardware update to PlayStation VR is being prepared. The new version, model number CUH-ZVR2, features an updated design that enables the stereo headphone cables to be integrated with the VR headset and a slimmer, streamlined connection cable. There’s also an updated Processor Unit that supports HDR pass through, enabling users to enjoy HDR-compatible PS4 content on a TV without having to disconnect the Processor Unit in between the TV and the PS4 system. This function can be used only when the VR headset is turned off.
When will the new PS VR model become available in North America? How much will it be?
We will share details on the launch timing in North America at a later date. The pricing of the PS VR bundles will remain the same.
How can I distinguish between the old PS VR headset and the new one when I’m purchasing?
The packaging for PlayStation VR will change slightly when the new model hits stores. To differentiate, look for the model number printed on the box. The previous PS VR’s model number is CUH-ZVR1, and the new PS VR’s model number is CUH-ZVR2. Also, the product image on the packaging will be updated to show changes on the new model, like the integrated headphones on the VR headset.
If I already own a PS VR, can I swap out my old Processor Unit with the updated one?
Because the cables of CUH-ZVR1 and CUH-ZVR2 are different, you cannot swap the Processor Units.
Are the PS VR games I already own compatible with the new model?
Yes, all PS VR games are compatible with both PS VR models.
PlayStation VR: The Basics
Q: What is PlayStation VR? How much does it cost?
Update: Starting September 1, 2017, PlayStation VR is available in a new bundle that includes PlayStation Camera. Full details here.
PlayStation VR is our virtual reality system for PlayStation 4 available October 13. The core product includes the PS VR system which includes the PS VR headset, headphones and all cabling required with a suggested retail price of $399.99 USD / $549.99 CAD. The PlayStation VR Launch Bundle was available to customers that pre-ordered for a suggested retail price of $499.99 USD / $699.99 CAD. It includes the PS VR system, PlayStation Camera, two PlayStation Move Motion Controllers, and a copy of PlayStation VR Worlds. Both versions include a demo disc (which will also be available on PS Store after the product launches) and The Playroom VR will be available as a free download from PlayStation Store to all PS VR owners.
Q: What do I need to own to experience PS VR?
PlayStation VR allows you to experience the future of gaming through virtual reality with a PS VR system, your PS4 and PS Camera. Most games utilize the DualShock 4 Wireless Controller. Many PS VR games give you an option to enhance your experience through the use of two PlayStation Move motion controllers, while there are a limited number of games that require two PlayStation Move motion controllers. The PS VR exclusive sci-fi FPS game, Farpoint, utilizes the PS VR Aim Controller to offer a realistic and precise way to control the game.
Q: What are the weight and measurements of PS VR?
It is approximately 1.3lb (excluding cable) and approximately 7.4 x 7.3 x 10.9 inches (width × height × length, excludes largest projection, headband at the shortest)
Q: What is VR?
VR stands for Virtual Reality, which is a simulation of another reality created by designers and programmers. Currently the PS VR system delivers a virtual reality experience for your eyes and ears through the combination of the 360-degree 1:1 tracking of your head, wide field of view, stereoscopic images delivered with a high refresh rate at 120Hz, and binaural 3D audio. These combine to make your brain think you’ve been transported to another world. This feeling is often referred to as a “sense of presence.”
Q: Will I be able to play non-VR games and watch video content on PS VR?
PS VR has a feature called Cinematic Mode, which lets users enjoy content in 2D, including PS4 games and movies, on a giant virtual screen while wearing the VR headset. The PS Camera is required for initial setup, but not when actually using Cinematic Mode.
Q: Where can I try PS VR before I decide to buy?
In the US and Canada, hundreds of retail stores are conducting hands-on demos of PlayStation VR. You can find the closest store to you right here.
Q: When can I buy PS VR?
In the US and Canada, PlayStation VR preorders opened in March and have sold out. But there will be units available at participating retailers nationwide on launch day, October 13, 2016. Click here to learn more.
Q: How can I pre-order PS VR?
Our three separate waves of pre-orders for PS VR have concluded. If you were not able to pre-order, we are planning to have units available to purchase at retailers nationwide once the device is available on October 13, 2016.
Q: When I’m using PS VR, will other people in the room be able to experience what I’m seeing?
Yes, PlayStation VR displays what you’re seeing in VR or a completely different image as a 2D image on your TV screen via a feature we call “Social Screen.” This allows others to observe and, in some cases, play alongside you. For example, the free launch game The Playroom VR offers several experiences where players are working with, and against, one person wearing the PS VR headset.
Q: Is there a particular age I should be at to use PS VR?
Age 12 and up.
PS VR: Hardware Specifications
Q: How does PS VR work?
PlayStation VR (PS VR) is a headset that displays a stereoscopic (a different image is in each eye) view of Virtual Reality (VR) content generated by the PS4 system. The headset contains blue LED tracking lights and motion sensors that are used in conjunction with the PS Camera to track the position and orientation of your head in real-time. VR games and applications use this tracking of your head to render immersive 3D visuals and audio that put you into a virtual world. The PS4 and PS Camera also track DualShock 4, PlayStation Move motion controller, and PlayStation VR Aim controller to allow you to interact with this virtual world. PlayStation Move controller and PlayStation VR Aim controller offer a more realistic and precise way to control games, and provide an unbelievable sense of presence in the virtual world.
Q: What are the specs on PS VR’s screen?
PS VR uses a single 5.7” 1920 x 1080 resolution full-color OLED RGB display, also known as “1920 x RGB x 1080.” Unlike other VR displays, the PS VR display uses full Red, Green and Blue sub-pixels to produce a full color pixel. There are 1920 Red, Green and Blue sub pixels for each of the 1080 lines of pixels, so this is referred to as 1920 x RGB x 1080. This enables PS VR to further immerse the player and deliver a strong sense of presence.
Q: What is PS VR’s latency?
Low latency is critical to delivering an engaging and comfortable VR experience, and PS VR’s latency comes in at less than 18ms (0.018 seconds).
*Recent research in VR has deemed 20ms as being the highest acceptable latency before people notice the lag in VR.
Q: What is the refresh rate of the PS VR display?
The PS VR OLED display can refresh at 90Hz (90 times per second) or at 120Hz (120 times per second) depending on the VR game or application.
Q: How can a game run at 60 frames per second, but we see it at 120Hz in PS VR?
PS VR games and applications utilize a feature called “reprojection.” This technique takes the last output image at 60Hz and creates a new image at 120Hz based on the latest head movements made by the user. This is not the same as video frame interpolation and does not introduce any lag in the images being presented by the PS VR OLED screen.
Q: Will we see PS VR games running natively at 90fps and 120fps?
Yes. There are already games in development that run natively at 90fps and in the future we may potentially see some games running natively at 120fps as developers become more experienced with creating games for PS VR.
Q: What is the Processor Unit and what does it do?
The Processor Unit is a small box that comes with your PS VR, and connects your PS VR to your PS4 and TV and provides HDMI cable management, enabling Social Screen TV output, 3D audio processing, and Cinematic mode.
Front A ) Status indicator
– White: Powered on
– Red: Rest mode
B ) AUX port
C ) HDMI output port Rear A ) HDMI TV port
B ) HDMI PS4 port
C ) USB port
D ) DC IN 12V connector
E ) Vent
Q: What do you mean by “HDMI cable management”?
The Processor Unit acts as an HDMI splitter, providing images to PS VR and to your TV. When the PS VR headset is off or in the system User Interface, the TV will show the normal PS4 output. When a PS VR game or application is launched, the TV will show the Social Screen output image.
Q: Does the Processor Unit provide extra processing power to PS4?
No. The Processor Unit only assists the PS4 with 3D audio processing, HDMI cable management, Cinematic Mode, and the Social Screen TV output.
Q: How big is the Processor Unit, and how much does it weigh?
It is approximately 12.9oz in weight and approximately 5.6 x 1.4 x 5.6 inches (width × height × length, excludes largest projection)
Q: Does the Processor Unit support 4K and HDR pass through?
The PS VR Processor Unit (PU) supports video pass through so that you can enjoy regular non-VR content on your TV when you have the PS4 connected to the TV via the PU and the PU is connected to power via the AC adapter and the PS VR headset is not in use. This pass through support works for regular 1080p signals and also supports 2160p (UHD or ‘4K’) content in YUV 420 color format at up to 60 Hz from a PlayStation Pro.
However, HDR signals are not supported for pass through by the PU. This applies to both 1080p and 2160p HDR. If you have a HDR capable TV and want to view PS4 content in HDR, it is necessary to cable the PS4 directly to the TV.
Q. How long is the cable between the PS VR headset and the Processor Unit?
The cable between the PS VR headset and Processor Unit is made up of two parts – one that extends out of the headset itself, and the Headset Connection Cable. The total length of the two cables is approximately 14.4ft.
PS VR Games
Q: How many games are currently in development for PS VR?
Hundreds of developers are currently working on games and experiences for PS VR, with approximately 50 titles slated to launch before the end of 2016. Stay tuned to PlayStation.Blog for more information on games and experiences in development.
Q: What types of games are available for PS VR?
PlayStation VR is a brand new medium for playing games and experiencing media, and its game lineup spans across genres including shooters (RIGS Mechanized Combat League, Until Dawn: Rush of Blood), puzzle (SuperHyperCube), racing (Driveclub VR), horror (Resident Evil 7 biohazard, due out 2017) and more. However, given the massive leap in interactivity and engagement that PlayStation VR provides, we are eagerly anticipating the creation of all-new gaming genres and entertainment experiences.
Q: How will I know what games are PS VR-compatible?
Whether on PlayStation Store or in your local retailer, you will see prominent branding elements that will indicate PlayStation VR support and whether peripherals such as the PlayStation Move Motion Controller is required. See below for an example.
Q: Will there be a specific section on PlayStation Store for PS VR games?
Yes. PlayStation Store will feature a PlayStation VR-specific category.
Q: Can I play PS VR games without the headset?
You’ll need to wear the headset to experience VR. However, certain titles such as The PlayRoom VR will support local multiplayer modes that allow a PS VR user and other players to play together using PS VR’s Social Screen. In addition, there are PS4 games like Bound and Resident Evil 7 biohazard that are PS VR compatible, which gives players the option to play in or out of VR. To play these games in VR, you must wear the headset.
Q: Are any games included when I buy a PS VR headset?
The PlayRoom VR will be a free download for all PS VR owners. Both PS VR packages (core and Launch Bundle) will come with a free demo disc featuring a wide variety of playable demos.
The PlayStation VR Launch Bundle includes a copy of PlayStation VR Worlds, in addition to a PS Camera and two PlayStation Move Motion Controllers.
Q: What games are on the demo disc that comes with the headset?
The included PS VR Demo Disc will feature a number of playable demos spanning across many different games. Click here to see the full list.
Q: What is The PlayRoom VR?
The PlayRoom VR is a brand new collection of six VR games especially created for use with the PlayStation VR headset. Players can use their VR headset while up to four friends can join in on the multiplayer fun in the same room on the TV.
Every game in The PlayRoom VR offers a unique experience and is the perfect introduction to the magic of VR.
VR Bots is a welcome lobby that places the user inside a room filled with adorable interactive robots.
Monster Escape is a competitive party game for up to five players (1 VR player vs 4 players on TV). The player in the PS VR headset becomes a huge monster destroying a miniature city. One to four additional players use their DualShock 4 controllers to fight the Monster in a fun and epic battle.
Cat and Mouse is a competitive party game for up to five players (1 VR player vs 4 players on TV). The player in the PS VR headset becomes a cat ready to pounce to protect his kitchen from the mice players controlled with the DualShock 4 on the screen.
Ghost House is a cooperative communication game where players must work together to clear a haunted house from the ghosts within a time limit. The player in the PS VR headset uses the DualShock 4 to shine a flashlight and shoot ghosts, which aren’t visible to him. He must rely on the players watching the TV for instructions as to where to aim and shoot.
WANTED! is a cooperative communication game set in the wild west, where players enter a saloon and can see several characters sitting around drinking. One of them is the bad guy, but which one?
Platformer is a cooperative communication game, where two players (1 VR player and 1 player on TV) work together to fight their way through enemies to rescue stranded VR bots. The player in the PS VR headset takes control of a VR bot jumping, punching and using a grappling hook to rescue his lost VR Bots comrades. The TV player gets a different viewpoint on the action, flying a UFO and giving air support to the VR player.
Q: What is PlayStation VR Worlds?
PlayStation VR Worlds is a collection of five different VR experiences that have all been built from the ground up exclusively for the PS VR headset. PS VR Worlds is included with the PS VR Launch Bundle, and is available separately for $39.99. Developed by SIE Worldwide Studios London Studio, VR Worlds presents a collection of varied experiences, each designed to showcase VR in different ways. Check out detail about each experience in the PS VR Worlds collection here.
Q: How much will PS VR games cost, on average?
This will be up to the individual developer and publisher, but we expect a wide range of prices and experiences from the publishing community. Some smaller, digital-only titles may be free or cost considerably less, and titles such as RIGS: Mechanized Combat League will be $49.99 USD at launch.
Q. Do you have plans to offer PS VR games on PlayStation Plus?
We have nothing to share at this point in time, but we are looking into it.
Cinematic Mode
Q: What is PS VR Cinematic mode?
This is a mode to view the PS4 system UI and all non-VR games and applications on a virtual screen. This screen has varying sizes from Small (117 inches), Medium (163 inches) and Large (226 inches), placed virtually at 6 – 10 feet away (the size of the screen may feel different depending on the individual).
Q: Will my existing, non-VR PS4 games work with the PS VR headset?
Yes, PS4 games will work using Cinematic Mode, which is used to view the PS4 system interface and non-VR games and applications on a virtual screen. Non-VR games which use the PS Camera like the original non-VR PlayRoom and Tearaway Unfolded are not supported by PS VR Cinematic mode.
Q. Can I use the SHARE button when playing non-VR PS4 games during Cinematic mode?
Yes. All SHARE features will be available for non-VR PS4 games during Cinematic mode, as long as it is supported by the game.
Q: What is the resolution of PS VR’s Cinematic mode?
PS VR presents images from a single 1920 x 1080 display split between both eyes, so the content can have a maximum resolution of 960×1080 in stereoscopic 3D. The actual resolution of the Cinematic Mode screen depends on the screen size and |
demands.
Politicizing Pride
It is important that Pride events are again taking on a more activist character, which can both revitalize the movement and push back against the commercialization that has run rampant in recent years. We should use this year’s Pride to help build the broader movement against Trump and to take up demands that move from defense to offense: going beyond the struggle for acceptance to the fight for strong anti-discrimination and anti-bullying laws, free and accessible counseling for LGBTQ youth, free and accessible sexual reassignment surgery, and real solutions to LGBTQ homelessness.
The resistance against bigotry also needs to be international, and many pride events around the world are also being politicized against the rise of right-wing governments. In Brazil, the brutal violence against trans and LGBTQ people in recent years has been further intensified with the reactionary interim Temer administration coming to power. The Brazilian LGBTQ and women’s movement have also been fighting back through politicizing of Pride parades, including Carnival, which has become more and more an expression of struggle against bigotry, in spite of its roots in Catholic tradition. The brutal oppression of LGBTQ people in Chechnya has led to protests globally and demands for an end to the violence and arrests.
The most powerful way to defend the LGBTQ community against future attacks is through a broad-based working-class movement that stands for LGBTQ liberation and builds maximum unity in action around our collective struggle.
For example, the fight for single-payer health care can unite millions of workers opposing Trumpcare but also wanting genuine affordable and universal care that will disproportionately benefit LGBTQ people. We can unite our struggles by taking up demands for a $15 minimum wage, affordable housing, and free public education through college. At the same time, a broader movement can fight side by side with us against bathroom bills, attacks on workplace rights, and other bigoted, anti-LGBTQ legislation. If you are serious about building a powerful struggle for LGBTQ and workers’ rights alongside a broad movement led by working people and youth of all genders and sexual identities, join Socialist Alternative.
Capitalism has bigotry and inequality built into it. It relies on strategies of divide-and-rule and on hierarchical structures of church and family, in order for a super-wealthy ruling elite to defend their dysfunctional and massively unequal system. An end to homophobia, misogyny, and bigotry will require an end to capitalism, and in its place a socialist society based on equality, democracy, and solidarity.“The Ultimate Fighter” is apparently moving to Tuesday.
An advertisement in the new issue of “UFC 360,” formerly known as “UFC Magazine,” declares the upcoming 17th season of “The Ultimate Fighter” debuts on Tuesday, Jan. 22, at 9 p.m. ET.
UFC and FX officials have yet to make an official announcement, however representatives from both companies have since confirmed the change with MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com). UFC President Dana White was a little more coy.
“That day sounds good to me,” White told MMAjunkie.com.
After 14 seasons on Spike TV, the past two seasons of the series aired on FX on Friday nights. In October, FX exec Chuck Saftler revealed the network had decided to move the show to a different night in an effort to revive declining ratings, but did not at the time specify which night ultimately would host the series.
Promotion officials had been keeping the new timeslot private as rival promotion Bellator Fighting Championships also was expecting to move out of its Friday slot and into a new night of the week to coincide with its transition from MTV2 to the UFC’s old broadcast partner, Spike TV. Bellator executives also have not made an official announcement, but as MMAjunkie.com first reported, the company has already started securing venues for Thursday nights in 2013, beginning with Jan. 10 in New Jersey for what is expected to serve as Bellator 85.
The Tuesday night slot means “The Ultimate Fighter” could potentially serve as a lead-in for FX’s popular “Sons of Anarchy” series, which currently airs on Tuesday nights at 10 p.m. ET and this past week drew more than 4.2 million viewers. FX-original series “Justified” takes that 10 p.m. ET timeslot in January and will likely follow “TUF 17.”
The UFC, of course, in 2011 started a partnership with FOX and left its former home of Spike TV, which has continued to air taped content throughout 2012. In addition to live events that have aired on FOX, FX and FUEL TV, the new deal brought the 15th and 16th seasons of “The Ultimate Fighter” to Friday nights on FX.
“TUF 17,” which began filming in October and wraps in the coming weeks, is expected to feature middleweight fighters. However, UFC and FX officials have yet to reveal the cast. UFC light heavyweight champion Jon Jones and Chael Sonnen serve as coaches on the show and are expected to meet in the headlining event of an April UFC pay-per-view event.
For the latest on the UFC’s upcoming schedule, stay tuned to the UFC Rumors section of the site.
Story updated on 12/3/12 at 9:10 p.m. with official confirmation from both UFC and FX officials.The day after Ignacio Francis Jr., also known as Greg or ‘lil G’, was gunned down while standing with a group in the 1800 block of Fairview Street, his friends paid their respects at the site of his death.
A group of about 20 people, mostly in their early 20s, gathered Friday afternoon at the intersection of Fairview and Harper to light candles, make wax initials on the sidewalk, and write lil G’s name on a pole to convey how sad they felt that the 19-year-old Berkeley man was killed.
“He was a good friend, he was always there for us,” said Greg Symons Jr., 24, who knew Francis for about a year. “He was a good person. He was not a street person.”
Other friends of Francis’ also said that he had not been mixed up in gang behavior, but was an innocent who was shot on the street.
“The dude didn’t do anything,” said a 20-year-old man who didn’t want his name used but who attended Berkeley Technology Academy with Francis. He said Berkeleyside could refer to him as Wallace. “Violence is everywhere. A bullet has no name on it. I have had too many people killed.”
Francis was standing on the corner with a group of people around 7:30 p.m. on Thursday Sept. 22 when someone walked up to the group, according to Officer Byron White, a spokesman for the Berkeley Police Department. There was some sort of verbal dispute and one of the young men started shooting. Francis was hit and declared dead upon arriving at Highland Hospital, said White.
The shooting was not random, meaning the victim and killer knew one another, said White. He said they could have been friends or merely casual acquaintances.
The killing was the second homicide of 2016. The first happened on Aug. 18 when Alex Goodwin Jr., 22, was shot at 11:58 p.m. near Mabel and Burnett streets. He died early the next day at Highland. No suspects have been arrested in connection with his death.
Since then two gangs in Berkeley have been shooting at one another, according to police. Police have also said that some of the recent shootings may have been in retaliation for the Goodwin homicide, but that investigators are still working on figuring out all the elements.
On Wednesday, a 16-year old was shot in Berkeley near Sacramento and Russell streets around 5:40 p.m. and left at an area hospital. On Sept. 16, a 17-year old was shot in the face after the car he was riding in and another car exchanged gunfire down a six-block stretch of Ninth Street. That 17-year-old had also been shot in February while sitting in a car on Parker Street with two other friends, who were also shot. They all survived.
“I am scared,” said Wallace, when asked by Berkeleyside if he was concerned for his safety since he was a young African-American man. Wallace said his mother expressed concern that he was going to hang out on the corner because she feared there could be more shooting.
Berkeley police have stepped up patrols in West and South Berkeley in response to the shootings.
Francis graduated from Berkeley Tech in 2015 and had just gotten a job working in construction in San Francisco, said Symons. He was a good-looking man who had plenty of girlfriends but no-one in particular, he said.
Francis’ sister was among those gathered on the corner, but she declined to speak to Berkeleyside.
Anyone with information about Thursday’s shooting death is asked to call homicide investigators at 510-981 5741 or the 24-hour non-emergency number at 510-981 5900. People wishing to remain anonymous can call Bay Area Crime Stoppers at 800-222-TIPS (8477).
Related:
Berkeley police step up patrols after recent shootings (09.23.16)
Update: Person dies after South Berkeley shooting (09.22.16)
Police respond to gunfire calls; teenage boy struck (09.21.16)
2 feuding groups go on shooting spree through West Berkeley (09.20.16)
Juvenile shot in the face in West Berkeley (09.16.16)
Police hunt for man who fired gun during argument (09.14.16)
Young man shot multiple times in San Pablo Park (05.17.16)
Berkeleyside publishes many articles every day. To see all our stories in chronological order, and read ones you may have missed, check out our All the News grid.MICHAEL FELBERBAUM AP Business Writer RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Virginians bought more alcohol in the state’s beverage control stores and restaurants as the state agency again saw a record sales in the last fiscal year.…
MICHAEL FELBERBAUM
AP Business Writer
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Virginians bought more alcohol in the state’s beverage control stores and restaurants as the state agency again saw a record sales in the last fiscal year.
The Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control says it has seen sales increase to record-breaking levels consecutively for the past 16 years.
The agency that runs 350 shops saw a profit of $140 million in the fiscal year that ended June 30.
Gross wholesale and retail sales increased nearly 4 percent to $801 million. Sales at retail stores grew nearly 5 percent while sales to restaurants increased nearly 2 percent.
Jack Daniel’s remained the top-selling brand based on dollar figures, followed by Smirnoff 80, Jim Beam and Grey Goose.
Meanwhile sales of Fireball Cinnamon Whisky more than doubled compared with last year.
Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani
The most exciting and underreported news of the past few weeks in Iran has been that the emerging challenger to the increasingly frantic and isolated “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. And Rafsanjani has recently made a visit to the city of Najaf in Iraq to confer with Ayatollah Ali Husaini Sistani, a long-standing opponent of the Khamenei doctrines, as well as meeting in the city of Qum with Jawad al-Shahristani, who is Sistani’s representative in Iran. It is this dialectic between Iraqi and Iranian Shiites that underlies the flabbergasting statement issued from Qum last weekend to the effect that the Ahmadinejad government has no claim to be the representative of the Iranian people.
One of the apparent paradoxes involved in visiting Iran is this: If you want to find deep-rooted opposition to the clerical autocracy, you must make a trip to the holy cities of Mashad and Qum. It is in places like this, consecrated to the various imams of Shiite mythology, that the most stubborn and vivid criticism is often to be heard—as well as the sort of criticism that the ruling mullahs find it hardest to deal with.
So it is very hard to overstate the significance of the statement made last Saturday by the Association of Teachers and Researchers of Qum, a much-respected source of religious rulings, which has in effect come right out with it and said that the recent farcical and prearranged plebiscite in the country was just that: a sham event. (In this, the clerics of Qum are a lot more clear-eyed than many American “experts” on Iranian public opinion, who were busy until recently writing about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the rough-hewn man of the people.)
It’s not too much to read two things into the association’s statement. The first is that public discontent with the outrages of the last few weeks must be extremely deep and extremely widespread. Differences among the clerisy are usually solved in much more discreet ways. If the Shiite scholars of Qum are willing to go public and call the Ahmadinejad regime an impostor, they must be impressed with the intensity of feeling at the grass roots. The second induction follows from the first: It is not an exaggeration to say that the Islamic republic in its present form is now undergoing a serious crisis of legitimacy.
An excellent article by Abbas Milani in the current issue of the New Republic gives a historical and ideological backdrop to the discrepant forces within Shiism and in particular to the long disagreement between those who think that the clergy must rule on behalf of the people (the ultra-reactionary notion of the velayat-e faqui, which I discussed in this column) and those who do not. Among the more surprising members of the anti-Khomeini opposition is the late ayatollah’s grandson Sayeed Khomeini, a relatively junior cleric in Qum about whom I have also written before. And among the best-known of those who think it is profane for the clergy to degrade and compromise themselves with political power is Grand Ayatollah Sistani, spiritual leader of neighboring Iraq. (To emphasize the cross-fertilization a bit further, bear in mind that Sistani is in fact an Iranian, while Ayatollah Khomeini did much of his brooding on a future religious despotism while in exile in Iraq.)
Which brings me to a question that I think deserves to be asked: Did the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime, and the subsequent holding of competitive elections in which many rival Iraqi Shiite parties took part, have any germinal influence on the astonishing events in Iran? Certainly when I interviewed Sayeed Khomeini in Qum some years ago, where he spoke openly about “the liberation of Iraq,” he seemed to hope and believe that the example would spread. One swallow does not make a summer. But consider this: Many Iranians go as religious pilgrims to the holy sites of Najaf and Kerbala in southern Iraq. They have seen the way in which national and local elections have been held, more or less fairly and openly, with different Iraqi Shiite parties having to bid for votes (and with those parties aligned with Iran’s regime doing less and less well). They have seen an often turbulent Iraqi Parliament holding genuine debates that are reported with reasonable fairness in the Iraqi media. Meanwhile, an Iranian mullah caste that classifies its own people as children who are mere wards of the state puts on a “let’s pretend” election and even then tries to fix the outcome. Iranians by no means like to take their tune from Arabs—perhaps least of all from Iraqis—but watching something like the real thing next door may well have increased the appetite for the genuine article in Iran itself.
There are, no doubt, other determining factors as well. Contrary to the simplistic distinction between the “liberal urban” and the “conservative rural” that is made by so many glib commentators, Iran is a country where very rapid urbanization of a formerly rural population is being undergone, and all good Marxists ought to know that historically this has always been a moment pregnant with revolutionary discontent. In Saddam’s Iraq, the possession of a satellite dish was punishable by death; everybody knows that the mullahs in Iran cannot enforce their own ban on informal media and unofficial transmission. And yet, precisely because they are so dense and so fanatical, they doom themselves to keep on trying. Every Iranian I know is now convinced that if this is not the end for the Khamenei system, it is at least the harbinger of the beginning of the end.If you talk to an Ethereum supporter, Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are bound to come up in the conversation. The smart contract platform was build to support these sorts of decentralized applications, and the first Ethereum-based DAOs have started to emerge in early 2016.
The crowdsale for The DAO has raised far more money than was raised in the original Ethereum crowdsale, which speaks volumes for the idea that Ethereum is simply a platform for other applications to build upon. Having said that, not everyone is buying the DAO hype.
Digital Currency Group Founder and CEO Barry Silbert was asked for his thoughts on DAOs during a panel at Consensus 2016. Although excited about Ethereum in general, Silbert admitted that he’s a bit more skeptical when it comes to the early DAOs that have popped up so far.
Excited About Ethereum
During his response to the question about DAOs, Silbert could not be any clearer in his support for the potential of Ethereum and the underlying ether token. He stated, “I am incredibly excited about the enthusiasm in the Ethereum community, about all things Ethereum, about ether, and about the potential for smart contracts.”
As the founder of Digital Currency Group (DCG), Silbert is heavily involved in funding projects related to digital currencies and blockchain technology. Although DCG has not announced any funding for Ethereum startups up to this point, the firm is expected to make its first investment in the Ethereum ecosystem later this year.
Blockchain Capital and Fenbushi Capital recently led a pre-seed round for Ethcore as the first Ethereum startup to receive venture capital funding.
An Ethereum-Based Utopia
Although Silbert is excited about Ethereum, he does not agree with the vision held by some of Ethereum’s most-ardent supporters. He explained:
“I sense there’s a certain utopian view of society, which I may or may not agree with philosophically, that I just don’t see from a real-world application perspective happening anytime soon.”
Silbert went on to explain that a world where there is no regulation, lawyers, contracts, or SEC rules is not going to exist in the near future. He then clarified, “It may solve some problems. The idea of a decentralized autonomous organization, it’s super interesting.”
Silbert also noted that many of the earliest applications built on Ethereum are related to gambling, Ponzi schemes, or pyramid schemes, but he also admitted that this isn’t necessarily a problem. He added, “That’s OK because that’s an interesting way to experiment; it’s certainly what happened with Bitcoin.”
What Does the World Need from Ethereum?
One of the main criticisms of Ethereum up to this point has been the lack of useful applications that solve real-world problems. On a recent episode of Unconfirmed Transactions, host Dan Anderson and Wall Street veteran Tone Vays described how Ethereum supporters were unable to provide any use cases for the project to them at a recent meetup in New York.
During his panel appearance on day one of Consensus 2016, Silbert seemed sympathetic to the idea that practical applications of Ethereum are yet to be found. He stated: “I don’t think the world needs a decentralized Uber, which is one project. I don’t think the world needs a decentralized AirBnb, which is another project.”
Having said that, it’s important to remember that Ethereum is a platform on which a developer is essentially given the power to build any decentralized application they wish. It’s possible the best use cases of Ethereum have simply not been thought of at this point.
During his final comments on DAOs, Silbert questioned the role these decentralized organizations can play in the real world. He concluded:- Advertisement -
-- And Why it's Time to Knock Off Saying That 9 in 10 Americans Believe in God
It is still widely held that religion is somehow so integral to the human psyche that it is nearly universal among humans, rather like language. A few also remain in denial about the loss of faith in America and abroad, among this behind the curve cohort is the notoriously proreligious sociologist Rodney Stark whose What America Really Believes is not accurately titled. To get a more perceptive appreciation of the rise of the nongodly and how it challenges to myth of religious universalism consider how the more objective albeit unhappy evangelical authors of the World Christian Encyclopedia lament that no Christian "in 1900 expected the massive defections from Christianity that subsequently took place in Western Europe due to secularism". and in the Americas due to materialism". The number of nonreligionists". throughout the 20th century has skyrocketed from 3.2 million in 1900, to 697 million in 1970, and on to 918 million in AD 2000". Equally startling has been the meteoritic growth of secularism". Two immense quasi-religious systems have emerged at the expense of the world's religions: agnosticism". and atheism". From a miniscule presence in 1900, a mere 0.2% of the globe, these systems". are today expanding at the extraordinary rate of 8.5 million new converts each year, and are likely to reach one billion adherents soon. A large percentage of their members are the children, grandchildren or the great-great-grandchildren of persons who in their lifetimes were practicing Christians" (italics added). Only western irreligion is proving able to achieve major growth by spontaneous conversion in the face of low breeding at low rates. Islam is the one major religion to make major proportional gains to a current fifth of the planetary population, but mainly through rapid reproduction. In comparison Christianity has remained stuck as a portion of the world's population at about a third over the last century, with gains in underdeveloped nations being offset by the severe declines in the 1st world. Hinduism remains at about a seventh of the globe despite the very rapid growth of India.
The withering of popular piety in the most prosperous democracies and some other parts of the world has been detailed in the classic Sacred and Secular by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, and Steve Bruce's God is Dead: Secularization in the West that explains that major Eurochurches are in danger of shrinking to the demographic point of no return. This does not mean that the 1st world portions of Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan are chock full of dedicated atheists who after deep thought realized the God thing is absurd. It is more that so many have in the main lost interest in matters religious -- check out Phil Zuckerman's interviews of casually nontheistic Danes in Society Without God to get an idea of how they do care all that much about what Jesus said back then or would do in response to modern matters. The waning of the religious component of American Exceptionalism is documented in American Grace senior authored by Robert (Bowling Alone) Putman, gravely concerned Christian David Olson's The American Church in Crisis, and American Religion, Contemporary Trends by Mark Chaves. In the US the no response to the three Gallup questions they have asked since the last world war is always about the same when the questions are asked at about the same time, so the no responses can be used to track proportional changes in stanch proatheist opinion over time. The resulting quadrupling of outright atheists since the 60s and doubling since the 1990s is a growth rate that Mormons would die for. Numbering two to three million in the sixties as were Mormon at the time, the strongly atheist now exceed 20 million, compared to just 6 million Mormons (about half of which are not active) whose much vaunted growth is due largely to their having lots of unprotected sex, and over 5 million Jews many of whom are atheists. When the agnostic wing of atheism is factored in the one in five Americans Harris and Gallup find are not theists amount to sixty million nonreligious, rivaling Catholics and evangelicals respectively. Note that the hope by many theists that the 9/11 tragedy would help revive Amerofaith did not pan out, if anything the example of what supernaturalistic thinking can lead to may have contributed to secularization.
The attempt by Gallup to pretend that their latest results show that "More than 9 in 10 continue to Believe in God" is an egregious example of proreligious bias; note how they shove the more sophisticated and telling poll showing that the actual result is 4 in 5 Americans are theists is shoved to the back of their press release of their simplistic poll that's so obsolete it had not bee asked for decades (click here) -- despite its flaws asking the old query every few years is useful for longitudinal comparisons. Belief in a "higher power" is not a form of theism because the latter is requires belief in at least one specific god, and because even some atheists go for the presence of some idea of higher power. The old nine in ten Americans are god believers line is just so twentieth century, so never ever repeat it. Never. Nor should atheist groups continue to cite as they are wont that ~15% of Americans are none religious, it's more like 20%. The expansion of atheists of various sorts provided the market base for the appearance of assertive atheist best sellers.
Christians made up 95% of the nation according the WCE in 1900, now it is three quarters. Church membership has been slipping since the 1950s when Ameroreligiosity may have peaked, these days only a fifth to a quarter attend church on nonholiday Sundays, and the much talked about megachurches draw in only a couple percent of the nation. Protestants are heading for unprecedented minority status and Catholics are holding their own only because of Hispanic immigration as northern EuroAmericans leave the scandal ridden church in droves -- if not for the large influx of immigrants the nation would be markedly proportionally more atheistic than it already is.
The shift towards Ameroatheism should be having an impact on the evolution versus creationism part of the culture war, and it is. Because the rise in support for evolution without the involvement of supernatural guidance from the upper single digits to the mid teens since the 1990s recorded by Gallup closely tracks with the parallel rise of atheism tallied by the same concern, the increasing support for the science is largely due to increasing atheism rather than convincing the religious to accept Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Support for humans being created recently by God was stuck between 43-47% until 2008 with at most a slight downward trend towards the end, but in 2010 Bible creationism dropped to below 40% for the first time. If this trend hold up it makes sense since the Bible literalism that supposedly underlies fundamentalist creationism has been in strong decline for decades to abut 30%, leaving the latter increasingly vulnerable to collapse. Meanwhile the Bible skeptics that used to be only a fourth as numerous as the literalists have been steadily rising and should match and then exceed the later in coming decades. The slide of Bible literalism and creationism helps belie the myth that the religious right minority is ascendant, they too are feeling the demographic heat like the more liberal sects.
The Great Secularization of the West including America is not just a matter of stats. When I drive across stretches of the country I seem to observe a decline of FM religious programming in favor of a revival of classic rock. In a recent Parade magazine article about how to make weekends less busy, going to church or synagogue was not mentioned. When I was a little fellow Puritanical Blue Laws still restricted Sunday retail activities, encouraging church attendance. Profit oriented retailers organized to eliminate most of those laws, allowing Home Depo and Wal-Mart parking lots to be packed on Sunday mornings -- that the latter is owned by an evangelical Christian family that keeps their stores open on the Sabbath helps show where the priority of the nation now is. Theoconservatism owned the western mainstream culture up until the Great War, but the religious right has been increasingly driven into a minority parallel culture as the secular and hypermaterialistic corporate-consumer culture has become increasingly ascendant. When was the last time you watched a traditional religious themed program on the broadcast or cable/satellite channels? Long past is when Catholic Bishop Sheen hosted the ABC prime time hit Life is Worth Living at the height of the its us Godly Yanks against the Godless Bolsheviks Cold War, when Gallup found that two thirds thought religion was gaining influence and those who opined the opposite were in the teens. Where would you find a such a mainstream media program in a country where three quarters now and quite correctly think that organized faith is losing influence? Some of the most popular programs -- House, The Mentalist, Big Bang Theory -- feature atheist lead characters, a trend likely to help mainstream the fast growing ungodly minority and alleviate the bigotry they remain the target of (click here) much as did media exposure of blacks and gays. But unlike the latter two cases that involve strong genetic components, growing acceptance of atheists is likely to accelerate the growth of the optional opinion as it already has in the rest of the west, where being devoutly godly is often seen as peculiar. Also note that the religious right is correctly aghast at the fast rising acceptance of gays especially among youth, theocons are all too aware that it heralds a further weakening of their grip on American culture and politics (richarddawkins.net/articles/568418-the-gays-are-winning-%E2%80%93-and-the-religious-right-is-losing-what-nontheists-can-learn-from-the-success-of-the-homosexual-rights-movement).
The reactionary and godly Tea Party (three quarters of TPs believe God favors the US, http://www.publicreligion.org/research?id=428) reflects both the power of the religious right, and its weakness with a majority of Americans currently disapproving of its positions. The waning of theoconservatism has long term political implications because Pew finds that the Republican base is shrinking (click here). American remains the most faith based prosperous democracy, to the degree that open atheists remain hard pressed to get elected in most of the nation (click here), but that means much less than it used to in a nation were the theist elites admit Ameropiety is a shallow as it is broad, and as the country continues down the secular road in a process driven to a great extent by science and prosperity, boosted by commercial interests whose resources overwhelm those of the increasingly cash strapped religious industry (http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/16619).
So the financial wherewithal and public relations campaigns of the western churches are proving insufficient to stem the decline of organized supernaturalism in the face of modernity any 1st world democracy. Nor are creationists holding their own despite the construction of Biblical creation "museums" and theme parks. The demographic problem for faith is that each new generation is intrinsically more secular than the last. Nor has there ever has been reversal of western secularization, and the possibility that there will be one can be ranked as low for a number of reasons including that Amerofaith is already so shallow among so many (also see http://www.gregspaul.webs.com/questionssolved.pdf). So western religion is increasingly an activity such as it is of the aged. In the world at large organized supernaturalism is progressively becoming a feature of developing countries, but even there religion is often not as healthy as it may seem (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/paul07/paul07_index.html). Catholic Brazil, for example, now has a below replacement fertility rate lower than the US because women influenced by a profeminist media just do not care what the men of the church tell them what is moral or not. The women of Brazil can make up their own secular minds.
Much as the dog not barking solved the famous Holmes case, that the rise of atheism went down so broadly, easily and quietly -- without the fuss and bother of a culture war like that underway in America -- in the rest of the 1st world tells us a lot about the core nature of supernaturalistic religion. Also vital to understanding the question is how western secularization occurs without much in the way of organized support and in the face of organized opposition from the churches, and that in every single prosperous democracy religion especially of the Jesus variety is trending downwards. No two ways about it, religion is not universal in the manner of the language skills and materialism in terms of wanting stuff that humans are genetically programmed for ( gregspaul.webs.com/sciletter0415.pdf; http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/EP07398441_c.pdf ). That means religion is a much more optional opinion that can be and of late often has been easily cast off by majorities of populations. That ought to increase the fear factor of the leaders of organized supernaturalism.The father of a Melbourne toddler allegedly murdered by her mother has spoken out about finding out his daughter had died, describing it as the worst moment of his life.
Sameer Sahib said he went into a state of shock after learning that his ex-partner Sofina Nikat, 22, had confessed to murdering their 14-month-old daughter Sanaya.
“I couldn’t believe it. I just froze,” Mr Sahib said.
Sanaya Sahib. (9NEWS) ()
“We both brought her into the world. How can she do that?”
Ms Nikat, 22, was charged with one count of murder yesterday afternoon, after Sanaya’s body was found partially submerged in a creek in Melbourne’s Heidelberg West on Sunday.
She was examined by a psychiatric nurse and doctor in custody this morning, and a magistrate later excused her from appearing in court today over concerns with her mental state.
Mr Sahib was forced to identify his daughter’s body today.
Police say Sofina Nikat made a "full confession" to the murder of her daughter. (9NEWS) ()
“I saw her last Thursday. She wanted to come into my lap,” he said.
“I just wish I brought her home with me.”
Mr Sahib said both Ms Nikat and Sanaya appeared to be in good spirits when he saw them two days before the alleged murder, but says his former partner “obviously put on an act.”
Ms Nikat, of Mitcham, was arrested in Mount Albert about 8.35am yesterday and fronted an out-of-sessions hearing at the Melbourne West Police Station last night.
Detective Senior Sergeant Stuart Bailey said the accused had made a "full confession" to the murder of her daughter, which is alleged to have occurred on Saturday.
Sanaya's body was found about 17 hours after she was first reported missing. (9NEWS) ()
Ms Nikat initially told police she was walking through Olympic Park in Heidelberg West on Saturday morning when a man pushed her to the ground and "snatched" Sanaya from her pram.
She said the man, who she described as being of African appearance, had then run through the park with Sanaya.
Mr Sahib said he had separated from Ms Nikat about a year ago and had been restricted from seeing Sanaya for the past six months.
However, he said he received a call from Ms Nikat around a week ago asking him to see his daughter again.
The father said he had learnt that Sanaya and her mother were in contact with the Department of Human Services but when he approached government agencies about them he was advised to contact a lawyer.
He said he trusted that they would safeguard the welfare of his child so that "nothing like this would ever happen."
Mr Sahib said he is now focused on arranging Sanaya's funeral.
Her body was found partially submerged in Darebin Creek. (9NEWS) ()
“When I heard the news it was the worst day of my life. When she was born it was the best day of my life.”
“It’s just come to a really sad end,” he said.
Ms Nikat did not apply for bail and the case will return to a Melbourne court on August 3.
© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2019MIAMI -- A year ago, Giancarlo Stanton, Christian Yelich and Marcell Ozuna were being hailed as arguably the best outfield trio in the National League, if not the Majors. In the eyes of the Marlins, they certainly were deserving of being in the conversation.
Pitchers and catchers begin Spring Training for the Marlins on Feb. 19 at the Roger Dean Stadium complex in Jupiter, Fla. Full-squad workouts get underway on Feb. 23. As the workout dates approach, MLB.com takes a position-by-position look at the 2016 Marlins. This is the final installment: Outfield.
Pitchers and catchers begin Spring Training for the Marlins on Feb. 19 at the Roger Dean Stadium complex in Jupiter, Fla. Full-squad workouts get underway on Feb. 23. As the workout dates approach, MLB.com takes a position-by-position look at the 2016 Marlins. This is the final installment: Outfield.
MIAMI -- A year ago, Giancarlo Stanton, Christian Yelich and Marcell Ozuna were being hailed as arguably the best outfield trio in the National League, if not the Majors. In the eyes of the Marlins, they certainly were deserving of being in the conversation.
But as the 2015 season unfolded, it didn't play out that way. Injuries and inconsistencies impacted all three, and collectively, the year was frustrating and disappointing.
Video: Graves explains why Marlins will surpass expectations
Stanton, 26, sustained a broken left hamate bone on June 26 and appeared in just 74 games. Ozuna, 25, got off to a slow start, was optioned to Triple-A New Orleans in early July and saw action in 123 big league games. Yelich, 24, overcame early-season back issues, and after a slow start, he ended up batting.300 in 126 games.
• Around the Horn: Rotation | Bullpen | C | 1B | 2B | SS | 3B
In the offseason, there was speculation Ozuna would be traded for a starting pitcher. Nothing, however, reached the point where a deal was close. So now, when full-squad workouts begin for the Marlins on Feb. 23, all three will be back. Yelich is set to return in left field, with Ozuna in center and Stanton in right.
For all that went wrong last season, the organization has not lost sight that its young outfield remains one of the most talented in the game. To be considered the best outfield in the game, they'll have to prove it. The first step in doing so is having them on the field.
Stanton's injury was the most damaging for Miami. Initially, he was expected to miss four to six weeks, but he didn't return. Stanton had several setbacks during his recovery. He dealt with excessive scar tissue, and he experienced numbness in his |
, and sends the case back to the lower court with instructions to dismiss it without prejudice. The HSUS intervened in the lawsuit and our Animal Protection Litigation team joined with pro bono attorneys from Latham and Watkins and Schiff Hardin to defend the law alongside California.“It is interesting to me that in every primary or caucus where Ted Cruz won, we have certified, proven, sworn evidence of massive voter fraud.” – Trump surrogate Roger Stone blatantly lying about voter fraud. Stone is calling for massive demonstrations at the Republican convention in Cleveland in July. Stone also threatened to disclose hotel names and room numbers of pro-Cruz delegates.
Donald Trump warned that his supporters would respond with “riots” if he fails to secure the nomination at July’s convention in Cleveland. “I think you’d have riots, I think you’d have riots. I’m representing a tremendous many, many millions of people.” Donald Trump, March 17, 2016
There is a rumor circulating on social media that chairman of the Republican National Committee Reince Priebus is rigging electronic voting machines in New York, ensuring that presidential candidate Donald Trump will get below 50% during the April 19 primary. The lie is so incredibly moronic that one would think it would not gain legs, but it inexplicably has been shared numerous times on social media so we will address it here.
Ridiculous accusations of voter fraud have been ongoing during this horrific presidential campaign by mainly FAKE pro-Trump websites and spread all over social media. Many of these websites promoting themselves as U.S. news organizations are unbelievably based in Macedonia.
Along with the constant blatant lies has been a menacing undertone of what will happen if Donald Trump is denied his rightful place as the Republican presidential nominee, such as the tweet below:
The #NYPrimary lie appears to have started from @umpire43, who obsessively tweets about Trump’s fabulousness, while regularly trashing Trump’s opponents. There are a number of openly pro-Trump liberals on Twitter, and umpire43, or “DJ Lewis” appears to be one of them, as evidenced by his very first tweet:
We will call on all Trump millions of new voters to stay home in NOV or vote for Hillary before we allow Cruz or Rubio — DJ Lewis (@umpire43) March 2, 2016
Evidently this is a running theme:
@Reince We have more than 98% of Trump supporters numbering new GOP voters in the millions that will vote Hillary if you cheat our choice. — DJ Lewis (@umpire43) March 21, 2016
Interestingly, @umpire43 was featured at TrevorLoudon.com just this week for the following blatant lie in the wake of the Wisconsin Primary:
ABC asked 5 Trump voters to take pics. All 5 were flipped to Cruz. ABC has the 5 Video files. — DJ Lewis (@umpire43) April 5, 2016
As far as this most recent rumor, here is the tweet that started it. The lie has since been promoted at the FAKE pro-Trump website Prntly:
@realDonaldTrump I hope you are aware of this. I was 5 feet from Priebus when he said” Use the diebold program in NY to keep Trump under 50% — DJ Lewis (@umpire43) April 6, 2016
Because of NY Primary rules, Ted Cruz would benefit from keeping Trump under 50%. But he is not going to rig voting machines to get there. Instead of dismissing the lie, many fell for it.
The question is how many of these Trump supporters are real people or more likely, paid astroturfers:
Want to know how our voting system is.@Reince was overheard saying “use diebold to keep trump under 50 in NY”https://t.co/bks7lCqkLE — Merritt 4 TRUTH (@Trump4Pres0225) April 7, 2016
RT @Reince said to use diebold program in NY 2 keep Trump under 50% @EricTrump @realDonaldTrump NY REVOLT ON GOP! https://t.co/IlBzpyYj49 — AMERICA FIRST (@PolyPatriot) April 7, 2016
End corrupt voting machines! Trumpsters wear PLAIN RED HAT 2polls. Hats=vote 4Trump. Count hats, Compare 2votes! RT https://t.co/f5corJg1fs — R. U. Honest (@ru_honest1) April 8, 2016
@umpire43 @ChrisCuomo I thought he has Diebold Machines? He probably has both..We need to demand paper ballots so we can make a pic & share — Christine DeSimone (@Tobymare) April 8, 2016
@seanhannity next time you have that hack Reince in your show…ask him Ehat is the Diebold method for keeping Trump under 50% in NY/Ca — Jaxx (@JaxxFacts) April 6, 2016
Since the bogus accusation that Ted Cruz stole Iowa from Ben Carson, this republican presidential campaign has been filled with lies aimed at Ted Cruz, many of which are debunked here.No country on Earth imprisons more people per capita than the United States. But for America, mass incarceration has proved a losing proposition. The Supreme Court recently found California’s overcrowded prisons unconstitutional, and state legislators want to cut the vast amounts of public money spent on prison warehousing.
Why are so many Americans in prison, and which ones can be safely released? Let’s address some common misunderstandings about our incarceration problem.
1. Crime has fallen because incarceration has risen.
U.S. crime rates are the lowest in 40 years, but it’s not clear how much of this drop is a result of locking up more people.
In Canada, for example, violent crime declined in the 1990s almost as much as it did in the United States. Yet, Canada’s prison population dropped during this time, and its per capita incarceration rate is about one-seventh that of the United States. Moreover, while U.S. incarceration rates have steadily risen for four decades, our crime rate has fluctuated — rising through the 1970s, falling and then rising in the 1980s, and falling since 1993.
Harvard University sociologist Bruce Western believes that increased incarceration accounts for only about 10 percent of the drop in crime rates; William Spelman, a professor of public affairs at the University of Texas, puts the figure at about 25 percent. Even if the higher figure is accurate, three-quarters of the crime decline had nothing to do with imprisonment. Other causes include changes in drug markets, policing strategies and community initiatives to reshape behavior.
2. The prison population is rising because more people are being sentenced to prison. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the number of people sent to prison grew mainly because of the war on drugs. The number of drug offenders sentenced to state prisons increased by more than 300 percent from 1985 to 1995.
Since then, however, longer prison terms more than new prison sentences have fueled the prison population expansion. These are a result of mandatory sentencing measures such as “three strikes” laws and limits on parole release. Today, 140,000 prisoners, or one of 11 inmates, are incarcerated for life, many with no chance of parole.
Longer stays in prison offer diminishing returns for public safety. As prisoners age, the likelihood that they will commit crimes drops, but the cost of their imprisonment rises, primarily because of increased medical care. Harsher sentences also offer little deterrence: When people consider committing crimes, they may think about whether they will be caught, but probably not about how harshly they will be punished. In 1999, the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University reviewed studies of deterrence and sentencing and found no basis “for inferring that increasing the severity of sentences generally is capable of enhancing deterrent effects.”
3. Helping prisoners rejoin society will substantially reduce the prison population. Ninety-five percent of American prisoners will return home someday. While reentry programs can aid reintegration into the community, they do little to reduce our reliance on incarceration. Prison appears to make inmates as likely to commit crime as not; about half of released inmates return to prison within three years. Congress appropriated only $83 million for reentry in fiscal year 2011, or less than $120 per released prisoner. Even with additional state funds, one is not likely to overcome a lifetime of low educational attainment, substance abuse and/or mental health disabilities with this meager commitment.
Investing in prevention and treatment instead of imprisonment is more likely to shrink the prison population. The Washington State Institute for Public Policy, for example, found that home-based supervision of juvenile offenders produced $28 in taxpayer benefits for every dollar invested.
4. There’s a link between race and crime. Yes, African Americans and Latinos disproportionately commit certain crimes. But in a 1996 study of crime rates in Columbus, Ohio, criminologists from Ohio State University concluded that socioeconomic disadvantages “explain the overwhelming portion of the difference in crime.”
Nowhere are racial disparities in criminal justice more evident than in drug law enforcement. In 2003, black men were nearly 12 times more likely to be sent to prison for a drug offense than white men. Yet, national household surveys show that whites and African Americans use and sell drugs at roughly the same rates. African Americans, who are 12 percent of the population and about 14 percent of drug users, make up 34 percent of those arrested for drug offenses and 45 percent of those serving time for such offenses in state prisons. Why?
In large measure, because police find drugs where they look for them. Inner-city, open-air drug markets are easier to bust than those that operate out of suburban basements, and numerous studies show that minorities are stopped by police more often than whites. For example, a Center for Constitutional Rights study found that 87 percent of the 575,000 people stopped by the police in New York City in 2009 were African American or Latino.
5. Racial disparities in incarceration reflect police and judges’ racial prejudice.
Shocking instances of racism still come to light in the justice system. But racist cops and courts are not the primary reason for racial disparities in incarceration.
Consider increased penalties for drug offenses in school zones. Though not racially motivated, these laws disproportionately affect minorities, who more often live in densely populated urban areas with many nearby schools. In New Jersey, for example, 96 percent of people incarcerated under such laws in 2005 were African American or Latino. Judges didn’t necessarily want to sentence these defendants to more prison time than those convicted outside school zones, but under the law, they had to.
Where we spend money also contributes to the problem. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 appropriated $9.7 billion for prisons and $13.6 billion for law enforcement, but only $6.1 billion for crime prevention. Politicians eager to be seen as tough on crime too often find ways to fund new prison cells, even though they know that minorities will predominantly fill them. This isn’t the fault of racist individuals. It’s the fault of a system that fails to take the promise of equality seriously.
The United States imprisons a larger proportion of its population than Russia or Belarus. Our incarceration rate is eight times that of France. These tragic statistics force us to ask: Would the American public accept these rates if incarceration were distributed more equally across race and class?
mauer@sentencingproject.org
cole@law.georgetown.edu
Marc Mauer is executive director of the Sentencing Project. David Cole is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center.
Want to challenge everything you know? Visit our “Five myths” archive.
Read more from Outlook, friend us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter.Most of the management team at the Illinois State Museum has retired or taken other jobs amid the museum's closure due to a lack of a state budget.
Gov. Bruce Rauner's administration closed the museum to the public on Oct. 1 and has laid off about a dozen members of the museum's management team, the (Springfield) State Journal-Register (http://bit.ly/1QWJhKo) reported.
Museum board Chairman Guerry Suggs said only three or four members of the management team would be available to return should the museum reopen. He said the others have retired or gotten new jobs.
Union employees working for the museum have spent their time doing curation work and other duties since the museum was closed. A lawsuit filed by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees temporarily halted layoffs of about 150 people at the museum and other state agencies.
"Curation work needs to be done every day, and without the public being there, it has allowed more time for some of these things," Suggs said.
A bill designed to keep the museum open has been passed by the state House and Senate, and Suggs said the bill was delivered to Rauner on Dec. 9. But Suggs said it's unlikely the museum would reopen without a new budget.
A message seeking comment was sent to Rauner's office.
Associated PressMac DeMarco on his new record, Coachella album leaks, and Kirin J Callinan in cowboy boots
Mac DeMarco has just turned 27, a famously dangerous age for musicians, not long after moving to L.A. from New York. His new album, This Old Dog, is out May 5th via Captured Tracks & Remote Control Records. It’s his third full length release and his first since 2014’s Salad Days. It follows 2015’s mini-LP, Another One. Four singles have already been released, showing off hints of his quirky new direction, and a touch of the vulnerable, deeply personal slant this record bears.
On the phone from his Silver Lake home, Mac’s quiet and relaxed. Fresh from playing Coachella, he’s putting his feet up and counting the days until his new record is released and he heads off to tour the world again. Known for his sketchy shenanigans and seemingly bottomless levels of oddball energy, it’s refreshing to catch him taking it easy. Despite his huge success in the last few years, he remains down-to-earth and charming as he discusses the finer points of This Old Dog, his move to L.A., and the latest stuff bouncing around the internet. Although he’s never seemed to be one for secrecy, he’s relatively quiet on the subject of his new record’s family focus. Perhaps it’s just modesty, but he downplays the vulnerability and raw introspection of his new music as the simple by-product of what happened to be running through his head since writing his last record.
This Old Dog is a solid progression from Salad Days and Another One. There are plenty of new ideas to appease those getting a little tired of Mac‘s older sound, as well as a slew of tunes perfect for fans of Classic Mac. The record is built on a handful of demos he recorded in New York and L.A. using what was laying around – including an acoustic guitar, synths and a drum machine. Although they’re instruments that aren’t traditionally part of his sound, much of it ended up remaining on the album, which overall is quite stripped back in both a conceptual and sonic sense. Wandering between dreamy and cheesy, thoughtful and cheeky, at the end, this one will make you cry.
Catch our chat with Mac below, and keep your eyes peeled for a cheeky nod to his touring plans at the end of 2017.
How are you, man? What are you up to, what have you been doing today?
Just interviews all day, but you know, just hanging out at my house.
I guess we’ll start with Coachella, how was [it] this year compared to 2015?
It actually felt really similar in a couple of ways, like we played the same stage, a little bit later than we did last time, but yeah, it was kinda crazy. It was a lot of fun, we saw a lot of friends, but it definitely has a specific vibe, ya know. It’s different than other festivals, it’s wacky. But I had a good time.
Is it the biggest festival in the world now?
I don’t think so, ‘cause they do somewhere between… I think it’s eighty to a hundred grand attendees? I think Glastonbury is bigger for sure. There’s gotta be some jungle fuckers in Europe that are still bigger, but I don’t know.
Can I get a peak and a pit? Your best moment, your worst moment for the festival?
Best moment… We hung out with Michael McDonald for a long time on Friday evening, well on Saturday evening too. That was great, really sweet guy. We got to see him, he played a couple of songs with Thundercat. Thundercat’s show was amazing. And uhh… worst would probably be that evening, throwing up out of the van on the ride home, that wasn’t the greatest thing ever.
You mentioned you played with a few friends, did you see any Aussie bands? I know King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard were on the same stage as you.
Yeah, we hung out with them. They played right before us, so it was pretty sick to chill with all the dudes.
Did you catch them on Conan last night?
I haven’t seen the video yet, I tried to find it yesterday but I don’t know if it was up yet. I’m gonna go check it out at some point, yeah.
I watched it right before I called, definitely check it out!
Will do!
So you mentioned during your set that the album had been leaked, you shouted out a bunch of torrent sites, what’s the story with that?
[Laughs] umm, it was hot on the stage, we’d had a couple drinks… Kinda trying to deter that now, everyone who works with me is just a little bit aggravated this morning, so… What can ya do?!
Are you bummed that it leaked?
No I’m not bummed, my albums always leak, and this time it was a lot closer to the release than usual, so… It comes out in like fifteen days or something, so I don’t know, I’m happy that people get to hear it, but I understand why it’s a complete logistical nightmare for everyone that’s put a lot of time into working on it for me.
Do you care much if kids go out and get it for free, be all sneaky on the internet?
I don’t really even understand how it works, but I think… Nah, I mean, if people want to listen to it, even by the time it releases there’s just going to be a full stream of it on YouTube anyway. So as long as people are listening, it’s cool enough for me!
Do you care much about the whole illegal downloads vs streaming vs physical sales thing? Like some artists will drop an album exclusively on one streaming service, which is kind of annoying for fans who want to listen. Like Kanye West, at least to begin with, he put his album out only on Tidal and a lot of people were pissed off. How do you feel about that kind of thing?
He probably owns some part of that company, so I’m sure it makes sense for his bank account or whatever. I don’t know, the easier it is for people to listen to something the better, I figure. I don’t really understand how my music even gets on streaming services or which ones it’s on. I don’t have a subscription to any of them. It sounds kind of like, what was that other trick they did? Every Samsung Galaxy came with like Jay Z’s new album or something like that? It’s weird with the internet now, to get your records to sell, but I don’t know, I understand people that put time and money into it, and want to make money off of it, but I’m living a fairly comfortable life and it’s still shocking that people listen to my stuff in the first place, so it’s just really cool that they do that. I don’t know. I don’t really worry about it.
Well let’s talk the new record, This Old Dog. I’m a massive fan, I loved it, and I can really hear a new direction, not just with the instrumentation and stuff like that, but lyrically and conceptually as well, can you tell me about that?
Yeah I don’t know! I guess it’s like, a little more synthesiser, a little more drum machine, a lot of acoustic guitar. I just kinda let it flow out whichever way it was gonna come out and to tell you the truth, I didn’t think about it that much. There were points on tour where I’d be back and I’d be like, “Ok, what am I gonna do?” and then when I actually went to sitting down and doing some stuff, I just let it happen. And then I’m happy with it, so there it is!
I was going to ask if you were trying to push your comfort zone by moving to instruments you hadn’t really used before or you didn’t know super well, were you trying to shake it up at all? Or trying to break out of a mould?
In a way, I think it’s just a product of, you know… The last bunch of records have been mainly electric guitar, and that’s what I play on stage, I’m pretty comfortable on one when I’m playing my own songs at least. But I don’t know, keeping it fresh for me. I wanted to do something that excited me and that I felt happy with, so… The acoustic guitar was around, I was strumming away on it, I guess I wrote the songs a little bit differently. It was more like the song was there and I put a couple things on top of it. But I don’t know, I just kinda went for it, you know.
Well I think it sounds great! When you play them on stage – you must have debuted some of it at Coachella – did you play it all on electric guitar?
We only really did one song that had an acoustic, so instead of plugging in the acoustic I just used the electric, but we played a couple of songs, and we already had that set up, so that’s ok. It’s kinda cool right now, we have another guy playing in the band and we’ve set it up so we can do some of the songs in different ways. I can play acoustic guitar if I want, or electric, or we can do this or do that. It’s nice, we can have a piano around, that’s always a treat. Things like that. A couple different arrangements for a couple different songs, it’s cool.
So you can kind of just play however you feel on the day?
Yeah, exactly!
I think when I first listened to the album it felt really sort of raw to me, vulnerable. Not just in comparison to your older records, but across this record itself from beginning to end there were sort of layers being stripped away. Is that an intentional thing? Is the record intended to be a whole listening experience start to finish?
Yeah, I think I try to make all my records kind of flow in some way or another, but with this one… I don’t know. I bought some new stuff to record with and I had more options, and I went, “Ok, I can put this here and I could put that there!” and then I’d listen back and be like, “Fuck this shit!” So I just wanted it to… you know, the songs were the songs, and then I just let them do their thing without too much more shit piled on top. Just simple and easy, yeah.
A lot of them are pretty short as well, a lot of the tracks come in under three minutes, except for ‘Moonlight On The River’ which is a bit longer. Is there a reason behind that, or it just came out that way? Or were you trying to be concise?
I think my songs have always been pretty short. I have a kind of affinity for bands that do really short stuff, like Guided by Voices, stuff like that. You know, like thirty songs on an album and they’re all like fifty seconds long. But I don’t know, they just kind of came out that way and it’s almost the same if you look at it as… There’s a whole bunch of stuff in the production, like a guitar solo or something. I look at it the same way with the song structure, where I’ll be writing something, and I’ll have it flowing, and I’ll be like “Ok, should I put a bridge in?” and then I’ll try, and then be like “Fuck this bridge!” A lot of the songs don’t even have choruses really, they don’t even have bridges… The purest form, maybe. I don’t know.
No messing around, straight to the point.
Yeah.
I really liked that track, ‘Moonlight On The River’, ’cause it was kind of in keeping with your older sound. What’s the story behind that one?
I wrote it in L.A. If it didn’t have that bit at the end it’d be a pretty short song as well, so… I didn’t really know how to end it, so I kinda just went right ahead and turned all the delay pedals up and churned out an eclectic tune I guess and went to town, you know.
Did anyone help you make the record? Do you have any sort of features on there? It got reported last year that you were working with Andrew VanWyngarden from MGMT, or you were at least in the studio with him, did that turn into anything?
Oh I was just at his house! But no, I did everything on the record myself. The only outside person was my friend Shags, Shags Chamberlain, he came over. I had mixed it, and then we just kind of made sure that nothing was exploding or like, really heinous sounding. Just made sure it was translatable, and then he came and got a master or two. So it’s the same as just doing it in my bedroom all by myself again, pretty much.
It’s pretty clear that there’s a family focus in the record, you mention your dad a lot, and your sister too – maybe I’m getting a bit literal there ‘cause the song’s called ‘Sister’, but I know you’re very close with your mum as well, she came on tour with you to Australia, you did the Laneway festival. You’ve sung about family before, you’ve got a half-brother and a half-sister, right?
I have a full brother and a half-sister, yeah.
You’ve sung about them before, but it was only sort of little references, like in ‘Cooking Up Something Good’ you said “brother’s in the ballet” and I’ve heard that that’s actually true, your brother does do ballet.
Yep!
This time around it felt very real, the core subject matter was your family, why is that?
I don’t know, I think for me, I don’t get a lot of time to think about things, and some of the relationships in my family are a little bit more oddball than a normal dynamic. But you know, with this record I had some time, it was over a longer period, we weren’t touring as much and I moved, I had time to sit down with my thoughts a little bit more, so… A lot of the songs that I wrote in New York too, I wasn’t really thinking like, “I’m going to put this on a record,” I was just kind of, you know, writing songs almost like, therapeutically, or whatever. So yeah I was just thinking about it, and now everybody can listen to it too, if they want to.
You just mentioned that you moved, you moved to L.A. from New York, you relocated again. I feel like the relocating comes with little shifts in your sound, like there was Makeout Videotape back in Vancouver and Montreal and then you started playing under your own name, you went to New York, you made a few records, now you’re in L.A. and you’ve got a pretty fresh new sound. Is there something to that? Does the relocating affect the music?
I don’t really know, I mean, half this record was done in New York, so I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe. I think the next one will be my like, Los Angeles, you know, yacht-rock, mountain of cocaine, whatever the L.A. sound is, you know [laughs]. But I don’t know, I took one bedroom in New York, moved it out here… It felt the same. Similar. But definitely when I looked out the window, it would look a little different, so, I don’t know if it’s really set in on me yet but I’m sure it will.
How have you been finding living in L.A. versus New York?
It’s great. I mean, I love New York, I love going there still. I’ve got a lot of friends there, a lot of my family’s from there too so it’s kind of different in that way for me. But yeah, it’s fun ‘cause I didn’t live in New York City really, I lived out on the outskirts of town, so living here, the main difference is I’m more central. I see people, people come over to my house, so socially it’s different for me, which I haven’t had for quite a few years, so it’s a little refreshing. It’s also a little terrifying sometimes, but you know, it’s cool. I’m really enjoying it.
Is it good to get away from the address that you gave out on the end of your last record?
Ahh, no I liked that! It’s cool ‘cause my roommates still live there, but no, people keep asking like, “Well you had to move didn’t ya?” but it’s not, I could’ve stayed there, it doesn’t matter. I just needed to freshen up everything, everything else.
How have you been killing time in L.A.? Are you still obsessed with pinball?
I don’t really go out and play pinball that much anymore, to tell you the honest truth. I think that was kind of a product of when I first moved to New York and I didn’t really know anybody or know the city at all, and I just was like, you know, people are busy, they have school or work, so I’d be like, “Well I guess I’m gonna go play pinball by myself all day.” Yeah pinball’s great, but here, I don’t know, I don’t really leave the house very often. In New York I had a pinball in my house so it was kind of like, you know, that worked, but here I go out to eat, but other than that I just like to make music and hang out.
Did you see the new teaser trailer for the new Star Wars movie?
I diiiid, I did.
What are your thoughts?
Looking good! You know, it’s looking good. It’s hard to judge off the teaser, but it’s looking good. Looks like we’re gonna get some Luke, you know, looks like things might be taking a different turn to what people are expecting, I don’t know. Perhaps Rey is a Kenobi after all, we’ll find out.
Could do with some more Gungans in there?
I could DEFINITELY use a couple fuckin’ Gungans in there but I know it’s not on the cards. I wish.
Have you ever been on that Facebook group (your mum is in it, this is why I ask) ‘Mac DeMarco Shitposting’, actually I think it’s called ‘Cigposting’ now, but originally ‘Shitposting’. You ever been on that?
No I haven’t had a Facebook in like three years now, maybe two. I don’t know, what is it?
Memes basically, about you. It’s hilarious, I wondered if you’d ever self-indulged.
I don’t know, yeah. I like Instagram but other than that I don’t really do the social media thing that much. But it’s fine if my mum’s in there!
Going back to the record, you said that it’s like your acoustic album, but it’s not really acoustic, but it feels like that. But you called it an Italian rock record, because you’re Italian. What exactly is Italian rock? What are your favourite Italian rock records?
See I don’t even really know, that’s the funniest part to me. And I’m only 25% Italian so it’s barely Italian, and if anything I’m like Canadian-Italian or American-Italian. There’s a certain degree of separation. For me, I mean, I like Italo disco, like I really pumped that guy Ryan Paris’ track a couple of years ago, I love that kind of stuff. That stuff I love. Italian rock I don’t really know. There’s certainly some bands that we played with in Italy when we toured there, and they’re all great, but I don’t know. This Old Dog, I guess that’s Italian rock [laughs].
Do you have any Australian tour dates lined up soon? I know you’re sort of bouncing back and forward between the States, Canada, the UK, Europe, all over for the rest of this year. Are you coming back to Australia any time soon?
We will be there, I think in your summer, so at the end of the year. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say for what yet, but something kind of familiar to us and it should be just a whole bunch of fun!
What are your plans for the rest of today?
Kirin [J.] Callinan is gonna come over, we’re gonna take some photos of him. He’s gotten really into buying cowboy stuff… You know Kirin right, he’s Australian?
Yeah! I was actually going to ask you about his mockumentary thing, you were in that mockumentary he did.
Yeah! I was reeeeaaal, real drunk when they interviewed me for that, but it was fun. His new album’s great, sounding amazing. What I was going to say was in the last week or so, he went to go see Dwight Yoakam, and he’s obsessed with cowboys now. He went to this like, cowboy store, he bought all of these cowboy outfits, and cowboy clothing is like, utilitarian, it’s expensive clothing, you know. So he spent like $800 buying cowboy boots yesterday. So we’re gonna take some photos together, but he’s going to be in full cowboy style.
Gittin readdy t’ boogie A post shared by Shags Chamberlain (@5hags) on Apr 18, 2017 at 9:21pm PDT
That’s unreal, classic Kirin!
Ohhh yeah!
Well that’s all the time we have, thanks for chatting with me and congrats on the record!
Thanks dude, see you in Australia. God bless!
This Old Dog is out May 5th via Captured Tracks.
Words by Ted Dwyer
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INTERVIEW: MAC DEMARCOExtroverts have easier lives, it would seem, than those of us who place more value on peace and quiet. Popular culture appears to be in love with noise and speed, with high-energy, fast-paced TV shows, parties and even workplaces. But don’t despair if that’s just not for you. With some planning, it’s possible for introverts to succeed and find contentment in an extrovert’s world.
The extroversion-introversion axis is a way of thinking about differences in personality. Traditionally, a contrast is made between the assertive, self-expressive, and generally dominant personality, and the withdrawing, secretive, and more yielding personality.
An extrovert “is one whose mental images, thoughts, and problems find ready expression in overt behavior,” according to the psychologists Allport and Allport in 1921, whereas an introvert “dwells largely in a realm of imagination.” Introverts, given sufficient ability, may become visionary poets or artists, they suggest.
The distinction was originally made by Freud and has since been widely used as a concept to help us understand one another. Tests to measure introversion and extroversion have been devised, but the rich internal life which defines an introvert is difficult to detect and measure.
Are You An Introvert?
As a rough guide, you are an introvert if:
You prefer spending time alone or with one or two close friends, especially when tired.
You concentrate best when alone, and often give the impression of being quiet, calm and even mysterious.
You feel that you gain energy and strength from being alone.
Make It Work for You
There are tools you can use to overcome the barriers that introversion can present. How about learning a trick or two from extroverts? Developing slightly more outgoing traits can help you cope “amid the noise and haste” and stand your ground in busy crowds of people. Here are some ways to boost your confidence:
Notice and copy social skills of outgoing people you admire. In time it will come naturally.
Speak out. The more you make your voice heard, the more positive feedback you’ll receive, and the easier it will become.
At parties, try playing the role of the host. Introduce people to each other. Let them begin a conversation that isn’t about you, so you can relax. Ask open-ended rather than closed-ended, yes or no questions.
Develop your networking skills. Use your memory for details to put people at ease and develop friendships.
Don’t put yourself down or make excuses for your shyness. Others usually can relate to feelings of awkwardness, so it’s OK to talk about it.
Above all, don’t let yourself retreat from the world and avoid situations you think you might enjoy. Stay positive and remember you can always leave if it’s becoming a trial.
The Benefits of Being an IntrovertEducation
Officials of Government UP School Pilicode got two of the walls of the school painted.
When the over 400 students of the Government UP School in Kasargod's Pilicode returned to school after their summer vacations on Thursday, they were in for an awesome surprise. Gone were the staid white-washed walls of their school building.
Instead, the walls bore bright images of a train with blue coaches, the classroom doors morphing into the doors of the coaches. Colourful and welcoming, the walls invited the students to take a magical journey into the world of learning.
While the train dominated the front façade of the building, the back faced announced the possibility of flights of fancy, with a giant airplane, bearing the legend Pilicode Airlines, painted on it.
As part of the Kerala state government's efforts to remodel public education in the state, the Government UP School turned to paint and colour to make the schoolhouse more inviting for its students.
Image Courtesy: Riya G/ Twitter
Speaking to TNM, Santhosh Kumar, a Malayalam teacher at the school says that the initiative was a conscious effort by the school authorities to project |
to feel they’ll be believed, no matter what they claim, starting with kind of the insidious notion that any African-American male from 18 to 53, which is Frank’s age, with dreadlocks and a white T-shirt look the same,” Bennett said.
The attorney representing the police union, Chris Wachtler, has said “there was no intent to injure someone” and that Baker would not have been injured had he complied with officers’ orders.
Wachtler declined to comment Monday on Palkowitsch’s status with the police department.
Palkowitsch, who was a St. Paul officer for three years, wrote in his report that he kicked Baker because he “fully believed that Baker was armed with a firearm and I wanted this progressively evolving use of force encounter on a gun call to end as fast as possible for the safety at the scene.”
He said after the first two kicks, he loudly ordered Baker to stay on the ground and put his hands out, but the man turned over and brought his hands toward his waistband area.
“I did not know if Baker was attempting to retrieve a weapon or was just continuing to move around and not comply with commands so I delivered one more kick,” Palkowitsch wrote. Officers were then able to get him handcuffed.
But Bennett said the police reports didn’t “mention that Baker’s being dragged in circles by … the K-9. The idea that someone who’s being attacked by that very large German shepherd is able to hear, respond and obey demands is kind of crazy to me. … I don’t know if compliance was even possible with a dog on your leg like that.”
The police department on Thursday suspended the K-9 handler involved, officer Brian Ficcadenti, for a month.
Baker, who works as a promoter of music and entertainment, was returning from work and sitting his vehicle when Ficcadenti approached him, Bennett said. He had not seen the squad video of the incident before Friday and was visibly upset when he watched it, his attorney said.
The police department released information about the case Friday, the day after the internal investigation into Ficcadenti had been completed. Axtell said he wanted it released in an effort to be transparent.
Baker had not gone public with the case when it happened because he’s a private man, he said, and because “he didn’t want protests, he didn’t want the potential of any violence occurring because of him,” Bennett said, adding that Baker been overwhelmed by the attention the incident has received in the last few days.
The case occurred on East Seventh Street near Hazel Street, on Axtell’s second day as police chief. Axtell apologized to Baker when he was in the hospital and when he saw him again Friday.
Bennett hasn’t filed a lawsuit and said he would see if he could reach a settlement with the city for Baker instead. He and the city attorney’s office have not had substantive discussions about it yet, Bennett added.
St. Paul City Attorney Samuel Clark said his office, generally speaking, “welcomes the chance to talk to attorneys before they file lawsuits against the city. If that’s Mr. Bennett’s intention, we look forward to talking to him.”A trader works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, October 21, 2008. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Private-sector economists believe the U.S. economy fell into recession last spring and now expect a sharp contraction in the fourth quarter of this year after slashing their forecasts for gross domestic product, a Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia survey said on Monday.
The bank’s quarterly Survey of Professional Forecasters also predicted non-farm payrolls would shrink by an average 222,400 per month during the last quarter of the year, nearly five times the pace of monthly job losses forecast when the previous survey was taken in August. The previous estimate was for 45,400 jobs lost per month in the quarter.
The forecasters survey also said the U.S. economy entered recession April and that the downturn would last for 14 months.Mortician Explores Cultures' Many Paths For 'Sacred Transition' Of Death
Enlarge this image toggle caption Mara Zehler Mara Zehler
When Sandra Daugherty's father died unexpectedly at 73, there was no plan. The only thing the family knew was what Grady Ross Daugherty didn't want.
"He was really freaked out about cement liners," said Sandra. "Like this Tupperware container that you get placed in, in the ground. He hated the idea of that. But other than that no wishes. He would say just surprise me. With a twinkle in his eye."
She decided not to choose a standard funeral.
"Every funeral I've ever gone to was awful, like the funeral parlor smell, and the way the casket looks and the fake flowers. It just always felt tacky and kind of empty."
So the family opted to go green. They went to a small funeral home in East Hollywood called Undertaking LA that offers alternatives. For one, it doesn't recommend embalming. And it offers caskets that are more like baskets, made of wicker or sea grass, and designed to decompose quickly, along with the body. Sandra Daugherty says it was exactly what she wanted. "My dad, it's been two months and three days since he was buried. And I know he is already back to the universe."
As it happens, the owner of Undertaking LA is passionate about delivering loved ones to the great beyond in just the right way. Caitlin Doughty is a mortician and the author of the book From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death. It's something of a travelogue of death rituals. And one thing she found in compiling the stories in the book was that rituals that are deeply meaningful in one culture are often viewed with a mix of horror and fascination by another.
She opens her book with an example that dates back to Canada in the 1600s. A French priest recorded what he observed among the Wendat People.
"They would wrap the dead in beaver robes on a scaffold and after a certain amount of time they would take them down and remove the flesh from the bones to put them in a large communal burial pit. One things that was interesting — he came to convert the indigenous people, but even he could see how much love and tenderness was put toward this process. As they were wrapping the bones to put them in the communal burial pit, he said, 'Isn't this an example to inspire Christians?' And then he went on to say, of course they should still be Christians, it's barbaric and savage what they do."
And in Japan, Doughty learned of a cremation ritual called kotsuage.
"Here in America when we pull out the bones after a cremation we grind them down in a machine called the cremulator to the ashes we know in a scattering or in an urn," Doughty said. "But in Japan, they pull out the full skeletonized body from the cremation machine and the family stands around it with chopsticks. Starting at the feet they pull the bones individually and place them in the urn."
From Here to Eternity Traveling the World to Find the Good Death by Caitlin Doughty Hardcover, 248 pages | purchase close overlay Buy Featured Book Your purchase helps support NPR programming. How?
It's a delicate ritual, and intimate.
And hard to imagine here in the United States where, just a generation ago, cremation was practically forbidden. It has long been against Jewish law. And it wasn't until 1963 that the Vatican allowed Catholics to be cremated, with restrictions.
"People were horrified by cremation," Doughty explained. "They thought it was burning your friend. And you can have burning as this idea of just, you know, hell. And there's holocaust imagery, and there was just such a resistance to adopting cremation."
That has changed dramatically. In 1980, only 6 percent of Americans were cremated. Now, just a generation later, 50 percent of Americans are choosing cremation. But unlike the intimacy of the experience in Japan, cremation in the U.S. is still quite industrial.
That's one reason why, when we visited Undertaking LA, we were the rare guests that Caitlin Doughty ushered into the brick, factory-like space that contains two cremation machines running at full blast. There, we met Mike Munoz, the crematory operator, who handles first the bodies, and then the ashes. At 22 years old, he is committed to spending his life caring for the dead. He offered to open the door to show us one cremation that was nearly complete. It was a surprisingly peaceful sight: just a hint of bones, white as lace, lit by slowly undulating flames. "It's beautiful," said Doughty. "You don't want to be the one who says a cremating body is beautiful, but cultures all around the world have open air pyres because it's a sacred transition for many people."
Caitlin Doughty, is just 32, but is accustomed to thinking ahead. She wants a green burial. Dust to dust. Unless there's a way to be laid out above ground.
"The model for this is the Tibetan sky burial, where when someone dies they are laid out to be eaten by vultures. Hence the name "sky burial." The Buddhist idea is that your body isn't worth anything to you anymore, so why are you trying to hold on to it? Why don't you give it back to other animals to take up into the sky? And I think that's gorgeous."
Caitlin Doughty's new book is From Here To Eternity: Traveling The World To Find The Good Death.
Anny Celsi contributed to this story.Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull says Prime Minister Tony Abbott has the complete support of the Liberal Party and insists his meeting with Clive Palmer last week was simply an "accidental dinner".
And a furious Mr Turnbull has taken the government's supporters in the media to task for maliciously suggesting he could have designs on the party leadership.
Communications MInister Malcolm Turnbull, pictured with Immigration Minister Scott Morrison, in question time on Wednesday. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
Mr Turnbull said he supported all of the budget, including the $7 co-payment for GP visits and higher education changes and revealed he had had dinner with Mr Abbott in Canberra on Sunday night following the furore.
Earlier this week, Mr Turnbull labelled conservative columnist Andrew Bolt "unhinged" and "demented" and rejected the columnist's suggestions he was agitating to replace the Prime Minister."Tony and I are very close, we talk a lot, we talk a lot on a range of issues," he told radio station 2GB.The already baking hot morningsun is leaking through the buildings as I exit Evol—Cape Town’s premier, dingy art school party—and climb into a cab with Amy Ayanda and some Irish tourist. We’re heading to a shitty sweaty house club that stays open till half past illegal and Ayanda is keen to stay up as late as possible because, as she tells me—while fighting off the advances of the Irish dude—she’s shooting a music video in the afternoon and she wants to looks as “sad and rough as possible.”
You can see the results above in the video for “La Lorna,” a simple and apt rendition of the song produced by Thor Rixon, with keys by Louis Pienaar and Ayanda on vocals. Plaintive, resolute, "La Lorna" builds layers of vocals around a tale of breakup, longing, and resistance. It's a study in unwrapping emotional rawness. Ayanda is not a jobbing musician but rather, a recently graduated art student with a firm interest in music, who sometimes sings. She didn’t plan to make the song but it came about quite organically. Currently she has no plans to release more music, and is focussing on travelling and her art works.
The catalyst for the track was Rixon a skinny, dreadlocked producer and all around weirdo. His two EPs, Shared Folder and Tea Time Favorites, are remarkable collaborative works possessed of an odd naiveté that sums up the headspace of naas—a collective which he co-founded. Currently naas publishes Platform which was founded last year and has since grown to be a hub that shines a light on South Africa’s youth culture and music, but most recently naas has launched a music agency too.
South African music is currently going through a particularly fertile period, aided, obviously by the internet, but mostly because a younger set of South African musicians are no longer concerned what international audiences think. Anxiety over worldwide recognition has long plagued even the country's most assured artists, but with the umswenko moves (a term similar to swag, but more slick, and well, South African) of Boyzn Bucks, RikyRick, Cassper Nyovest, Okmalumkoolkat, these Joburg based music makers play with beats and language—mixing English, Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, and various South African slang terms—in ways that are hard to contextualize to the casual outside observer. With thisa new robust confidence seems to have also overtaken South African music, and naas is riding with this wave, inspiring collaborations with artists both on and off label.
As fellow co-founder Ian McNair says, “The world doesn't want to see Southern Africans spewing their own culture back at them, at least not without a sincerely local edge to it. But I also think that the local audience is less bashful and embarrassed of seeing itself reflected in art.”
Speaking of this new paradigm of music making Ayanda notes, “I think the energy has definitely shifted. There is a group of individuals in our pop culture that are not afraid to be different and completely submerge themselves in creating. Sometimes I’ll be chilling and will get a call to come hang out and we’ll just end up making music and playing around with whatever comes off the top of our vibes. The process of just being together, in a space and playing around with sounds and ideas is definitely the core of where it’s coming from.”
Run by Rixon, McNair, and Matt Rightford, naas came about, according to Rightford, “because we were in a kak [very] weird band and having the best time making videos and various promo content. We realized that we had a knack for it and figured it would be pretty rad to make a living out of doing what we were good at and enjoyed.”
Soon enough they started hosting events, putting out compilations (see the end of this piece for links to said comps), producing videos, publishing Platform, and eventually settling into the idea of running a label. Naas operates in a very specific headspace summed up by one of the artists they represent, Maramza: “They’re really sweet, they’re weird guys, with weird haircuts, and they're all really tall.”
On a slightly more serious note, Smiso Zwane, a.k.a. Okmalumkoolkat adds, “They're actually some of the easiest energies to work with, [they have a] laid-back attitude, but they’re on time with precision.” The name naas is a play on the South African pronunciation of "nice," but this way of saying nice is often ironic and jokey, gently mocking of the way South African’s speak.
This sweetness comes through when I ask McNair what kind of musicians they're keen to work with. “Most importantly they need to be serious about their art. It's got to be what they live for, even if it's not what they live off. Musically we tend to work with people who make (mostly) electronic or electronic hybrid music that's explorative and interesting. The music MUST be authentic—it must come from a place of absolute sincerity.”
Rixon takes up the thread: “We always emphasize friendliness and kindness with all of our dealings as we don't see the point in being horrible people doing awesome stuff—that usually ruins a product if you find out that the person who created it is a terrible person. Always be friendly, always be professional.”
Along with Amy Ayanda and Thor Rixon’s video, below are two of naas’ latest releases, which sum up their ethos perfectly.
CARD ON SPOKES - “ON THE LOW” FT. OKMALUMKOOKAT & NONKU PHIRI
"In The Low" is bright and breezy meander through the beginnings of a relationship—two people checking each other from opposite sides of the room—told via the smooth, deep house vocals of Nonku Phiri and the pop culture loaded flow of Okamalumkoolkat, whose references are both hyper local and ardently international. Meanwhile the swirling electronica comes courtesy of Card on Spokes.
Ostensibly, Card On Spokes is the electronic project of jazz musician Shane Cooper, who's played Carnegie Hall as part of South African jazz rebels Kesivan and The Lights, and whose debut album, Oscillations, won a 2014 SAMA (South African Music Award) for Best Jazz Album. The song itself came about through a series of experiments at the 2013 Red Bull ZA Bass Camp.
“Okamalumkoolkat had written his verses on top of an old unreleased track of mine," says Cooper, elaborating on the song's genesis. "That night while partying downstairs at a club, I found Nonku and we went to the studio upstairs and she came up with the chorus. Months later I decided the instrumental wasn't sexy enough for the vocals so I wrote a new track to better fit their lyrics and mood.”
Okamalumkoolkat continues: “I get a mail a month later, and the beat wasn't [what] I had recorded on but it made me sound zuper suave so it's a winner. I had written the first four bars: ''When I found her, her ex Chris Browned her, heavy in the dwelms, almost Bobby Browned her,' a couple of years back. Classic story of transitioning from the friend-zone to the love-mat."
MARAMZA – “CUT THE CAKE” FT. MOONCHILD
Bass heavy and playful, a mix of kwaito vocals and jacking house, "Cut The Cake" is smooth embodiment of what’s going down on SA dancefloors right now and features the arresting vocals of Moonchild—whose video we premiered to acclaim earlier this year.
"Deep house isn't pop music, it's jazzy and the tracks are really long and it's all about soulfulness and not fucking and taking / selling drugs, which most pop music is about," says Maramza. "Our deep house guys are superstars.”
Talking of the current South African music scene Maramza says, “The new hip-hop revolution is a Wu-Tang Clan kinda thing: a crew of guys making gully, don't-give-a-fuck, fresh to death hip-hop and everybody wants to be a part of it."
What does Maramza predict for the future? Well, being a dystopian son of a bitch he says: “More war, there's always war, maybe another world war. Cape Town will be swallowed by the sea. We will all be Zulu Compuras as Okmalumkoolkat says—laptops coming out of our chests. Women will get stronger, more dominant, men will get weaker, more house-husbands. There will be some great new drugs—drugs to make you forget things permanently, drugs to make you work in your sleep, drugs to make you attractive to certain people. There will be an option to go to sleep until you die, and live in your dreams and nightmares.”
Check out some of naas' compilations from the past 12 months:
Slip-Slop || P.S. Bar || Dassie || Laaitie
Roger Young is a music and culture writer and filmmaker living in Cape Town. Follow him on Twitter.Phoenix, Arizona is one of the extensive drug centers of America, and now it's under jurisdiction of one of Mexico's most dominant and brutal drug syndicates, the Sinaloa Cartel. With a formidable authority south of the border, the cartel uses Phoenix as a starting point for their North American activities.
Lying 300 kilometers north of the Mexican border, Phoenix has become the focal point for the wholesale dissemination and transportation of marijuana, heroin and methamphetamine to the rest of the country. And for the drug dealers and providers who operate on the streets of Phoenix, this means a lot of money.
It's Friday afternoon and, in a low-cost lodge, meth dealer Frankie is preparing for work. For $800 Frankie has 56 grams of meth which he needs to crack into small batches that he can trade on the streets of Phoenix.
To get his goods at bulk cost, Frankie must cooperate with the cartel foot troopers, who deal straight onto the streets. But Frankie is aware that there'll be some severe consequences if he's unable to compensate his Mexican suppliers on schedule.
Selvin was born and grew up in Phoenix, but at a very young age concluded that his faithfulness was towards satisfying his masters in Mexico. As a foot trooper, Selvin acts as an arbitrator for Phoenix street dealers and cartel suppliers. Selvin has ambitions to climb fast in the cartel hierarchy regardless the cost. The existence of Selvin, and others with aspirations like his, means there's a continuous flow of drugs onto the streets of Phoenix.
But for the big fish inside the Sinaloa Cartel, the real money is made by selling large amounts of the product to the rest of America. Juan was one of the first drug bosses to be appointed to Phoenix by the cartel. There are now over 100 bosses exactly like him who have been sent from Mexico to run Phoenix. Available only in United States.A man who claimed the owner of a Dublin pub told him to go home and change out of his pyjamas before locking him in a “full Nelson” in the men’s loo, has lost a €38,000 damages suit for assault.
A man who claimed the owner of a Dublin pub told him to go home and change out of his pyjamas before locking him in a “full Nelson” in the men’s loo, has lost a €38,000 damages suit for assault.
Drinker who said Dublin pub owner insulted his clothes and got him in full nelson loses claim for €38k
Jason O’Neill, of Dunard Road, Blackhorse Avenue, Dublin, was also directed to pay the legal costs of Richmond Properties (Ireland) Limited, which trades as Nancy Hands pub in Parkgate Street.
O’Neill (41) told Judge Jacqueline Linnane in the Circuit Civil Court that on September 11, 2006, pub owner Fran O’Reilly slagged him off about his track suit bottoms and made an absolute show of him in front of his drinking buddies.
He said he had followed O’Reilly into the toilets to protest and was whisked around and locked in a full Nelson hold. He said he had turned red and blue and had been unable to breathe.
O’Neill told barrister Deirdre Byrne, counsel for the publican, that he knew O’Reilly had introduced a new dress code banning track suits.
He denied having taken a swing with his fist at O’Reilly who had earlier referred to his clothing as “pjs” and “jammers.”
O’Neill told Ms Byrne he had gone to the pub at 2 p.m. and had between five and seven large bottles of cider, “maybe more, maybe less.” He had gone to his solicitor within a fortnight but had not gone to see a doctor about a painful neck until 15 months after the incident.
Francis O’Reilly told the court he had spoken discreetly to Mr O’Neill about the new dress code rules. He had been followed into the toilet by O’Neill who grabbed him and swung his closed fist at him. He had put him in a lock to save himself from being head butted.
Judge Linnane said CCTV coverage of the incident was timed at between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. the following morning. She was not satisfied Mr O’Neill had suffered any injuries as a result of what had taken place in the men’s lavatory. He had not gone to his doctor until more than a year later.
Online EditorsThis isn’t about refugees per se, but as you get geared up to go to battle with Congress to push them to get tough on immigration and to reform/trash the US Refugee Admissions Program, this might be a helpful guide to what the other side is going to do!
They know, as you should, that the battle will ultimately be in Congress!
Sent to me by a reader, click here to learn more, and go here to access the document.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery! Right!
If you’ve been a longtime Tea Party activist and weren’t sure you were getting things accomplished, you will be happy to see that the other side thinks you were highly successful!
I admit I didn’t read the whole thing yet, I just thought I should get it out quickly. Let me know if you see anything that we should make particular note of!The Speaker of the Alabama House of Representatives is calling for state legislation that would keep poll watchers sent by the United Nations out of his state on Election Day.
“The United States is the worldwide beacon of free elections and the Republican form of government, so having an international squad from the United Nations playing referee in our elections is insulting and absurd,” Speaker of the House Mike Hubbard said, according to the Yellow Hammer Politics blog.
“We’ve been holding elections in the U.S. for the past 223 years without the United Nations playing a role or enforcing the rules, and we certainly don’t want or need them now,” he said.
Hubbard said that in order to prevent U.N. poll watchers from interfering with Alabama elections, he would support future state legislation requiring poll watchers to have U.S citizenship.
Hubbard’s comments came in response to news reports that a United Nations-affiliated group is planning to send election monitors to America to keep an eye on whether conservative groups try to suppress votes in November. (RELATED: United Nations organization set to monitor US polling places on Election Day)
“If you can’t participate in an election in the United States, and if you can’t cast a vote in the United States, you really have no business serving as a poll watcher in an election being held in the United States,” Hubbard said, according to the blog.
The federal government, he added, already keeps a close eye on Alabama during elections.
“It’s bad enough that Alabama remains trapped under the provisions of the Voting Rights Act, so we certainly don’t need anyone from the United Nations coming into our state and meddling in our elections, as well,” he said.
Follow Alex on TwitterIn Ali Smith’s novel How to be Both, teenage girl George – recently motherless – becomes obsessed with a pornographic clip. She spends almost all her free time watching it, and watching it, and watching it. It features a very young woman, perhaps young enough to be a girl herself, although of course George knows nothing about who she is or how she came to be in this film. Understandably, George’s father is concerned when he finds out what his daughter is doing. He wants to know why, and so she tells him:
“This really happened, George said. To this girl. And anyone can watch it just, like, happening, any time he or she likes. And it happens for the first time, over and over again, every time someone who hasn’t seen it before clicks on it and watches it. So I want to watch it for a completely different reason. Because my completely different watching of it goes some way to acknowledging all of that to this girl. Do you still not understand?”
Most people, of course, do not watch pornography for the same high-minded reasons as George. Most of them watch it to get off, and most of them are men – pornography is produced by and for men, an orgiastic confirmation of the most brutal sexual and racial stereotypes. At this point, it’s habitual for pornography defenders to step in and muddy the waters. Not all porn is like that, you will be told, and anyway how can you define porn, and even if you could, how would you prove that pornography actually caused harm?
One thing at a time. There is actually a perfectly good and workable definition of pornography – it’s from Dworkin and MacKinnon’s Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance. This is it: “Pornography is the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words.” They also specify that in porn, women will be dehumanised as sexual objects, or shown to enjoy pain and humiliation, or to take pleasure in being raped, or shown tied or mutilated or injured, or presented in sexually submissive poses, or reduced to body parts.
The difference between porn and not-porn, which is so often presented as an intractable question of taste beyond which the discussion cannot proceed, is clearly described here as political rather than aesthetic. There will be cases that test the boundaries or demand deeper consideration than others, but for the most part, everything that you think is probably porn would count as porn under the Ordinance. (Which is not to say the Ordinance, were it enforced, would ban it: the purpose of the Ordinance is not censorship, but to allow women harmed through the production or use of pornography to sue the makers for damages.)
I imagine the 19,000 images possessed by Nathan Matthews and Shauna Hoare, the killers of Becky Watts, would pass the Ordinance definition. They preferred images of teenagers, young women in school uniform, threesomes; most of the material was legal, but one of their files was a video of a woman being raped. (“And anyone can watch it just, like, happening,” says George in How to be Both, “and it happens for the first time, over and over again.”) I say “they”, but it is pretty clear whose sexual tastes this collection reflects. The schoolgirl fetish is Matthews’: Hoare was the schoolgirl herself when Matthews first picked her up, a child of 14 or 15 who had been in and out of care.
He was seven years older, and confirmed his control over her in all the usual ways that men do: isolated her from her family, stopped her going to college, attacked and strangled her, told her she was fat, withheld food and cigarettes, and when all that failed to keep her in line, threatened to harm himself. The evidence presented in court showed Hoare was a collaborator in the fantasies of kidnap and rape the two concocted, but she was exactly that: a collaborator, an occupied population choosing between resistance and compliance with the occupier.
It is not a question of whether pornography “caused” Matthews and Hoare to commit their crime. What matters is this: in a world sodden with violence against women, pornography is one more form of it. Matthews and Hoare apparently made no distinction between legal images and the video of the rape. All served the same need to see women (in Hoare’s case, other women besides herself) subordinated and dehumanised. Pornography is the propaganda of gender. Through it, men and women alike learn what women are supposed to be for: something to fuck, something to use, something to hurt if you’d like to, and something to dispose of when you’re finished. Matthews and Hoare dismembered Becky Watts with a circular saw.
Mark Bridger watched images of child abuse and murder before he murdered April Jones. Stuart Hazell watched images of child abuse and searched for incest porn before he murdered Tia Sharpe, the granddaughter of his partner. Vincent Tabak watched pornographic videos of blonde women being strangled before he strangled blonde Joanna Yeates. A 13-year-old boy raped his eight-year-old sister after watching pornography. Jamie Reynolds used violent pornography with images of nooses before he murdered Georgia Williams by hanging. First the theory, then the practice.
And this pattern does not apply only to confirmed criminals and obvious monsters. A 2014 BMJ study of teenagers found an increasing prevalence of anal sex, which the participants explained they had learned about from porn. There was little thought that the girls would enjoy or even consent to it – boys “accidentally” penetrating the wrong orifice was presented as normal, and girls expected anal sex to be painful. It was pornsex: the subjugation and humiliation of women to serve male desires. And this is how porn operates: first through the eyes, and then in the mind, and then back through the body, against other bodies. Humans are creatures of culture, and the culture we have made for sex is one where women are destroyed. Do you still not understand?The head of the Shin Bet security service says Israel is successfully fighting back against cyberterrorists. “Hackers around the world working to harm Israel often experience unexpected mishaps,” Nadav Argaman told a cybersecurity conference in Tel Aviv on Tuesday.
Argaman told attendees at Cyber Week 2017 at Tel Aviv University: “Just as we aren’t satisfied with passive defense in the real world but find terrorists in their place – the same goes for cyberdefense. We study our adversary’s modus operandi and learn how to defeat them in a variety of ways.”
He added that in the past year, the Shin Bet has been working with its partners in the intelligence and defense communities to confront a variety of challenges in the cybersecurity field – from state-sponsored threats and terrorist organizations to individual hackers acting independently.
“Still, in light of the deceptive characteristics of cybersecurity, it would appropriate for us to remain modest and cautious concerning our ability to receive a hermetic picture of what is happening in this area,” Argaman said.
The Shin Bet head also revealed that Israel has identified and prevented over 2,000 potential lone-wolf attackers since the beginning of 2016 using technological and intelligence methods. He added that 400 of the would-be assailants were arrested.
“To successfully locate a lone-wolf attacker is an enormous challenge,” Argaman said. “The trailblazing technological improvements, along with knowing [the situation on] the ground and operational work, have contributed greatly to reducing the level of terrorism and Israel successfully dealing with the threat of such terrorists,” he added.
Intelligence agencies' activities related to the internet, particularly on the social networks, has sparked criticism over the protection of the privacy of the individual but also due to the fact that some of the people being investigated by security agencies are actually probed even prior to taking any active steps.
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Speaking at the Herzliya Conference last week about the tension between the right to privacy and technology-based intelligence collection, the head of the Intelligence Corps of the Israel Defense Forces, Maj. Gen. Herzl Halevi, said: "If a group is speaking on the Web about carrying out a terrorist attack and is beginning to acquire the means [to do so], we would want to live in a country that knows in advance and not after the fact."Two men have been jailed for 10 years for abducting a woman from the street in Abu Dhabi then torturing and raping her.
Abu Dhabi Criminal Court also found the Emirati and Egyptian guilty of impersonating police officers.
A third man, who is an Emirati, was also with the duo when they carried out the attack and he was fined Dhs1,000 for not reporting the crimes.
The Chinese woman had earlier told the court that three men abducted her as she walked near a hotel in Abu Dhabi at night.
She said one of the men had stopped her claiming to be a policeman.
“He then grabbed me by my hair and forced me into their vehicle,” the woman testified in court.
The men then took her to their apartment where they beat her up and two of them raped her.
She said the third man who was with them had tried to stop the duo from caring out the assault but they ignored him.
Related links:
Employer faces charges of torturing her two maids, killing one of them
Dubai jail prisoner accused of raping cellmateRichard Harris said he was angry when he found out his 2-year-old son got a gun from his mother’s purse and shot himself in the face on Thursday night.
“Who leaves loaded guns around with 2- or 3-year-old kids?” Harris, 25, of Centerville, Washington County, said on Friday afternoon. “I have guns in my house, but they’re locked up.”
State police said Owen Harris shot himself in the face with his stepfather’s gun around 8:50 p.m. at his home along Second Street in Isabella, Luzerne Township.
Trooper Stefani Plume said Owen somehow got the gun, which was in his mother’s purse, and shot himself.
His mother and stepfather were home at the time, Plume said.
Owen was taken first to Uniontown Hospital and then flown to Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, where he was in critical but stable condition Friday.
Plume said no charges have been filed in the case.
“It appears as though the incident was just a tragic accident,” Plume said in a news release.
Fayette County District Attorney Jack Heneks said the incident remains under investigation.
Richard Harris said he has “a thousand questions” about the shooting. He said his ex-girlfriend told him she and her husband were asleep when Owen woke up and got the gun.
“I’m sure she’s just as devastated,” he said of Owen’s mother.
Richard Harris said Owen and his 3-year-old daughter, Jalynn, live with his ex-girlfriend, Donna Christopher, and her husband, Donald.
Attempts to reach the Christophers Friday were unsuccessful.
Donald Christopher asked for prayers on Facebook yesterday.
“Please everyone please pray for our lil man owen we love u so much buddy u mean the world to us,” he wrote.
And though he’s looking for answers, what Richard Harris wants is to see his son smile again.
Richard Harris said his son is in intensive care and has been sedated.
“They’re saying it’s still up in the air,” Harris said of Owen’s condition. “He has a long road ahead of him. But I guess he’s doing all right for what happened to him. There’s no sugarcoating it. He’s definitely hurt badly.”
Richard Harris, his grandfather Phillip Gill, 70, and other family members rushed to Children’s Thursday night.
Gill said doctors are monitoring brain swelling in Owen, who shot himself in the face between his nose and mouth.
Gill said his great-grandson is a typical 2-year-old boy who likes to romp around and play.
“He’s always having fun, him and his sister, and he’s always happy,” Gill said.
Jennifer Reeger and Mary Pickels are staff writers for Trib Total Media. Jennifer can be reached at 724-836-615 |
as far as work went, which in turn eased Ritsuko's load of responsibilities.
The doctor turned Commander continued to type as Misato went through the pages as quickly as her eyes could read. "Those are Shinji's test results the day he was admitted to the hospital, the day he left and the last one is yesterday's physical." Ritsuko pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to discern between the many mathematical variables on her screen. She gave it a rest and occupied the remaining part of her brain in explaining the situation to her old friend.
"When Asuka broke his ribs he was severely dehydrated and fifteen pounds under his ideal weight; the stress had already started to affect his basic motor functions and most of his muscles were atrophied, which only worsened considering he was barely eating," Misato's eyes widened exponentially as she both read the data and listened to her friend. "Asuka didn't even have to use that much force to break his bones, he was already starting to develop a considerable calcium deficiency. His whole body was at the brink of collapsing, beating or no beating. Another month or so like that and his heart would've probably given out."
Misato gulped as she turned the pages and read on. These numbers, they were terrible! "Shinji's leukocyte count was on the ground, literally. The flu would've turned into pneumonia in a day or two, had he gotten sick. He was bottling up so much stress he ended up with an ulcer on his stomach some time ago, that's why he was vomiting blood, well that and the punctured lung. His body was technically eating itself, since he barely ate anything, another reason why his muscles were so reduced. To this day I still can't understand how he survived for eight months with the level of stress his mind and body. Now, since the…um…incident with Asuka, he's only three pounds away from his ideal weight, he's gained muscle mass, we got the calcium deficiency under control, and he should make a full recovery if he doesn't skip yoga every time he can. The serum is incredible, true, but the serum can't force him to eat, or train, or take better care of himself."
Numbers rarely lied, and the numbers on the following page only proved Ritsuko right. The boy's immune system was almost back to normal, his bones were mending with surprising speed, the lesion on his lung had all but closed with no infections or complications, the ulcer had dissapeared, his heart was at 100%, and his diaphragm was healing faster than they'd anticipated. Plus, his metabolism seemed keen on catching up with the months of starvation, which could only mean Shinji was not only eating; he was eating with an appetite for once.
"Asuka might've looked healthy, but her liver had been deteriorating long before the bullet even hit her, I'm assuming the inflammation was due to stress. Two knuckles of her right hand were fractured a long time ago, and did not heal correctly. Had it not been for Shinji, assuming he was the one who reset her bones, she wouldn't be able to move those fingers at all. She was severely paranoid; her teeth were starting to fissure from her clenching her jaw so much. Just to mention a few…"
"So what you're saying," interrupted the former Mayor. "Is that they're good for each other? I wish I could believe that, I really do Ritsu, but Asuka almost killed Shinji, with her bare hands, for touching her. She broke his fingers that time, too, I guarantee it."
"Dislocated," interjected the Commander. "She dislocated one of his fingers, she didn't break both."
"It doesn't matter! If they're so good for each other's health, how come this happened!?" Misato retorted, holding out the Children's health charts. "How come they've both been wasting away all this time?!"
"How should I know?" answered Ritsuko calmly, unaffected by Misato's anger. She stared at her friend and colleague square in the eye. "I'm not their guardian, I'm their doctor."
Misato's eyes widened again; her anger dissipated as soon as it'd come, leaving her once more with the heavy guilt of incompetence on her shoulders. She looked at the ground, at the screen, at anything that wasn't Ritsuko's cold stare, where the cold truth waited patiently. The woman was right, after all.
"So you're telling it's a good thing they're spooning now?" the purpled-haired woman snapped back at last. Once again, Ritsuko shrugged and refocused her attention on the laptop's screen.
"I don't think it's a good or bad thing. I don't really care either way, as long as they're not tearing open their wounds. Look, these kids are public figures, public targets. We put them through hell and left them to deal with our pile of shit. If they want to spoon, cuddle, kiss or fuck I think we owe it to them to let them be as happy as they can be. At the very least. They look pretty damn happy to me right now, don't they?"
The Commander didn't bother to look, but Misato did turn again to watch both teens snuggle comfortably in the rather small bed. "I suppose so." She had to admit it; both Asuka and Shinji's health were improving by simply solving the issues with each other. The evidence was right there for her to see.
"Then that's all that matters right now. Asuka and Shinji held it in, all of it, Third Impact and the war against the Angels, for this whole time, just trying to survive what happened to the world. What we did to the world. It's only logical the dam broke at some point, that's why they're crying and making up on a daily basis, Misato."
Ritsuko sighed once more when she remembered the disturbing information her contact had provided a few days back. The cImage copyright PA
Shell has admitted for the first time it dealt with a convicted money-launderer when negotiating access to a vast oil field in Nigeria.
It comes after emails were published showing Shell negotiated with Dan Etete, who was later convicted of money laundering in a separate case.
Shell and an Italian oil company paid $1.3bn (£1bn) to the Nigerian government for access to the field.
Investigators claim $1.1bn was passed to a firm controlled by Mr Etete.
Shell and the Italian firm ENI agreed a deal with the Nigerian government for the rights to exploit OPL 245, a prime oil block off the coast of the Niger Delta.
The government passed on $1.1bn of the money to a company called Malabu, which was controlled by Mr Etete, according to Italian prosecutors.
Documents filed by the Italian prosecutors claim that $466m of that sum was then laundered through bureau de change and passed on to the then president, Goodluck Jonathan, and members of his government.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Shell has been active in Nigeria for 60 years
When questioned in the past, Shell has claimed that it only paid money to the Nigerian government, which took the form of a sum to settle the long-running legal dispute which had raged over the ownership of OPL 245.
But a spokesman has now said Shell had engaged with Malabu and Etete before signing that deal.
"Over the course of several years, Shell made repeated attempts to fully establish and understand Malabu's ownership structure, including the exact role of Mr Etete in Malabu," he said.
"Over time it became clear to us that Etete was involved in Malabu and that the only way to resolve the impasse through a negotiated settlement was to engage with Etete and Malabu, whether we liked it or not. This was consistent with the Federal Government of Nigeria's (FGN) position.
"From the complex multi-party negotiations that followed, we knew the FGN would compensate Malabu to settle its claim on the block. We believe that the settlement was a fully legal transaction with the FGN," he added.
'Changed its tune'
The change comes after Global Witness and Finance Uncovered, two anti-corruption charities, published emails seen by the BBC which showed that Shell representatives were negotiating with Mr Etete a year before the deal was signed.
One of the emails was copied to Shell's chief executive at the time, Peter Voser, showing knowledge of Mr Etete's involvement went right to the top at Shell.
Rachel Owens, a campaigner at Global Witness, said: "Shell have always said that they only paid the Nigerian government. Today Shell has changed its tune."
At the time Shell struck the deal for OPL 245, it was under a deferred prosecution agreement with the Department of Justice in the US, settling a case under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for $30m.
Under the terms of its agreement, it had to toughen up internal controls and stay in line with the US' tough anti-corruption laws.
Representatives of Peter Voser declined to comment. ENI said there was no credible evidence any of its staff were involved in wrongdoing.
A spokesperson for Goodluck Jonathan told the BBC that no charges or indictments have been brought or secured against the former president relating to this transaction and described the allegations as a "false narrative".
The BBC is still awaiting comment from Dan Etete, but he has previously denied any wrongdoing.Geographers don’t need to actually understand the rules to appreciate the issues surrounding one of the world’s biggest annual sporting events
On Sunday 1 February 2015, defending champions Seattle Seahawks will take on the New England Patriots in the forty-ninth American Football Super Bowl (or NFL Super Bowl XLIX, as it’s officially called) in Glendale, Arizona. And, like the Olympics or the World Cup, it’s an occasion which is more than a mere sporting event; there are many significant geographical issues at play.
Host cities of the past ten Super Bowls
ECONOMICS
The ‘where’ element to the season-ending Super Bowl is important in numerous ways, but especially when it comes to economics. American cities bid to host the event – and to be in the spotlight which is cast upon the game – several years in advance. Along with the prestige, there is the economic boost which comes from hosting the match to fight for. The National Football League (NFL) estimates as much as $600million (£395million) in economic benefits are brought to the city which hosts the sporting spectacle.
However, Jerry Weiers, Mayor of Glendale, Arizona, home to the University of Phoenix Stadium, where this year’s Super Bowl will take place, has suggested that when the cost of public safety measures, as well as other necessary expenses, are factored in, it is quite possible the city will be worse off than if it wasn’t hosting the match.
‘There is no evidence of an economic impact for hosting a Super Bowl,’ Kurt Rotthoff, Associate Professor of Economics and Finance, Stillman School of Business, Seton Hall University, tells Geographical. He highlights several ways in which researches have reached this conclusion, including how the NFL often awards the event to cities which have recently built new stadia, meaning that the subsequent boost is unlikely to exceed the initial investment in the stadium, and also how money spent at local hotels and other businesses tends to go to national corporations, meaning the money doesn’t stay in the local area anyway.
Rotthoff also cites an observed phenomenon known as the ‘crowding out effect’: ‘That is, there are people that would have been visiting that area, either local residents or out of town guests, that avoid the area because of the traffic surrounding the event,’ he says. ‘Because of this, people often count the number of game attendees as an economic boost, but these people that are avoiding the area – and would have been there without the game – need to be taken out of the overall numbers; thus the number is much smaller than estimated.’
CULTURE
The Super Bowl is a key part of American life, even amongst people with no interest in American football. The NFL pursued an aggressive marketing strategy from the 1960s onwards, making the Super Bowl the centrepiece of the annual American television schedule. The 2014 final between the Seattle Seahawks and the Denver Broncos became the most watched television event in US history, with an average 111.5 million viewers, a record which is expected to be broken this weekend.
‘The Super Bowl has almost all of the highest TV ratings and audiences over the past 40 years,’ Michael Oriard, former player for the Kansas City Chiefs, Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at Oregon State University, and author of Brand NFL: Making and Selling America’s Favorite Sport, tells Geographical. ‘The NFL is one of the few things in this country that crosses genders, races, classes, regions, even politics. And the Super Bowl is the focal point of that mass-cultural appeal.’
With its rock star half-time shows, firework displays, and multi-million dollar television advertising, the Super Bowl has grown into a culturally-significant occasion, so much more than a mere sporting event. ‘The Super Bowl was developed and marketed as a spectacle of excess, known for its commercials, its half-time show, its all-day TV preview, its orgy of festivities in the host city before the game as much as the game itself,’ continues Oriard. ‘Football itself, played at the highest level, is crucial to the appeal of the NFL and the Super Bowl, but marketing is responsible for much of the Super Bowl’s magnitude.’
University of Phoenix Stadium, Arizona, USA, venue for NFL Super Bowl XLIX. Image: You Touch Pix of EuToch
ENERGY
As with most major sporting events, the Super Bowl is an energy-intensive occasion. However, this year will see the inclusion of an innovative renewable energy initiative. The Salt River Project (SRP), an Arizona-based public utilities company, the third-largest in the US, will be supplying the University of Phoenix Stadium – the venue for the match – with renewable wind-generated energy ‘to offset greenhouse gas emissions associated with Super Bowl XLIX’.
‘The Super Bowl is a great opportunity to demonstrate ways that a world-class event can be environmentally responsible,’ says Jack Groh, NFL Environmental Program Director. ‘Working with SRP to green the power at University of Phoenix Stadium is one of many strategies to respond to environmental concerns and create a positive legacy of Super Bowl in Arizona.’
In 2013, US-energy consumption analysts Opower also found that despite the millions of Americans glued to their televisions over the course of the Super Bowl, the communal nature of the event and the reduced usage of other household appliances, meant that energy usage across the country actually dropped during the match. It claims ‘the total decrease in US home electricity usage during the Super Bowl is greater than three times the amount of energy consumed by all the TVs watching it.’
GEOPOLITICS
All this spectacle and popular culture makes the Super Bowl arguably one of America’s most ‘American’ events, which, significantly, was watched last year by fifty million people outside the United States. This gives the US the chance to say something about itself, something different from the ‘hard’ military actions which shape many global perceptions of the country. Sport, in general, gives America the opportunity to portray itself somewhat differently from how it may otherwise be seen by much of the world population.
‘An America is created that is neither military hegemon nor corporate leviathan – a looser place, less rigid and more free, where anyone who works hard shooting a ball or handling a puck can become famous and (yes) rich.’ Those are the words of Charles P. Pierce, in his 2003 Boston Globe article The Goodwill Games, as quoted by Joseph Nye in his book Soft Power: The Means to Succeed in World Politics. And with the Super Bowl at the forefront of the American sports market, it is this event which could potentially have the most say in changing global perceptions of the US, and having a significant influence of other countries’ relationships with the country.
‘I take some issue with the game being viewed as some kind of instrument of US soft-power,’ Jeremy Hildreth, co-author of Brand America, tells Geographical. ‘It’s the Super Bowl. It’s unabashedly American.’ He also highlights one traditional Super Bowl branding – the Roman numeral sequential numbering method – as a reason why host cities may struggle to gain recognition from staging the event. ‘Right now, the name of the game is “NFL Super Bowl XLIX at the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Arizona”,’ he says. ‘No mere mortal stands a chance with that, I’m afraid. “Super Bowl 2015: Phoenix” would be better for everybody.’Deutsche Version Dutch Version Spanish Version
Welcome to the Facebook Crystal Set Radio Group! Hello friend. My name is Dave Schmarder. I am the owner and operator of makearadio.com. My homemade hobby radio website has been on the net since 2002. Yes, this is the home of that crazy guy of German heritage that builds all those radios. This website is about the homemade radio projects that I have built. I show all the circuits and offer good quality pictures. Each project has a description added. I did all this so you, the radio builder hobbyist would have some good plans. Starting in early 2010, makearadio.com was transformed into an ad supported website. The income helps offset the hosting costs as well as a little for me. Please whitelist me in your adblocker. Thanks! (BTW, The Ublock Origin extension is an excellent blocker and does allow individual website whitelisting.) Or please donate $5 via PayPal, if you like my website or found something useful here. Thanks.
I also host The RadioBoard, CrystalRadio.US and 1n34a.com.
(After I send a thank you note, I then will delete your e-mail address, for your privacy.) Do you have, or are you interested in the Google Home speakers? Check out my recent website about this great device.
Crystal Radios Remember that crystal set you made with your dad or grandpa? I remember my experiences to this day. In early 2002 the crystal set bit me again. This time I really got excited and started building one set right after another. I was going to stop when I built a couple of radios that would display well. But there was no way I was going to quit. So here I am at 78 radios and counting! I hope you find one that you would like to build. See what I have made to show you.
Tube Radios Soon after I started building crystal sets, the lousy summer band conditions convinced me that I should expand my activities in to active devices. Encouraged by my web visitors, I built a bunch of tube radios to experiment with. I didn't build regenerative radios when I was a kid, so this was new territory for me. I am pleased with the outcome and I hope you are too. So, I proudly present my tube radio main page.
Solid State Radios Transistors? Bah humbug. But I've heard that they have become popular and more and more people have switched from tubes to transistors. So far there is only one radio, but I hope to add more. So please accept my meager attempt for now
Audio Amplifier I love tube amplifiers. But as my solid state section, my amplifier section has only one example to show you. It is a nice small, low powered audio amp. Several others have built this design and are quite happy. So check out my amplifier section and encourage me to make more!
Loop Antennas Loop antennas have been in my family since I was a little guy. I still have the big red loop that my dad built and that started my interest in these magical devices. I built some smaller loop antennas to connect to my old time radios to improve my reception. My loops are beautiful!
My Non-Radios Websites I also have a website called ichweissnicht.com which has a bunch of banner graphics that I made, plus a DIY home page template. I have a section that I call "EBayisms" that are funny things found on the popular auction website. To round out the site, I added some product reviews. For a complete list of sites that I built, check out my Websites Portfolio Page.
The RadioBoard Forums As someone that is interested in the topic of homemade radios, I wish to extend an invite to join other like minded people at a forum that I operate, called The RadioBoard! I also want to invite you to the other sections of The RadioBoard website including the RadioContest section. Here you will see some more very nice examples of well built homemade radios. Also, new on the site is a section that I have named The Best of the Best. Over the more than 5 years of The RadioBoard Forums, there have been some real outstanding posts by our members. There are some popular technical threads that deserved a better spotlight. So I took those posts and boiled them down into some nice articles. As time allows, this section will become larger.It took two-and-a-half years of determined digging for Rebellion’s sibling founders, Chris and Jason Kingsley, to acquire Judge Dredd license holders 2000 AD. Before them, a Danish company had ended up with it in a series of acquisitions, as part of an effort to get hold of some Disney licenses. That company didn’t know what to do with the quintessentially British publishing house that should, really, be considered a national treasure.
Read about how Rebellion’s game jam was born from a man punching a fish.
“I think it should be more well loved in some kind of way,” Jason Kingsley tells me. “Pretty much everybody has heard of it who are into genre, but it’s not considered a big part of culture in some ways. But if you look at anybody who worked in creative industries, it is hugely influential. We managed to persuade [the Danish company], take it on board, reinvest in it, and do good things. And now I believe we are the people who have owned 2000 AD the longest.”
Rebellion are also game developers – known for titles such as Sniper Elite 4 and Battlezone VR – but despite fortuitously holding the license for 2000 AD since the year 2000, they have only released a handful of games based on the many, many stories the sci-fi comic series has put out over the decades. That is due to a lack of time, a lack on manpower, and the fact that the studio is already juggling multiple projects. This is why they made the decision earlier this year to license out 2000 AD to other game developers, so we can finally see the imaginative worlds of 2000 AD in games, even if Rebellion never find the time.
“Because they’re short bursts of episodic content – though they occasionally have arcs that span a few episodes – there are hundreds of encapsulated stories where they’re designed for the reader to jump in and get what’s going on, whether or not you have any kind of history with the characters,” Steve Bristow, lead designer on Rebellion’s Strange Brigade, says. “There’s almost nothing in 2000 AD’s back catalogue that couldn’t work in a game.”
So, out of all these worlds and experiences, what games would the staff at Rebellion like to see?
The Helltrekkers RPG
In the Judge Dredd mythos, the Cursed Earth is an irradiated wasteland outside of the urban sprawl of Mega-City One, and its inhabitants are disgraced Judges, mutants, robots, and gangs of outlaws. In The Helltrekkers comics, one group decided it was better to risk their fates in this scorched desert than to endure the torture of modern life in the overpopulated Mega-City.
“I want a sort of journey to the Cursed Earth for Helltrekkers,” Jason Kingsley says. “I always liked the offshore colonies in Judge Dredd’s world. I like the Undercity. Personally, I’m very interested in the peripheral areas of the Mega-City. I’m not a particularly city person; I live in the countryside. What’s equivalent to the countryside to Mega-City One? It could be open-world, RPG, exploration, city building. I love my post-apocalyptic stuff, so I love the Fallout series of games, so you can imagine that could be Cursed Earth: a Fallout-style open world. You’re a survivor and you wake up in Cursed Earth and you’ve got to get home. That could be interesting.”
The Undercity RTS
Mega-City One was built on top of old cities and the polluted Ohio River. These places, abandoned, desolate, and without sunlight, became a lawless location known only as the Undercity. Some of the citizens who could not cope with the futuristic city above retreated into its dank bowels, many of them mutating because of the toxic conditions. In the comics, a group of these mutants, the Troggies, hatched a plan to blow up Mega-City One.
“Maybe you could have a whole bunch of Troggies in the Undercity, and it’s a real-time strategy game,” Kingsley suggests. “Or maybe you have a Civilization equivalent, but it’s in the Undercity where you have judges coming in and busting you up. You’ve got werewolves there as well.”
Strontium Dog adventure game
Strontium Dog is a bounty hunter who travels the galaxy searching for criminals. It is the perfect premise for a videogame. Kingsley agrees: “I love Strontium Dog as character and a conceit, I love the idea of a first-person/third-person action game, travelling around, arresting criminals, tracking them down, solving problems – that could be rather fun.”
“Strontium Dog is one of my favourites,” Steve Bristow adds. “There’s loads of game mechanics in those stories – really good action mechanics that work well for comics and would for games. Strontium Dog’s time grenade is a classic. He’s got a gun that’s similar in some respects to Dredd’s Lawgiver, where you can select different types of shot – armour piercing, incendiary, and whatnot.”
As well as having these cool weapons and gadgets – I mean, who wouldn’t want to throw a grenade that sends someone and the scenery around them into space? – Strontium Dog has co-op mechanics baked in. “You’ve got this buddy thing as well: his mate, Wulf Sternhammer – a sort of melee specialist,” Bristow continues. “You’ve got this enormously fertile canvas, a universe full of scum and villainy that you can go exploring. Strontium Dog as an open-world game would be really interesting because he’s this classic hero character who has a quest.”
Sláine RPG
Sláine is like Conan’s unhinged Irish cousin, his stories based in the realm of Celtic myth. This is a guy who wields a massive axe called Brainbiter and can shapeshift into an ungodly monstrosity with terrifying, brutish strength. He would feel right at home in a frantic PlatinumGames release.
Kingsley, himself an appreciator of melee combat, prefers to think of it as a sprawling RPG. “I love Slaine,” he says. “I love the idea of the Land of the Young, and very early mythological history, so that would probably be sort of a roleplaying game, like Skyrim maybe.”
Ace Trucking adventure game
Ace Trucking is a series about a band of misfit aliens who run a space trucking company, headed up by a cone-headed extraterrestrial called Ace Garp.
“A secret favourite of mine is Ace Trucking – some ‘70s-based, CB radio twist of the future,” Kingsley says. “That could be quite fun. You could have an intergalactic trucking company.”
Perhaps it could work as a Telltale-esque narrative game, or maybe it could be Elite with a sense of humour. Hell, you could even peg it as four-player co-op, with each of you taking on a vital ship role as you trawl across the galaxy, occasionally stopping for some mischief.
“It’s a couple of weirdos hauling stuff across the universe and getting into trouble,” Bristow adds.
Judge Demarco detective game
Judge Demarco is a billionaire through inheritance, but she chose to forgo that wealth to pursue a life as a Judge. After quickly rising through the ranks, she found herself falling in love with Dredd, which is forbidden. She was disgraced and ejected from the force, but Dredd pulled some strings to grant her a firearm license and the chance to work as a private investigator.
“I remember back in the day, after Dredd vs. Death we did a ‘making of’ book and they asked us [what other 2000 AD games we’d like to make],” Battlezone VR lead programmer Richard May says. “One of the things that struck me was doing a Demarco P.I. kind of thing. Judge Demarco is a fallen-from-grace Judge. She has a kind of Mega-City noir thing going on. She has this sentient gorilla partner and they try to solve crimes that the Justice Department won’t go near. It always struck me as a nice thing to do.”
Nemesis the Warlock Soulslike
It’s the distant future and humanity is ruled by a fascist human supremacist who wants to wipe out all aliens. Nemesis is a demonic, fire-breathing alien who wants to rid the world of its xenophobes with his massive sword and scorchy breath. It is a dark story where good and evil don’t exist, with more shades of grey than that book about the bondage man. It is a world that is rife with religious fanaticism.
“I’d really love to see a big, nasty Nemesis game,” 2000 AD publishing assistant Owen Johnson says. “A really dark Nemesis game in the style of Dark Souls. That would look really amazing. Nemesis has such a giant, expansive canvas on which to do stuff like that. It would touch on a lot of the religious themes, the persecution, and racism that’s in Nemesis.
“It’s this huge backdrop of alien creatures and that kind of thing. It’s got Torquemada who’s this giant villain of galactic proportions. That would be absolutely amazing. Although superheroes have been done, Nemesis has a really good story and it is fixed, it doesn’t go on and on – it’s something you could take from really easily.”
Lawless adventure game
“I’ve been really enjoying Lawless, a Dan Abnett series – it’s the Dredd world divorced from Mega-City One,” Richard May says. “It’s a colonial frontier type thing. A bit like if you took Dredd and mixed it with Firefly. It’s about Colonial Judges, and there’s one particular one, Metta Lawson, who turns up in this backwater town to replace the Judge they had previously – a sheriff essentially.”
As a game, Lawless could be a sci-fi take on the Red Dead model – riding through the Frontier taking on quests and tagging criminals as you go.
“It’s about her adventures in this Western parallel, but with all the crazy future stuff that you get in 2000 AD: sentient aliens, robots, labour conflicts between the robots and the indentured servants, and there’s a whole apocalyptic thing going on in the background as well,” May continues. “That kind of Firefly setting is dear to people’s hearts anyway, but mixing that with the Dredd universe gives you something that’s away from the years of baggage in Mega-City One. You don’t have to know all the history but it’s still compelling.”
Chopper Cannonball Run
When you think of a Judge Dredd game, you think of playing it through the eyes of the law. One outlaw in the Dredd-verse has a story that would make for a straightforward way to experience that world, however.
“There’s a secondary character in Dredd called Chopper – essentially an outlaw and graffiti artist who rides around Mega-City One on this hovering surfboard,” Bristow says. “He’s like this Californian dude or Australian beach bum. There’s this legendary race that happens that he wants to compete in, but it’s completely illegal – a cannonball run kind of thing. That’s another one – a relatively simple piece of game design already done for us there.”
D.R. and Quinch platformer
“I quite like D.R. and Quinch as a series,” Kingsley says, “those characters are really interesting. Alan Moore’s early work. A kind of comedy series, delinquent juveniles, aliens, very powerful, going around causing havoc and chaos.”
Publishing assistant Owen Johnson has a specific game for this duo in mind. “My favourite characters are D.R. & Quinch, alien delinquents that go around with nuclear capabilities and start trouble in a very mischievous kind of way,” he says.
“I’m stuck in the past and love the N64, so I’d love to see an R-rated Rare-style game with D.R. & Quinch that’s like a Conker’s Bad Fur Day or Jet Force Gemini’s giant guns – if you botched all that together, like a Banjo Kazooie, or Conker’s Bad Fur day, but with D.R. & Quinch, I’d be all over that.”
Judge Dredd Block Wars
“One request we always get is a big, Arkham Asylum-style game for Judge Dredd, set in Mega-City One or the Cursed Earth,” Johnson says. It is no surprise. Dredd is by far 2000 AD’s most popular character – a British icon with a square jaw and unbending morals. The character has decades of stories that videogames could explore, even away from the interdimensional foes he faces in Rebellion’s first-person shooter, Dredd vs Death.
“I know it’s obvious, but there’s so much in Judge Dredd that needs to be a game,” Bristow adds. “I would love to do that character, who means a lot to me on a personal level, justice. There’s obvious big storylines like the Apocalypse War and the Block Wars. It starts with Block Mania, where a Russian spy infects the water supply in Mega-City One with something that causes everyone to get [aggressive] with each other. It ferments a civil war inside the city, essentially.
“That causes chaos, and in that chaos they take advantage and launch an attack on Mega-City One, to which Dredd responds characteristically with an immediate launch of nuclear weapons. It’s one of my favourite panels in a 2000 AD comic, actually – where the Chief Judges and the Senior Judges are dithering about whether or not to launch this pre-emptive strike against Russia. Dredd strides up to the control panel, says, ‘The decision is mine’, and presses the button.”
Rogue Trooper 2
Rebellion have already done Rogue Trooper, a third-person shooter that was recently remastered. That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t do another, however. In fact, Kingsley admits that the remaster was a test to gauge whether there’s an appetite for blue army men with sentient equipment.
“I’d love to make another Rogue Trooper game,” May says. “In terms of gameplay it would be very similar to the original. If you look at things like Sniper Elite 4 – it has a lot of similarities to the original Rogue Trooper. There’s clambering over the environment for well-placed shots, traps, and more environmental interactions. You’d place Gunnar, things like decoys. You have the same in Sniper Elite, where you can decoy an enemy, but that’s done with rocks and whistling, whereas in the original Rogue Trooper we had holograms that you could set up to annoy people with.
“You can see common DNA between the games, and I could see how you would take those mechanics, twist them a little with more futuristic technology, paint the guys blue, next,” he laughs.
At the time of release, the original Rogue Trooper was doing a lot of things other games were not. I still remember how satisfying it was when you shot an enemy’s oxygen tank and they exploded, usually taking down some of their friends as they go.
“It was so satisfying: ping the tank, watch them running around, their buddies would try to get away from them because they knew they were going to explode, and you might catch two or three with one shot,” May agrees. “Those kinds of encounter moments, where you can make a plan and execute it, are what I really love about the original Rogue Trooper.”(Editor’s note: this is a contribution from Thomas Kösters, an entrepreneurship professional with the Technische Universität München and co-founder of the European Startup Initiative)
It’s interesting that Google chairman Eric Schmidt recently published an article in German media defending his company’s operations. In it, he lamented that many pundits (especially German ones) “attack the entire Internet and its magic, which gives anyone, anywhere access to previously hard-to-find information.”
While I understand that as the executive chairman of Google, it’s expected that he react to attacks in this fashion, I also believe the criticism the company has received is good.
Now don’t get me wrong – I don’t think Google should be used as a scapegoat, but I do believe there needs to be a discussion on how the Internet and digitalization are affecting our privacy rights.
So, I’m glad that Schmidt has entered into the public sphere for debate.
The times they are a-changing
Digitalization is essentially the conversion of physical objects into digital ones – everything becomes data. As a result of the conveniences that come with it, it seems we are all incessantly giving away valuable information about our personal and professional lives.
In fact, it’s often difficult to see the real costs of these data packages we use to pay for “free” services, and where this data is going
Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Europe’s largest newspaper publisher Axel Springer, summarized the significance of the digital revolution by saying: “If fossil fuels were the fuels of the 20th century, then those of the 21st century are surely data and user profiles.”
In an open letter to Eric Schmidt, Döpfner argued that Google and others are becoming “new digital super-authorities”, which pose as a danger in extracting themselves from the reach of regulation. He even went so far as to openly admitting being afraid of their power.
No wonder he’s afraid though, the Internet infrastructure reaches much further than the jurisdiction of a single nation state or even the European Union. Plus, the core values of the free world (like freedom of expression) largely forbid any limitations of this free flow of data.
In fact, democratic institutions fight with conviction for the preservation and expansion of what is the basis of Google’s business.
Growing power of Internet giants across borders
The debate on deterritorialization and the loss of the power of the nation state vis-a-vis multinational companies that can blackmail governments by moving to another location are old and, I believe, inaccurate.
If anything, Google’s campus in Palo Alto is a clear sign of the indispensable link between business and |
into the organisation of Caribbean cricket last year (naturally his remit did not extend to governance) has led to significant reforms of domestic cricket. Belatedly, the WICB has introduced 90 professional contracts for domestic players, allowing them to train full-time; the 2014-15 first-class season was the first in which each team played a minimum of 10 first-class games rather than six; and there are tentative signs of first innings scores improving in domestic cricket. All of this might be welcome, but the West Indies cannot afford to skirt around the need to reform a board whose structure is unreconstructed from its formation in 1927.
Yet unless the structure of all international cricket is made more equitable there is only so much that internal reforms within the West Indies will achieve. The West Indies are not merely victims of their own poor governance, but that in the wider international game today.
“Some boards are in a really tough spot quite apart from how well or badly they are run because of the existing international cricket landscape resulting primarily from last year’s ICC restructure,” says Tony Irish, the executive chairman of the Federation of International Cricketers’ Association. As a result of the power-grab by Australia, England and India last year, the West Indies are $42 million worse off than had the ICC distribution model remained unchanged: money that the WICB, who suffer financially from the region’s economic weakness, will not readily find elsewhere. Worse, because the “Big Three” are so much wealthier, they will have more money to invest in their own domestic cricket – and so have more money to tempt West Indians to play in domestic T20 competitions instead of international cricket. Trying to avoid clashes between the West Indies and the IPL might be just about possible; avoiding clashes with Australian and English T20 competitions too will not be.
The problem is not just how the ICC distributes its cash but its lack of leadership. Eight years ago, in the months before the first IPL tournament, the ICC mooted a plan to prevent the IPL disrupting international cricket. Around three per cent of IPL revenue would go into a pool. Proceeds from this would be used to match the IPL salaries of cricketers if their national team had a clash with the IPL, meaning they would not lose financially by playing for their countries, and to reimburse owners for their absent players. Had the idea got off the ground, domestic T20 leagues could have been prevented from decimating the West Indies, and there would not be six West Indians playing in the Big Bash instead of against Australia in the Test series.
The lack of a proper schedule in international cricket, beyond ICC events, is another systemic problem for the West Indies. Consider an interview Chris Gayle gave to the film-makers of the documentary Death of A Gentleman in 2013 (it did not make the cut of that vital film).
“I don’t know what will happen for West Indies. The top teams are going to play more against the top teams, and occasionally you might get two or three Test matches against a top team, so where does that leave you as one of the teams below? How you going to look at it? It’s ridiculous. You want the game to uplift you got to make everybody play against everybody…”
Men like Gayle can hardly be criticised for preferring to earn many times more cash playing in domestic T20 cricket than in desolate stadiums, playing series lacking context or lasting value. As scheduling between the Big Three has become more aggressive – Michael Clarke played 57 of his 115 Tests against India or England – so series against sides like the West Indies have been squeezed. That makes the side less attractive to sponsors and broadcasters, and less able to pay their players at rates remotely competitive with IPL wages, and exacerbates the huge financial advantage the Big Three enjoy after the ICC reforms. If the ICC is serious about helping the West Indies and, indeed, all the 102 ICC members beyond the big three, it would do well to listen to its CEO David Richardson’s idea of leagues in Test and ODI cricket (with gaps outside the schedule to allow extra bilateral matches), creating a context that would make international cricket more attractive for players from the have-not nations and give those countries greater financial security.
Two weeks ago, Shashank Manohar, the BCCI president and new ICC chairman, criticised “the three major countries bullying the ICC”. His words were a reminder that, for all the self-inflicted element to the West Indies’ decline, the iniquitous running of world cricket today has accelerated their descent.
In the batting of Darren Bravo, Kraigg Brathwaite and Jermaine Blackwood, the pace bowling of Shannon Gabriel and the leadership of the admirable Jason Holder, there remains abundant talent in the West Indies. Unless they are harnessed into a solid Test side – the sort of team, at least, who do not give Cricket Australia cold sweats about being so atrocious that they ruin the marquee Boxing Day Test – it will be an indictment of the leadership of the ICC and WICB alike. If the West Indies continue to flounder in Australia and beyond, it is not only the WICB who should consider themselves culpable.Getty Images
Despite diminished skills and advancing age, Kobe Bryant remains the most important figure in the Los Angeles Lakers organization.
And Brandon Bass knows it.
The Lakers' new power forward buttered up his de facto boss with some kind (and altogether ridiculous) praise in comments to Terrance Harris of the New Orleans Times-Picayune:
We have arguably the best player in the game still. When (Bryant) is healthy he is a monster still. If he is healthy he's right up there with the best players in the league, that's LeBron or whoever the best players in the league are. When Kobe is healthy, 19 years in the game he is still elite.
If this is an attempt to get on Bryant's good side, it's excusable. Bryant got into his teammates plenty last year, taking digs at Jeremy Lin in practice and berating his entire team (and general manager) in a well-publicized tirade (NSFW time, kids):
Anybody would want to avoid that, so maybe Bass deserves a little slack.
If he genuinely believes Bryant is arguably the best player in the league, well...he's not in for a very long argument.
In 35 games last year, Bryant attempted an average of 20.4 shots per contest and posted an effective field-goal percentage of 41.1 percent. According to Basketball-Reference.com, he has the lowest efficiency paired with that much volume of any player during the past 40 years (though Allen Iverson comes awfully close).
Bryant's not making up for historically poor shooting on the defensive end, either. When guarded by Bryant last year, opponents shot the ball more accurately than their normal averages from every area of the floor.
Substandard defense is not new for Bryant. Grantland's Zach Lowe wrote an open letter begging No. 24 to put forth a little effort on D over two years ago:
Bryant, as the whole Internet (including this corner of it) has noted repeatedly, has been an irresponsible off-ball defender all season. He gambles out of scheme whenever he feels like it, often turning his back completely to his man, and several of Washington's 11 3s during the Lakers' home loss to the Wiz on Friday were the direct result of Bryant deciding he didn’t want to play team defense any longer.
Kobe's defense has been bad for a while. Real bad.
Fast forward to our most recent data, and you'll see the Lakers were better with Bryant on the bench than they were with him on the floor, per NBA.com:
Bryant's On-Off Splits in 2014-15 ORtg DRtg Net Rtg Kobe On 100.4 112.6 -12.2 Kobe Off 101.0 106.0 -4.9 NBA.com
And if being "arguably the best" has anything to do with the ability to stay on the court consistently, maybe Bass failed to note Bryant has missed three-quarters of his team's games over the past two years. At age 36, with almost 47,000 regular-season minutes of wear on his tires, Bryant's not likely to get healthier going forward.
Look, it's fine to talk up your teammates. It's good for morale, and in this particular case, it might even be good for Bass' job security and emotional well-being. I get it.
But statistically, Bryant is far closer to being the NBA's worst player than he is to being its best. So let's all just nod politely at Bass' comments and move on.
Grant Hughes covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter @gt_hughes.Trump Wants More Campaign Cash
Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) says Republican tax reform planned for this year will include repeal of the Johnson Amendment, the 1954 law that bans churches, religious institutions, faith-based organizations, and many non-profits from endorsing or publicly opposing political candidates. Repeal of the law, which was re-affirmed under President Ronald Reagan, was a campaign promise to evangelical Christian conservatives from President Donald Trump, who has said he will "get rid of and totally destroy" it.
"Places of worship across America need to be free to practice their faith without worrying about Washington or the IRS targeting their religious freedom," Congressman Brady, chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, told conservative activists Friday at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Convention. The Hill reports he was cheered. "So in our Republican tax reform, we're going to repeal the damaging effects of the Johnson Amendment once and for all."
The religious right for years has wanted the law repealed, falsely claiming it's a First Amendment violation of the rights of pastors to speak. They have continually falsely claimed it bans them from delivering their message to their flocks. Some have falsely called it part of "an agenda to silence Christians," to "muzzle pastors," and claim it "threatens churches' freedoms."
Contrary to what the religious right would like America to believe the Johnson Amendment does not stop anyone from advocating for or against a particular issue. Pastors and priests and all faith leaders are absolutely allowed to guide their followers down whatever path they like. Legally they can preach against abortion and same-sex marriage, should they wish. They can preach for or against marijuana legalization and gambling. What they cannot do is endorse or oppose a political candidate.
Violating the Johnson Amendment could lead to the IRS revoking their tax-exempt status. NCRM was unable to find any instance of the IRS doing so because of the Johnson Amendment.
Meanwhile, Americans today pay over $80 billion in extra taxes to make up for the shortfall caused by religious non-profits that are tax-exempt. That's hundreds of dollars per person to subsidize religious institutions.
Yet far right wing groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom are at the forefront of the movement to force Americans to continue to carry the load for religious institutions while working to allow even more money in politics.
President Trump wants the law repealed so his supporters can donate money to churches, and those churches can turn around and endorse his re-election, and donate those tax-deductible funds to his campaign.
Any questions?
To comment on this article and other NCRM content, visit our Facebook page.
Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license
See a mistake? Email corrections to: [email protected]The Middle East quartet has strongly denounced Israeli moves to build 1,600 new homes in East Jerusalem and urged the Israeli government and Palestinians to resume peace negotiations.
In a hard-hitting statement after a meeting in Moscow, the UN, the EU, Russia and the US condemned Israel's "unilateral" construction plans and said the status of Jerusalem could only be resolved through negotiations between both parties.
The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said: "The quartet condemns the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem."
The quartet expected that talks between Israelis and Palestinians should lead to a negotiated settlement that "within 24 months" ends the occupation of Palestinian territories begun in 1967. The settlement should result "in the emergence of an independent, democratic, and viable Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel and its other neighbours".
The quartet includes Hillary Clinton for the US; Russia's foreign secretary, Sergei Lavrov; Tony Blair, the quartet's special representative; and Lady Ashton, the EU foreign policy chief.
The statement expressed deep alarm at the deteriorating situation in Gaza, urging Israel to lift its blockade of the Gaza Strip for both humanitarian and commercial traffic and calling for a "durable resolution to the Gaza crisis".
Clinton said she had spoken last night to the Israel prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, following his apparent offer of "confidence-building measures" to encourage the renewal of peace talks. She described the conversation as "very useful and productive … We don't believe unilateral action by any parties are helpful. We've made this clear."
None of the quartet parties were willing to say what pressure they were prepared to put on Israel should it ignore today's statement.
The quartet called on Israel to freeze all settlement activity "including natural growth", to dismantle outposts erected since March 2001, and to "refrain from demolitions and evictions in East Jerusalem". It also appealed for the international community to back the Palestinians' commitment to build an independent state by offering immediate and concrete support.
A statement from Netanyahu's office said he proposed a series of steps that would make it easier for the Palestinians to join the talks. He did not specify what these would be, but they could include easing Israeli roadblocks in the West Bank, the withdrawal of Israeli troops from more parts of the West Bank and the release of Palestinian prisoners.
He did not announce, as the US had demanded, a freeze on the construction of Jewish homes in Ramat Shlomo in East Jerusalem, the key sticking point.
But diplomats in Washington, Moscow and Jerusalem said Netanyahu had privately promised a temporary freeze on new construction. The work, while not cancelled, is to be postponed for several years.
The Israeli ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, told the Washington Post: "The goal of both sides at this point is to put this behind us and go forward with the proximity talks as quickly as possible."
This morning Ban said the Israeli government had approved several long-standing UN humanitarian programmes in Gaza, including a water and sanitation project, a flour mill, temporary schools and 150 houses. The UN secretary general said he would be travelling to Gaza on Sunday to see the situation on the ground there himself, following yesterday's visit by Lady Ashton. The EU foreign policy chief is understood to have been shocked by her trip to Gaza, privately describing it as "worse than Haiti".
Asked about her phone conversation with Netanyahu, Clinton today struck a more conciliatory note following her comments last week that Israel's building plans for East Jerusalem – announced during a visit by the US vice-president, Joe Biden – were "insulting". Of US-Israeli ties, she said: "Our relationship is ongoing. It is deep and broad. It is strong and enduring."
She went on: "We believe that the launch of the proximity talks is very much in Israel's interests, as it is in the interests of the Palestinians. We hope to see these talks commence as soon as possible."
A US state department spokesman, PJ Crowley, said Clinton and Netanyahu had discussed "specific steps" to improve the outlook for Middle East peace talks. Netanyahu's spokesman, Nir Chefetz, said the prime minister had proposed "mutual confidence-building steps" that both Israel and the Palestinians could take.
Last night Israel retaliated for a Palestinian rocket attack that killed a Thai agricultural worker. Israeli planes struck at least two targets in Gaza, officials and witnesses said.
The quartet condemned yesterday's rocket attack from Gaza and called for "an immediate end to violence and terror and for calm to be respected". It also urged the release of the captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.Federal Judge G. Murray Snow recently told Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio that he wanted the sheriff to have some "skin in the game" in regards to an upcoming civil contempt trial of Arpaio and four other current and former MCSO honchos set for April 21-24.
But when it comes to Arpaio's racial-profiling ways, his admission of contempt of Judge Snow's orders in the big civil rights case Melendres v. Arpaio, and his abuses of power under the color of law, county taxpayers have had plenty of skin in the game from jump.
To date, according to Maricopa County's Office of Management and Budget, the ACLU's big civil rights lawsuit Melendres v. Arpaio, and a related lawsuit by the U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. v. Maricopa County, have cost taxpayers more than $14.2 million.
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Arpaio acts the fool and who pays? Look in the mirror, suckers...
This total does not include the cost of new equipment and training for the MCSO, which are required by Snow's order in Melendres.
Nor does it include the cost of the four-day civil trial to come, payments to be made to plaintiffs for legal work ordered by the court, and the final cost of a county-supported kitty, which Arpaio has suggested start at $350,000, to be paid out to those individuals illegally detained as a result of Arpaio's deputies not adhering to a 2011 order from Snow in the case.
See, when Arpaio loses a lawsuit, like he did in May 2013 in Melendres, taxpayers are not only on the hook for the legal fees of the defense, but for the plaintiffs as well.
Read the breakdown of the billings so far in Melendres and the DOJ suit.
From December of 2007 to the present date, Arpaio's defense in Melendres has cost more than $2.3 million. About $1.6 million of that has gone to the law firm of Arpaio's former counsel in Melendres, Tim Casey.
In September 2014, Snow awarded legal fees to the plaintiffs' attorneys in Melendres, including lawyers from the ACLU, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the California firm of Covington & Burling, which did the bulk of the legal work.
Total: $4.5 million to plaintiffs' attorneys. Of that, around $3.5 million went to Covington.
When Snow awarded the money, he noted that the ACLU had trouble recruiting a firm to replace its former litigation partner in the case, Steptoe & Johnson.
Also, there was no promise of a win. If Arpaio had prevailed instead, Covington, the ACLU and MALDEF would have gotten bupkis.
"The court recognizes that Covington incurred a substantial risk of receiving no reimbursement for its services in agreeing to undertake this case," Snow wrote at the time.
As part of his judgment in Melendres, Snow ordered reforms, retraining, new equipment, and a monitor, Robert Warshaw, to oversee the changes.
Since Warshaw was appointed by Snow in January 2014, Warshaw's team has billed the county more than $2.6 million.
That's included in the $14.2 million total above.
The DOJ case has yet to go to trial or be otherwise resolved. To date, the defense in U.S. v. Maricopa County has cost the county about $4.8 million.
No way of knowing how deep that dark hole will go.
Ditto for Melendres.
According to Snow's October 2013 order in Melendres, the MCSO will have to be in "full and effective compliance" of his final order for "no less than three consecutive years" before the MCSO can ask to be released from all or part of it.
Meaning, Warshaw's tab with the county is guaranteed to increase.
The last report from the monitor, dated December 15, 2014, states that "MCSO is only in compliance with 14 of 87 paragraphs" of Judge Snow's order. A new monitor's report is due out soon.
During a recent hearing, Snow seemed receptive to Arpaio's suggestion of a $350,000 taxpayer-funded pool of money to address those stopped in violation of the court's 2011 order, which enjoined the MCSO from enforcing civil immigration law and detaining people under the belief -- often because of race, language, etc. -- that they were in the country illegally.
But at this point, no one knows how many people were stopped from December 2011 on, while the MCSO repeatedly violated the court's injunction.
In that hearing, Snow told Arpaio's current civil counsel Michele Iafrate the following:
"So, you know, you may well, for example, Ms. Iafrate, in your motion you've suggested funding to the tune of $350,000, and more if necessary. But I guess the point I'm making is I don't see how I can cut off the rights of any potential victim of the misconduct at any particular dollar amount as a part of this contempt proceeding."
Snow also asked Iafrate, hypothetically, "What if it ends up being millions of dollars that are required as a matter of liability?"
In a subsequent discussion with attorney Doug Irish, who was present representing the county, Snow told Irish that when it comes to claims arising from Arpaio's contempt, "At the end of the day, the County is going to be holding the bag."
Snow has made clear that the violations may be referred to another judge for criminal contempt proceedings, after the civil trial has concluded.
Arpaio has a criminal attorney, former U.S. Attorney Mel McDonald, but the county tells me it is not paying for Arpaio's possible criminal defense, though McDonald's firm has done some work on Melendres in the past couple of years.
The sheriff also has suggested that he and other defendants shell out $100,000 to an as-yet unnamed Hispanic civil rights organization, as a kind of punitive payment. Snow seemed to like the idea, especially if it came from Arpaio's pocket, and not the "Joe Arpaio Legal Defense Fund."
That would be Arpaio's "skin in the game," supposedly.
Which is nothing compared to what Arpaio's shenanigans have cost county taxpayers in these two cases.
Got a tip for The Bastard? Send it to: Stephen Lemons.
Follow Valley Fever on Twitter at @ValleyFeverPHX. Follow Stephen Lemons on Twitter at @StephenLemons.From under the gun, John Kabbaj raised to 20,000, and then action folded over to Phil Ivey in the hijack seat. Ivey, who won his 10th gold bracelet earlier this summer, reraised to 55,000. Everyone folded back over to Kabbaj, and he made the call to see the flop.
After the dealer spread the, Kabbaj checked. Ivey checked behind, and the turn brought the. With two pair now on board, Kabbaj led with a bet of 80,000. Ivey had around 275,000 behind and took his time to study Kabbaj. Ivey's stare was piercing, and he eventually pushed his entire stack forward for an all-in bet. Kabbaj called quickly.
When the two hands were revealed, it was Kabbaj's against Ivey's. As the cameras surrounded the table and the action was halted until everyone set up to get the shots, Ivey sat stoically, in need of an ace or a king on the river to keep his Main Event run alive.
The dealer burned one final time and completed the board with the. Ivey was up, out of his chair, and through the exit immediately, only stopping for some brief few seconds to pick up his top-heavy chair that toppled over after his got up out of his seat. His run ended in 430th place for $25,756, and Kabbaj climbed to 1.4 million in chips.'I can think of no one else who captured the essence better than Linda,' Paul writes
Paul McCartney's wife Linda Eastman McCartney amassed a major portfolio of photographs of rock musicians from the 1960s to the 1990s
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'Who was the most important photographer covering the sixties' rock and roll music scene? I can think of no one else whose work was so comprehensive and who captured the essence better than Linda,' Paul McCartney writes about his wife who died tragically of breast cancer at 56.
Paul McCartney remembers his adored wife who died in 1998 with portraits from this family album he states is a testament to her artistic talent.
Linda's passion for music inspired her to work independently and she amassed a major portfolio of photographs of rock musicians from the 1960s to the 1990s.
Linda Eastman McCartney was born in New York City in 1941 and raised in suburban Westchester County.
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Lovely Linda: Eastman met Paul McCartney in London in 1967 at the Bag O'Nails Club. They met up again days later at the launch album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.The couple married in March 1969, had four children together and remained close until her untimely death of advancing breast cancer at age fifty-six in 1998
Paul, the last of the Beatles to marry poses with his bride Linda Eastman and her daughter Heather after their wedding
She was not related to the George Eastman family of Eastman Kodak fame. Rather, her father, Leopold Vail Epstein, was the son of Jewish Russian immigrants and had changed his name to Lee Eastman.
After high school, Linda headed west and was living in Arizona where a friend encouraged her to take an art history course at the Tucson Art Center with Hazel Archer.
Archer introduced Linda to the great photographers Walker Evan, Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams and told Eastman to 'Borrow a camera, buy a roll of film and take pictures'.
'She inspired me to become a photographer, because of the photographs she showed me, unlike fashion photography, they were photographs of life, of people, of sadness, of poverty, of nature, everything – I loved it'.
Back in Manhattan, Linda's photographic break came while working as a receptionist at Town and Country Magazine.
She used an extra invite to a Rolling Stone promotional party to shoot pictures of the band. That was the beginning of her career chronicling the musical revolution of the Sixties.
She met Paul McCartney in London in 1967 at the Bag O'Nails Club and met up again days later at the launch of their album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
The couple married in March 1969, had four children together and remained close until her untimely death of advancing breast cancer at age fifty-six in 1998.
These photographs appear in Life In Photographs by Linda McCartney and, in a new edition of the book published by Taschen.
Paul McCartney appears to be flying while diving into a swimming pool on vacation in Jamaica in 1971. He wrote the song 'Bluebird', apparently inspired by the act of 'flying,' with Linda and Denny Laine providing background harmony
Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw, Jamaica, 1973. Ali was Steve's second wife and the couple fell in love on the set of the film, The Getaway, 1972, in which she played his wife. They married the following year but the union only lasted five years. McQueen did not want his wife to make movies while they were together and allegedly cheated on Ali
Linda first met and photographed the Rolling Stones when she attended a Stones album promotional party on a freebie invite in 1966 that marked the beginning of her commercial photography career
Paul, Stella and James and Linda loved McCartney's modest farmhouse in High Park on the Kintyre Peninsula in Scotland in 1982. Paul bought the small farm after the breakup of the Beatles in 1970 and it saved him from the drug and the heavy drinking scene of London nightclubs. The simple lifestyle inspired him to write the song, The Long and Winding Road
The Beatles in London in 1968, a year after Linda and Paul first met. This was the first year that the Apple Boutique, a retail store located on the corner of Baker and Paddington Streets, opened in London, the first business undertaking by the Beatles under the name of Apple Corps. Paul described the shop as 'a beautiful place where beautiful people can buy beautiful things.' It closed that same year.Broadway Week, which runs September 2 to 15, and 20 At 20, September 3 to 22, both offer theatergoers steep discounts. Also offering discounted tickets: Season of Savings.
All of this is a signal that the Fall theater season has begun. Another sign: the fall theater guides:
Associated Press
Bloomberg News
Broadway World (the Musicals)
Broadway World (the Plays)
New York Magazine
Playbill (Off-Broadway)
Variety (Off-Broadway)
Many emphasize all the stars:
Denzel Washington, Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, Zachary Quinto, Ian McKellen, Orlando Bloom, Diahann Carroll, Mary-Louise Parker, Patrick Stewart, Zach Braff, Billy Crystal, Ethan Hawke, Fantasia Barrino
Then there is my Broadway Preview Guide, which goes chronologically show by show.
All this is what’s coming up. But there was plenty of theater news just in the past week, supposedly the last gasp of summer — but really the first full breath of Fall. Jessica Lange announced her return to Broadway in another classic play; Rocky got a date ; Aladdin’s magic carpet lands at the New Amsterdam.
The Week in New York Theater
Monday, August 26, 2013
New York Fringe Festival Overall Excellence Award Winners 2013
Rocky has a date. The musical co-written by Sylvester Stallone,directed by Alex Timbers, is set to open March 13 at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theater.
Beth Henley’s The Jacksonian, exploring racism in 1964 Mississippi, directed by Robert Falls, with Ed Harris and (real-life wife) Amy Madigan opens on Theatre Row November 7 and runs through December 15.
Danny Burstein and Victoria Clark will join Mary-Louise Parker in The Snow Geese by Sharr White, opening October 24
“To write is an act of intervention,” Caridad Savich writes, but “art is not merely an instrument of social change.”
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Jessica Lange says she plans Broadway return in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. A model who made her film debut in King Kong, she now tackles tough parts, including two on Broadway – A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie — and makes smart use of her age, which is 66′
Andrea Martin returning to the trapeze in Pippin tonight after her vacation:
Following another injury of a performer in Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, the musical brings in record-low gross; Daniel Curry is still in the hospital
“I hate Broadway….It is the very incarnation of tackiness,”says director Jean-Pierre Jeunet of Amelie,being made into a musical. The director sold the rights to make the film into a Broadway-aiming musical to raise $ for a charity. Some objected to Amelie director’s strong anti-Bway language (“disgusted.”) But I’m sure it sounded better in the original French.
Wikipedia introduces WikiProject Musical Theatre to improve and expand their coverage
What does a Broadway show about a rabbi do during High Holy Days? Soul Doctor will be dark Yom Kippur eve (Friday) but there will be two shows on Saturday
August Wilson’s American Century Project — all 10 of his plays recorded as radio dramas….in front of a live audience, and livestreamed on the Web.
@NewYorkTheater Gem of the Ocean, so far. But I haven’t seen all of them. — Suzi Steffen (@SuziSteffen) August 29, 2013
@NewYorkTheater Literally was going to say Piano Lesson. I love Fences but Piano Lesson is really special. — Corey Ryan (@ChaoticCorey) August 29, 2013
@NewYorkTheater Jitney. First one I saw live. — Leslie Odom, Jr. (@leslieodomjr) August 29, 2013
@NewYorkTheater JOE TURNER’S COME AND GONE, the original Broadway production. I was dazzled. — Robert LoBiondo (@Bobster427) August 29, 2013
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Silicon Alley companies use NYC’s arts culture, including Broadway, as a recruiting tool for tech talent. Doctor scheduling start-up @Zocdoc “has hired former Broadway performers to sing praises of its service to physicians & patients”
BRIC arts media’s new $35 million home with 240-seat “performance space” opens October 3 in former Strand Theater 647 Fulton St, Brooklyn
John Lloyd Young, who played Frankie Valli in Jersey Boys on Broadway, will play him in Clint Eastwood movie version.
“No Time at All” is right. Turns out that Andrea Martin, who just returned to Pippin after a four week vacation, is leaving the show for good in September, for a TV series, Working the Engels.
Broadway Perfumes: Broadway’s Answer to Justin Bieber and One Direction. Smells That Sell
Guilty by @SpideyOnBway: The fragrance that you’ll fall for.
(Resist) Temptation by the Book of Mormon: A whiff of starched shirt with a note of pepper spray.
“Artists are the gate keepers of truth.We are civilization’s radical voice”~Paul Robeson. Yvette Heyliger agrees
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Disney’s Aladdin, new stage musical of 1992 animated film, will open March 20 at Broadway’s New Amsterdam. Dir: Casey Nicholaw (The Book of Mormon)
Lauren @ lauren9739 now all we need is a cast!!!
Tim Nicolai @ tim_nicolai This is going to make insane money.
Celebrated director David Cromer (Our Town, Tribes, etc.) will join Denzel in Raisin in the Sun cast as polite racist Karl Lindner
Stephen Schwartz hopes his Houdini with Hugh Jackman (Act I done) will counteract Broadway’s “artistic slump” h
Yank, WWII gay love story that was at York Theater, has raised $ 35,000 through Kickstarter for a cast album. There is no talk (as there once was) of transferring it to Broadway.
New season at the Irish Repertory Theater to include Sean O’Casey’s Juno and The Paycock (about Irish civil war) and three Beckett short plays performed by puppets.
Theater and Social/Political Change
.A weekly Twitter chat from Howlround (Storify transcript)
Excerpt:
1. History of Theater and Activism
Jonathan Mandell: When did the idea begin that theater *should* change society? Did the Ancient Greeks feel that way
Paul Mullin @ justwrought Greek theater DID change the culture from family vendetta-driven towards democracy and institutional justice.
Yvette Heyliger @ Twinbizness No TV or twitter. Theatre was the gathering place, right?
Russell Warne @ Russwarne I don’t know for sure, but that attitude seems prominent in countries & time periods w/free speech & social unrest.
Jonathan Mandell: You’re forgetting Eastern Europe, which did not have free speech but did have world-changing theater. # VaclavHavel
Russell Warne Definitely true. But I’m talking generalities. It certainly isn’t a universal urge. # Shakespeare rarely rocked the political boat. Because of censorship?
2. Did August Wilson want to change the world,or just present a world previously unseen on stage
Lili Ashman @ LiliAshman Why can’t it be Wilson wanted to do both
Yvette Heyliger Not sure he set out to change world but did so anyway
Elaine Avila @ ObrigadaAvila Doesn’t presenting a world previously unseen on stage change the world?
3. Plays that changed the world
Works by Athol Fugard’s & Anna Deavere Smith,Laramie Project, Fortune & Men’s Eyes, Ruined.ngels in America, Boys in the Band, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Vagina Monologues,
Terry Teachout @terryteachout All great plays change the world, but I suspect that the greatest ones do so without trying.
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Harmony, Broadway-aiming Barry Manilow musical about Comedian Harmonists, opens at Atlanta’s Alliance Theater September 6.
The many practical reasons why Lyn Gardner (fresh from the Fringe) loves going to the theater alone.
New “tell-all” Spider-Man book: Producers at first wanted to hire Tony Kushner or Tom Stoppard to write the book of the musical.
Tour of “green” Stephen Sondheim Theater: metal-looking walls made of recycled paper; waterless urinals
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“Othello never knew/He was schemed on by a member of his crew.” Chicago Shakes goes hip-hop, for inmates.
Christopher Sieber (Shrek, Spamalot, etc) steps in for Terrence Mann as Pip’s Pop in Pippin for 16 performances in September
Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser married economist John Roberts today, with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg officiating.
My review of Night Blooming Jasmine
Night Blooming Jasmine is a Romeo and Juliet love story between an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian student, originally produced in 2000, now revised and revived in Horsetrade Theater Group’s swift, well-cast, modest production at Under St. Marks….
the best change may be the theater in which the play takes place, with a minimal set. Under St. Marks Theater requires descent down a rickety staircase, and immersion in a space that feels too small and too run down, inducing the kind of claustrophobia that seems just right for a play about uneasy and unwilling neighbors.
Full review of Night Blooming Jasmine
Sunday, September 1, 2013
Fringe Encores Pics, videos & descriptions of the 17 shows — out of the 185 in the 2013 New York International Fringe Festival — being presented again this month
The Tempest will be FREE in Central Park with a cast of 206 members of the public including 32 gospel choir singers and three cabdrivers. September 6 to 8.
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Like this: Like Loading...DeepMind’s AlphaGo Zero AI program just became the Go champion of the world without human data or guidance. This new system marks a significant technological jump from the AlphaGo program which beat Go |
upside of inequality is far weaker than it should be.”GLENDALE, Calif. — It's Friday afternoon. School just got out at Hoover High. You can hear the drumline practicing in the distance. A group of senior guys sit talking kitty corner from campus as one of them skateboards.
The week before, the entire campus was abuzz with word the district was monitoring their social media accounts. "Somebody read something [online] and rumors spread," says Andre Abramian, a senior.
Most of his friends had heard about it. A few hadn't. "That's fucked up!" one says after Abramian explains what happened. "That's bullshit!"
The school district hired a Hermosa Beach firm, Geo Listening, to monitor students' social media accounts and report back with what they find. Some attacked it as an invasion of privacy. The district sees it as a way to help students. The consensus among Abramian and his friends is that it's about discipline.
"For like a week, everybody talked about it, but then nothing happened," says Michael Rizzo, a senior. "I haven't heard of anybody who got in trouble."
Their teachers are mostly on board with the program. Rizzo says he's only heard one opposed to it.
The next day, The New York Times will break news that the National Security Administration has been monitoring Americans' social networks since 2010. The story was mostly lost in the lead up to the government shut down, and also, it's not that surprising a revelation, considering the government has been tracking Americans' phone records and emails.
Polling has shown that a majority of Americans think the government's phone and email surveillance tactics are acceptable as an anti-terror tactic, and it's not a stretch to assume they'll feel the same way when asked about their social media.
Andre, Michael and their friends feel the same way. When asked if they're OK with what the district's doing, they shrug. They don't think they ever post anything on social media that will get them in trouble anyways.
"We built this for the kids," says Chris Frydych, Geo Listening's CEO. "I just really wanted to have a greater impact in some of the areas involving school climate."
Frydych hopes his service will make schools better by giving educators and administrators more information about their students. They look for evidence of bullying, drug use, violence, possible suicide and unauthorized use of technology in the classroom by using a blend of technology and employees who sift through the data to find meaningful information.
"We don't interpret, we just provide information," he says. "We get that information to people who work there every day and help."
Geo Listening is expected to have 3,000 "school sites" as clients by the end of July across the country and internationally as well, Frydych says. He's tight lipped over who the clients are, though. A confidentiality agreement means even curious districts thinking about signing up for the service can't find out which of their neighbors are already using it. The only reason Glendale's business became public was because it was picked up on by local media after being included in a district board meeting.
"The contract with Geo Listening was included in the district's board agenda," said Kelly Corrigan, a Glendale News-Press reporter, in an email. "The board approved it without any discussion then."
The district had also piloted the program last spring, but Corrigan says as far as she knows, they never publicly discussed that. If it wasn't for her reporting, the program would still be a secret.
Her story set off a media firestorm that drew the attention of the Los Angeles Times and CNN and drew criticism of privacy advocates. Frydych, who had previously listed the connection to the Glendale district on his LinkedIn profile, went private, Corrigan said. Glendale Superintendent Richard Sheehan defended the program, saying during its pilot phase, the district was able to intervene with a student who was contemplating suicide on social media. "We were able to save a life," Sheehan told CNN.
Suicide prevention has become a top concern for districts. Sheehan said two students have committed suicide in the past year, and California has reduced mental health services in schools. It's also an issue parents hold schools responsible for. In 2011, the parents of a Florida girl who committed suicide after being bullied for a topless photo she sent to a boy spread through the school, sued their school district, arguing they didn't do enough after their daughter showed signs of being suicidal.
A district spokesperson said Sheehan was no longer speaking to media about the program. Glendale was burdened with the fallout from the story, but potentially hundreds of schools across the country are doing the same thing without students' knowledge.
Frydych dismisses critics who say his service is a violation of privacy. He sees the outrage as misunderstanding from adults who are used to an Internet of email and passwords and privacy and don't know the realities of publicly visible social media. "We only look at publicly available social media," he says. "You make a conscious decision to publish publicly or privately."
He also says this is something students want. "The students have stood up and said they want this," he says.
At a district meeting after the program came to light, Hoover High School senior Audria Amirian, a student representative on the school board defended the program.
"They're not hacking into your system to find out what you've posted," she said, according to the Glendale News-Press. "Everything is public information. And I think that even if it saves one student's life, it's worth every dollar that you've put into it."
Frydych says he doesn't seem much competition in in Geo Listening's future — "I think the companies are scared of liabilities," he says — and they're moving forward, working within the legal framework of each new state and country they enter. It's a service more and more schools might look to as they grapple with how to handle students and social media.
"Adults have a very large blind spot for what's happening on social media," he says. "They don't understand the volume of negative activity students see directed towards them and their peers."The run went better than expected. I thought I’d stick to a steady 7.5 mph, but when I got to 10 miles I realised that my legs were feeling OK but my shoulders were beginning to hurt, so I needed to finish the run quicker than planned and running faster doesn’t seem to hurt the shoulders any more – in fact I think the longer stride made it less painful on the shoulders.
So I went to 8 mph for 10 miles and then for the last 6.2 miles went to 8.6 mph. My legs paid the price but my shoulders were grateful. It probably looked like I was having a strong run at the end but the reality was that I couldn’t wait to get out of that harness!!
Watching the live marathon on the BBC the whole time was a huge encouragement – I had thought I would watch a movie (2001 A Space Odyssey was ready to go) or listen to my #Spacerocks playlist but in fact it was extremely motivating watching the live coverage of the event and hearing the stories of some of the 33000 people taking part. In addition to that I was able to compare my progress to the live event since I had the RunSocial app giving me an excellent view of streets of London as I would see them if I were running the real marathon.
Staying hydrated was no problem – this was a big mistake I had made in 1999 when I last ran the London marathon and did not drink enough during the race… which hit me hard at 18 miles and scuppered my plans for a sub three-hour run. This time I was drinking water from the start and I had my pouches lined up on Velcro strips on the panel above my head to ensure that I drank one pouch (300ml) per hour. I also had an energy sachet at 18 miles which was a great boost for the last stage of the run.
It was an incredible experience to take part in such a prestigious event whilst orbiting the planet on the International Space Station and I’m hugely grateful to everyone at the European Space Agency and NASA who made that happen. And last but not least, I was truly proud to be part of Team Astronaut in support of The Prince’s Trust and to help raise awareness for the great work that they do.SOUTH MIAMI, Fla. - It's a reunion that was 10 years in the making.
A South Florida family got their teacup Yorkshire terrier back -- a decade after she ran away.
Ginger was found last week by a couple in Houston. They said the small dog was hiding under a car near a busy road.
The couple took the dog to a veterinarian, who scanned her for a microchip and contacted her original owner.
Yajaira Fuentes, who lives in South Miami, says Ginger escaped from her backyard in 2005.
After getting the good news, Fuentes paid for boarding and a flight for Ginger to return home.
It's not clear how the dog got from south Florida to Texas. Fuentes thinks someone may have taken Ginger from South Miami and moved to Texas.
Copyright 2016 by WKMG ClickOrlando - All rights reserved.When I saw an article about the first SlutWalk, in Toronto, it spoke to me on a deep level.
Photo: John Fisher
As a lifelong feminist who constantly rebuffed the term because of the anger and separatism I felt it implied, I had been “looking” for a feminist movement that celebrated the strength of women in a way that was uniquely feminine. I know that’s a controversial statement, but I came of age in the era in which being a feminist felt like a call to be more like men. And I am a girlie girl, through and through.
At the same time, I am a rape survivor who now focuses all of my energy advocating for women to get involved in their own sexuality. I just launched a business focused entirely on helping women discover their own unique sexuality and live it in an empowered and playful way.
When I first heard about SlutWalk, it tickled me in a very powerful way, and I wrote a couple pieces about why. When I heard it was coming to Seattle, I contacted them immediately and asked what I could do. When it was suggested that I’d be a great speaker, I said, “of course I would.”
Except for one thing. I am terrified of public speaking. I am terrified, in many ways, of just speaking, even in small groups. I am painfully shy. That’s what makes me a brilliant writer. With the safety of words on a screen and the gigantic separation of the entire Internet between my readers and I, I feel safe. I am the most socially awkward person I know.
But this matters. I was given an opportunity to illuminate some ideas that I think will change the world, I was not going to blow it. Armed with good friends, and a shot of tequila, I stood before thousands and bared both my body and my soul to discuss my own violent rape, and why I know it was not my fault. More than that, what we as a society can do to stop rape, stop blaming victims and stop shaming victims.
Most importantly, why creating a society of sexually empowered women might be the most important thing we can do to end violent crimes in which sexual organs are used as a weapon.
If you’d prefer to skip the intro, fast forward to 02:04.
It’s worth watching the speech, to see what can happen when passion and conviction overtake fear. Even I was blown away when I watched it. It was totally different than what I had rehearsed, but I was impressed with my own courage, and the clarity of the message:
The only person responsible for rape is the rapist. Society needs to remove the shame of surviving rape from the victims and turn it into shame for committing rape, for the rapists. There is no sex in rape. Sex involves consent. Rape is a violent crime that has nothing to do with consent, or sex. By becoming empowered in our sexuality we can make the point that rape and sex are not the same thing.
I was so honored to be part of this movement. But it is now more clear to me than ever before that we have a long ways to go. We need to speak out and speak up. We need to be proud and loud. We can be as sexy as we want, but we cannot condone violence in any form. Especially not violence that uses our own bodies as weapons against us.
It starts with us.
With my parents + daughter after the speech was over. Photo by Sarah Anne Lloyd:
About the author.
Alyssa Royse is a founder of NotSoSecret.com, a site dedicated to empowering women to discover their own sexuality. A writer by both passion and profession, she has worked in marketing, PR, education, theater and in the non-profit world. She was the founder of JUST CAUSE Magazine, an all-digital magazine dedicated to social change – before people knew what digital magazines were, making it an altruistic and unintentionally non-profit venture. Fast Company named her one of the top 50 entrepreneurs in the world, and PR News said she was one of the best PR professionals under 35. She is constantly writing, about all sorts of things, most of which you can read about on her personal blog, AlyssaRoyse.com. You can follow her on twitter @alyssaroyse.A person with direct knowledge of the NHL’s decision says the league has settled on Las Vegas as its choice for expansion, provided organizers can come up with a $500 million fee.
The person spoke Tuesday on condition of anonymity because details have not been released by the league ahead of its Board of Governors meeting on June 22 in Las Vegas. Quebec City was also considered for expansion.
A second person who had been briefed on the decision said Las Vegas was a “done deal” following the recommendation of the NHL’s executive committee.
The 2017-18 season would be the earliest the league would expand.
The franchise would be the NHL’s 31st team and the first major professional sports franchise in Las Vegas, the rapidly growing gambling centre of the American West.
The NHL hasn’t expanded since 2000, when Minnesota and Columbus paid $80 million each to join the league. Prospective Vegas owner Bill Foley is a wealthy businessman who isn’t likely to blink at the raised price tag proposed by NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman as an expansion fee.
The Las Vegas bid says it has secured more than 13,200 season-ticket deposits for the new team, which will play in T-Mobile Arena, the sparkling new multipurpose building on the south end of the Las Vegas Strip. The arena, which seats 17,500 for hockey, was built entirely with private money by MGM Resorts International and Anschutz Entertainment Group, the owners of the Los Angeles Kings.
The Las Vegas area had nearly 2.2 million people in the 2010 census, making it the largest population centre in the U.S. without a major pro sports franchise. The days when sports leagues were wary of the potential corruption of Vegas’ massive sports betting scene have all but vanished, making the city an attractive candidate for sports looking to get in on a growing market.
The Oakland Raiders have held serious discussions with Vegas leaders in recent months about a move to Nevada, with owner Mark Davis suggesting he and his partners could build a $1.4 billion domed stadium near the Strip with substantial public money. But Foley and the NHL have been working on a deal for much longer to bring hockey to the city — with the enormous advantage of an NHL-ready rink freshly opened in town.
The NHL has debated expansion for a few years, with Seattle and the Toronto suburbs also generating interest for another team. Bettman has said he doesn’t worry about the league’s product suffering from dilution.
Quebec City has a strong bid for expansion, but owners have expressed concerns about the strength of the Canadian dollar and a geographical imbalance if they add another team to the Eastern Conference, which currently has 16 teams to the West’s 14.
Even with the serious financial woes of the Arizona Coyotes, who were essentially owned by the league for several years while struggling to find permanent leadership, the NHL apparently remains confident in its belief that hockey can thrive in a non-traditional Southwest market.
Vegas is in the middle of the Mojave Desert, but it has grown as a hockey town over the past 20 years since local youngsters like Jason Zucker, now with the Minnesota Wild, had to practice on one of the three rinks in town. The IHL’s Las Vegas Thunder attracted large crowds in the 1990s when they played at the Thomas and Mack Center, and the ECHL’s Las Vegas Wranglers took the Thunder’s place until 2014 while playing at the Orleans Arena.
Foley hasn’t said what he will call his new team, but the bid is run by a company named Black Knight Sports and Entertainment, the same name as his financial services company. Foley graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
AP Sports Writer Tim Reynolds and AP Hockey Writer John Wawrow contributed to this report.If you think congestion is bad today, consider that population growth and increasing urbanisation is expected to see an additional 2.5 billion people living in cities by 2050, according to a United Nations report published earlier this year. For those unable or unwilling to cycle, the future may hold travel by networked electric vehicles; autonomous pods that can be hailed like a cab and bridge the gap between public and private transport. However, a Dutch company believes the answer to personal and light commercial transport in our evermore crowded cities is the Johanson3: a contemporary take on the rickshaw.
Cycle Insurance Quick Quote Bike Value (£) Maximum value £5,000 Postcode What's included?
The Johanson3 is a simple approach to personal mobility for short and mid-range distances. It provides a stable platform for carrying goods or passengers and because the rider stands rather than sits, the design accommodates people of all ages with a height from 1m to 1.95m.
Conventional trikes can feel very awkward when cornering, but the johnson3 tilts like a bicycle.
According to Johann Neerman, designer of the Johnanson3, “Times have changed. As modern and advanced as an urban public transport system is, it hangs on to concepts from the past. Infrastructure with rails and electrification remains costly despite the improvements we have seen in the last decade. Cities of the future belong to e-taxis, e-logistics and personal mobility. We need eco-friendly personal mobility vehicles during the day and appropriate vehicles to allow goods to travel during the night and early mornings.”
The johanson3 costs from £1,600 and can be pre-ordered at http://johanson3.com/
Cycle insurance from the ETA covers electric bikes and trikes up to 250W against theft (including battery), accidental damage as standard. It also includes third party cover and cycle breakdown.
Cycle Insurance Quick Quote Bike Value (£) Maximum value £5,000 Postcode What's included?
Butchers & Bicycles based in the meatpacking district of Copenhagen (hence the name) has recently started selling the MK1 – a leaning cargo trike designed to retain the performance and fun of a conventional bike.
British city cyclists regularly reach their destination quicker than any other mode of transport, and yet, for the most part, rarelt venture beyond road bikes and MTBs. Elsewhere in Europe, the bicycle is considered a practical alternative to the car and certain designs have evolved to carry loads of up to 250 kg. Such cargo bikes tend to be big, heavy and relatively slow, but the MK1 aims to challenge the perception of how fun and easy riding a cargo bike can be without compromising usability.
Carrying kids
Christiania cargo trikes are being bought in increasing numbers in London, not only by businesses looking for an environmentally-friendly way of bypassing the congestion charge, but by parents looking for a practical and fun alternative to the car for the school run.
When it comes to transporting young children by bike, especially on the school run, there are various options to choose between.
By far the simplest and most popular is the child seat fitted onto the rear rack, but on a standard bike it is not possible to carry more than one child in this way.
In Denmark, particularly in Copenhagen, a significant majority of families with two or more kids cycle their little ones around in a very interesting looking tricycle called a Christiania. There is a choice between a standard-sized model, which can fit two to three kids, and a longer version, which could fit four very comfortably, and even up to six.
The box where the kids sit is in front, so both the parents and the kids get the advantage of a good view, while the parent can also keep an eye on the kids while safely manoeuvring them about. The alternative option – of a trailer that attaches to a normal bike – isn’t as comfortable or fun for the kids as they mainly see the cyclist’s bottom in front of them.
The Christiania tricycle also has the great advantage over a child seat that there is loads of space for all kinds of shopping, even when fully loaded with kids. In fact, the space is comparable to the boot space in a small family car.
Cycle insurance
The ETA offers fully comprehensive cycle insurance to cover your road bike, folder, hybrid, pedelec or cargo bike. Custom builds are also welcome. Every policy includes as standard, protection against theft, accidental damage and vandalism as well as £5m third party cover. Get an instant online quoteThursday on Mark Levin’s syndicated radio show, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), a candidate for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, took aim at President Barack Obama and his foreign policy in the wake of Russia’s new presense in war-torn Syria.
Cruz described the situation in the world to be like “Lord of the Flies” and pointed to the lack of limits on aggression of “bad actors” in the world as evidence.
“America has retreated from the world,” Cruz said. “Every bad actor on earth has taken the measure of President Obama and determined that he is no credible threat whatsoever. For the next 16 months, we are in a Hobbesian state of nature, it is like ‘Lord of the Flies,’ where the only limit on misconduct and aggression of bad actors is the limit of their own strength.
(h/t RCP Video)
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There is a singular truth about the 2016 presidential election that few are willing to talk about. Even within his own party, Republicans don’t believe that Donald Trump will win the White House.
A Washington Post telling of the scene at a recent fundraiser illustrated the GOP’s lack of confidence in their nominee:
At an intimate fundraiser Wednesday for Rep. Joseph J. Heck (R-Nev.), who is running for the Senate, McConnell asked the group of about a dozen supporters how many of them think Trump can win. About half of the attendees raised their hands. But when McConnell then asked how many thought Trump would win, no hands went up, and the room fell silent, according to a person familiar with the scene who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a closed event.
The Republican attitude about Trump can be boiled down to the answers to two questions. Can he win? Maybe. Will he win? Republicans solidly believe that he won’t.
To be fair, Trump appears to be actively campaigning to undermine the confidence of Republicans, but it is a stark commentary on the state of the presidential race when a political party has so little faith in their own nominee. Donald Trump has a puncher’s chance of winning because he is one of the two major party nominees, but the reality is that even the Republican Party doesn’t think that he will be the next President Of The United States.
If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human:× Upset Chiefs Fans Raising Funds To Voice Displeasure With Team
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A group of Kansas City Chiefs fans is so upset with the team, they plan to fly a banner over Arrowhead Stadium before Sunday’s game against the Baltimore Ravens voicing their displeasure.
According to a Chiefs fan who goes by the handle pc_capone at ChiefsPlanet.com, the banner will read, “WE DESERVE BETTER! FIRE PIOLI – BENCH CASSEL”.
That refers to Chiefs general manager Scott Pioli, who put the team together, and starting quarterback Matt Cassel, who has thrown seven interceptions and given up three fumbles in the past four games.
In the post, the fan says the cost to fly such a banner costs $725, but the pilot agreed to reduce the price by $100 because he “believes we are doing God’s work.”
As of 3 a.m. Wednesday morning, this fan had raised $1270.61 from donations sent in by Chiefs fans throughout the nation.
The fan is encouraging others to continue donating with plans to use the remaining money to fly other banners at future home games.
A plane will pull the banner over Arrowhead Stadium between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. Sunday morning.
Click here to learn more about this effort.By Jordan Snowden
Even if you haven’t stepped foot inside Comet Ping Pong, at some point you’ve probably seen one of Sophie McTear’s unique designs. The talented 20-year-old recently became the club’s junior designer, solidifying their foothold as one of the city’s rising artists. McTear’s distinctive designs mix their love and passion of music with minimalist styles and dark and light themes, creating eye-catching illustrations that have garnered plenty of praise throughout the music community.
We recently spoke with McTear to find out more about this accomplished artist, including leaving school to pursue their dreams, what inspires their unique designs and more.
D.C. Music Download: At only 20 years old, you’re already making a name for yourself within the art and music community. What were some of the challenges you’ve faced in order to get to this point?
Sophie McTear: I’m still facing challenges, in all honesty. Being an artist is obviously not the most lucrative job out there. I work retail most days, but finding time to do my art has been a bit of a challenge lately. My days have been mostly working, sleeping and not much in-between. I withdrew from university this past year to focus on my art, but with that comes a lot of stigma.
DCMD: When you dropped out of school, how did your friends and family react to your decision? Were they supportive with your choice?
SM: As far as the support of friends and family, they’ve been pretty supportive, though I don’t have really constant communication with a big part of my family. Some of my friends at George Washington University were apprehensive. Someone who I had been really close with told me I’d regret it, but I haven’t yet. I strongly believe if I was still there I’d have another mental breakdown. My health is the most important thing to me, and after that comes my artwork and livelihood.
DCMD: How did you get started with art and graphic design?
SM: Well, in high school I had played with a few Adobe programs. When I got to college I saw an ad for a job at the student newspaper for a design assistant. I applied and was accepted. After a few months there, I was moved up to design editor and spent almost two years running the print newspaper, The Hatchet, at GW. I had a really great time there, and it allowed me to be able to focus on improving my technical skills.
For a while, I was working an office job where there was a lot of downtime, so I would spend my free moments teaching myself how to improve on Adobe Illustrator. After that, I kind of just put my art out there and started drawing and designing for my friends who were in bands. Some of my first projects were T-shirt designs for Kissing Fractures and Makeshift Shelters.
I then met the ladies from Comet at a poster workshop run by Jourdan Betette, also known as Magickbat Design. We all clicked and I was added to the team there. I’ve been working on more and more posters since then, and have enjoyed it so much.
DCMD: Similar to how you got started, what is your creative background? Did you always like to illustrate or is it something you just sort of got into?
SM: I guess I sort of got ahead of myself earlier with my creative history. I’ve always loved art and everything to do with it, but in school I always leaned toward academics. In high school, I graduated like fourth out of 600 kids and was obsessed with my grades, so I had to put art on the back burner.
When I got to college I was majoring in political communication, but I only really enjoyed myself when I was working on the creative side of that (i.e. designing a logo, website or making a video). I then realized I wasn’t happy where I was, and decided to focus entirely on my visual and design futures.
DCMD: What inspires your designs?
SM: As cheesy as it sounds, the music itself. When preparing my work, I’ll listen to the band and write down adjectives, whether it be things to describe the genre or visual things that come to mind. I also am very inspired by things I’ve seen in passing. I’ll jot down notes when I’m on the Metro, maybe like the graffiti I pass on the red line or even someone’s outfit. Other things will just sort of float through my mind, like weird combinations of images. I like to mix dark and light ideas. I’ve wanted to design a baby’s mobile with fish carcasses on it. That sounds really strange when I say it out loud.
DCMD: Are there any artists that you look up to?
SM: Definitely. Obviously Jourdan. I also follow a lot of artists and tattoo artists on Instagram that I’m always drooling over. Think Tenderfoot Studio, Benjamin Constantine, Nomi Chi and Audra Auclair. A few people that are local or I have mutual friends with that make art that I obsess over are Corey Purvis, Alex Morante, Beau Brynes and Lauren Moran. Honestly, if you were to look through my Instagram follows you’d see a ton of awesome artists.
DCMD: How do you go about designing a poster?
SM: I usually begin with a general concept or a color scheme. Sometimes I’ll find an awesome texture online that I’m dying to use. I like incorporating flat colors with a bit of texture.
DCMD: Out of the posters you’ve designed, which ones stand out to you and why do they mean so much?
SM: A few of my favorites are ones I’ve made for CD Cellar, like the Grim Reaper I did holding a bouquet of flowers.
I’m also really proud of my double feature for the sold-out Frankie Cosmos/Girlpool show at Comet Ping Pong. It meant a lot because they’re two of my favorite bands, and it was also one of the first times I had sold my posters at a show. I sold out! It was a really nice feeling, and made me feel good about my work. Being an artist can be really frustrating sometimes, with self-doubt and comparing yourself to others, but ultimately the best thing to do is always strive to be the best you can possibly be.
Check out more of McTear’s work on Facebook and TumblrEvery parent-to-be knows one fact about the next few years: They'll have many, many sleepless nights.
While some of those will come from the erratic sleep schedules of their children, many more may stem from the increasingly expensive price of child care. With the millennial generation now becoming parents, this group of adults is getting hit with the double whammy of juggling student debt repayments and surging child care costs, which have jumped by about 70 percent since the mid-80s (in constant 2011 dollars), according to the Census Bureau.
In some states, the cost of child care is even more expensive than annual tuition at a public university. Parents in Massachusetts face $16,430 in yearly child care costs, Pew Research found last year. While some families are buckling down and adjusting their budgets, others are asking relatives for help or have made the tough choice to scale back on work because the cost of child care may in some cases outpace their own earnings.
Millennials now biggest part of workforce
More than three-quarters of mothers and half of fathers said they've switched jobs, quit or given up work opportunities to take care of their children, a Washington Post poll found earlier this month. A majority of parents described the cost of child care in their region as somewhat to very expensive.
"We now have sort of 21st century expectations, and we still have, in some ways, a 20th century system," where "everybody's doing everything on a shoestring," Marcy Whitebook, director and founder of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California at Berkeley, told Bloomberg.
At the same time, millennials are already struggling with student debt and depressed wages, thanks to the lingering effects of the Great Recession. Employees who start their careers during a downturn earn as much as 9 percent less annually than those who don't for about 15 years after they enter the work force, the White House noted in a 2014 report on millennials. As a consequence, the generation isn't making as much money as their parents did at their age.
Millennials, who range in age from 18 to 34, are just starting to have children, although so far their birth rates are lagging previous generations. The birth rate among American women in their 20s fell 15 percent between 2007 to 2012, marking an abrupt change from three decades of relatively stable rates, the Urban Institute found earlier this year. Economic pressures may be one reason for the decline.
Julie Waltz-Stalker told the Washington Post she had wanted to return to work after her daughter was born, but she realized that her pay as an elementary school art teacher wouldn't cover the day-care bill. Waltz-Stalker, 31, has been at home for three years with her daughter.
"I want to work. I can't afford it," she said. "And as time passes, I feel more behind and less qualified to go back."
Millennials' saving habits help debunk stereotype
Those tough decisions may have implications for parents as the years roll on. The gender pay gap -- the phenomenon where women make less money than men who perform the same job -- may be partly due to some women deciding to stay at home with their children or cut back hours, which can depress earnings later on in their careers.
Why is child care so expensive? It's not due to the pay earned by early childhood education workers, who often turn to government programs such as food stamps to make ends meet. These workers make a median wage of $10.60 an hour, or less than what dog trainers earn, according to a study published last year from the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment.
It found that while child care costs have risen sharply, early education workers haven't seen a real rise in earnings. Instead, the higher child care costs are due to issues such as higher rents, more expensive food and meager government funding.
While President Barack Obama has touted early education as one of the country's priorities, scant resources are devoted to it. Government spending in the U.S. on child care was less than 0.5 percent of GPD, compared with more than 1 percent for France, New Zealand, the U.K. and the Nordic countries, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development said last year.Energetic adaptations in response to RYGB‐induced weight loss are associated with changes in insulin, adipokines, thyroid hormones, gut hormones, and sympathetic nervous system activity and persists 12 months postsurgery.
In the RYGB group, mean weight loss was 44 ± 19 kg at 12 months. Total energy expenditure (TEE), activity EE, basal metabolic rate (BMR), sleep EE, and walking EE significantly declined by 1.5 months ( P = 0.001) and remained suppressed at 6 and 12 months. Adjusted for age, sex, fat‐free mass, and fat mass, EE was still lower than baseline ( P = 0.001). Decreases in serum insulin, leptin, and triiodothyronine (T3), gut hormones, and urinary norepinephrine (NE) paralleled the decline in EE. Adjusted changes in TEE, BMR, and/or sleep EE were associated with decreases in insulin, homeostatic model assessment, leptin, thyroid stimulating hormone, total T3, peptide YY3‐36, glucagon‐like peptide‐2, and urinary NE and epinephrine ( P = 0.001‐0.05).
At baseline and at 1.5, 6, and 12 months post‐baseline, 24‐h room calorimetry, body composition, and fasting blood biochemistries were measured in 11 obese adolescents relative to five matched controls.
Energetic adaptations induced by bariatric surgery have not been studied in adolescents or for extended periods postsurgery. Energetic, metabolic, and neuroendocrine responses to Roux‐en‐Y gastric bypass (RYGB) surgery were investigated in extremely obese adolescents.
Introduction Bariatric surgery induces massive reductions in body weight that are associated with energetic adaptations that favor weight regain 1. These adaptations involve multiple signals including regulatory hormones from the gastrointestinal tract and pancreas impacting glucose homeostasis, adipokines affecting inflammation and insulin resistance, and the hypothalamic–pituitary axis regulating energy balance in part through thyroid, autonomic nervous system, and adrenal mediators 2, 3. The metabolic changes induced by bariatric surgery result in resolution or improvement in obesity‐related comorbidities including type 2 diabetes, hyperlipidemia, liver disease, obstructive sleep apnea, pseudotumor cerebri, hypertension, and psychological disorders 3. Inevitably, bariatric surgery induces some loss of fat‐free mass (FFM), which is undesirable as FFM is responsible for the majority of basal metabolism, regulation of core body temperature, cardiopulmonary function, and skeletal integrity and mobility. For extremely obese adolescents who have been unable to achieve a healthy weight with conventional treatment, Roux‐en‐Y gastric bypass (RYGB) surgery is an option 4. RYGB is a diversionary procedure which creates a very small gastric pouch considerably restricting meal size and promoting early satiety. A surgical anastomosis connects the gastric pouch to the mid‐jejunum using a 125‐150 cm Roux limb, diverting ingested macronutrients and micronutrients from the duodenum, decreasing the efficiency of micronutrient absorption 5. Dietary energy restriction and weight loss elicit energetic adaptations or compensatory |
ner, 28, contemplated how many calories she had burned: “I’d much rather be dancing with all these people than in a gym.”
A couple of dozen people stayed and sat for a kind of closing sermon about intentionality that ended with a solo tap-dancing performance. Outside, a man handed out postcards advertising another early-morning dance party, put on by a competing organization, that would take place the next day. (“You’re not all danced out for the week, are you?”)KABUL (Reuters) - A suicide bomber blew himself up at a bank close to the heavily protected U.S. embassy in the Afghan capital Kabul on Tuesday, killing at least five people and wounding eight, the interior ministry said.
The bomber hit the entrance to a Kabul Bank branch in the well-off area of Kabul, close to the main diplomatic quarter, ministry spokesman Najib Danish said. He said at least five people had been killed and eight wounded.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, which came as banks were busy with people taking out money ahead of the Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday at the end of the week, saying it had targeted soldiers and police withdrawing their salaries.
The latest in a long series of suicide attacks in Kabul highlight the danger in the city, where 209 civilians were killed and 777 injured in the first half of the year, according to U.N. figures.
The Taliban, fighting to restore Islamic law and drive out international forces backing the government in Kabul, have carried out many of the attacks. Other militant groups, including the affiliated Haqqani network and the local branch of Islamic State, have carried out others.
Attacks on banks where soldiers and police withdraw their salaries have become a regular tactic of the Taliban and the movement’s spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said several members of the security forces had been killed. There was no confirmation from the government.
President Ashraf Ghani’s government, facing growing public anger over insecurity in Kabul, has started tightening checks around the center of the city, where many of the most deadly attacks have taken place.Felt dares to do something that not even British Cycling has done
This is the Felt TA FRD track bike that the USA will be using at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, and at first glance it looks like any other track bike. But wait, something’s not quite right here. Yes, Felt’s engineers have done something that not even the secret squirrel club at British Cycling have dared to do and moved the drivetrain to the left side of the bike.
>>> Rio 2016 Olympics Games: Who will be riding for Team GB?
The reason for this, according to Felt, is that bikes are faster when the airflow is coming from the drivetrain side, so as the air will always be coming from the left when riding anti-clockwise around a velodrome, it switch the drivetrain to that side.
And as an added bonus, Felt also says that this change improves handling as the bike’s weight and centre of gravity is moved to the inside when riding around the banking.
Watch: how much faster is an aero bike?
Another change is that the Felt TA FRD track bike now features asymmetric tube shapes, which basically means that the aerofoil tubes have been reshaped to be at their best with airflow coming from the left-hand side of the bike, while the ability to design the new bike from the ground up and to work closely with HED to design the wheels, has enable Felt to narrow the front and rear dropouts.
>>> Icons of cycling: UK Sports Institute track bike
The radical bike will be used by USA’s women’s team pursuit squad who finished second behind Great Britain in the 2012 Olympics, while the men’s squad failed to qualify for Rio.The Stone Roses will headline the first night of T in the Park 2016.
The indie totems were widely expected to announce live dates amid feverish speculation that the band were ready to return to the stage.
Their official Twitter account confirmed their return to Scotland on social media.
The Stone Roses are the first act to be confirmed for the 2016 festival which takes place at Strathallan Castle. They will headline on Friday 8th July.
The full original line-up of Ian Brown, John Squire, Mani and Reni reformed for a series of gigs in 2012 after an acrimonious split following their second album.
The live shows were some of the hottest tickets in the last few years with the band retaining a special place in the affections of music fans.
Recent rumours have centred on an anticipated announcement of new material and live dates.
Tonight’s announcement confirmed three shows, with two dates at Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium on Friday 17th and Saturday 18th June alongside their T in the Park appearance.This is the state of the left today. They are so filled with rage about losing power that they openly applaud each other for expressing their hatred of Republicans.
At a recent city council meeting in Seattle, the openly socialist member of the council received applause for her anti-Republican remarks.
The Seattle Times reported:
In Seattle, is it now taboo to be friends with a Republican?
Trending: New York Governor Andrew Cuomo Blames State’s Budget Shortfall On Residents Fleeing To Florida
Can we just get along?
This question is being asked more and more, what with the bitter polarization of the nation. The answer, right now, would appear to be a resounding no.
It’s not because we can’t. We don’t want to.
I had that thought the other day when I was listening to the Seattle City Council. Many council meetings of late involve left-wingers shouting at other left-wingers for not being left-wing enough. But on this day, a new purity test of left-wingedness was revealed…
One council member, Tim Burgess, tried to highlight this basic agreement by noting that “even some of our Republican friends” have been calling for seismic changes to the incarceration system. Burgess cited an article by the Seattle brothers Mike and John McKay, former U.S. attorneys and, yep, both Republicans, who excoriated their own party’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, for calling for harsher sentences even on low-level crimes.
Kshama Sawant wasn’t having any of that. She stood up and said Burgess wasn’t speaking for her with this “our Republican friends” stuff. Because, she assured the crowd, she doesn’t have any Republican friends.
Yay, cheered the crowd.
Make no mistake. These people don’t want to meet in the middle and find solutions to America’s problems. They want to defeat conservatives who they see as enemies and they’ll do anything to win.To be honest I really didn't need to buy these since they are quite a bit more casual and chunky than what I'm wanting to wear nowadays but at less than $50 and welt construction I figured this would be my chance to try them out and maybe use these as guinea pigs for local shoe cobbler service down the road since our cobblers here by and large have had mixed reviews.
I ordered the tan since it came with the discounted price and as usual the colour is (preferably) not quite as pictured - it's more vibrant as opposed to the dull looking finish from the stock images. It resembles a dull yellow mustard and luckily is not the golden yellow that is ubiquitous with the Timberland work boot with the padded collar.
First off, the right top cap at the seam was sewn too far up vs. the left boot so it rolls over the stitching and creates a "bump". It's definitely noticeable by itself and is very much a QC issue though entirely cosmetic. It bothers me but not enough to request an exchange. There have also been reports of poor stitching at the welt so spotty quality control might be something to expect before you order. However for me I tend to have lesser expectations at these price points.
Again, at this price there are details, seemingly minute and could be tolerated depending on the persons but are cons nonetheless. The tongue width is lacking at the top as it tends to shift over a touch but enough to have one side of the tongue slip through. It is gusseted however. Naturally at this price range the leather quality can't compare to the household names (1000 Mile, Red Wing, Alden) and these are well below Chippewa's GQ Lacer but for what it's worth it is a fairly pliable full grain with a padded tongue and far ahead of what you find from fashion brands still (and for less money to boot). The collar is padded but in my experience the inner liner on these will wear from the constant contact as the material appears and feels man-made (as indicated inside the tongue) so I'd wager that they'll start to wear over time and the foam will come through. The D-hook eyelets look sturdy enough but for those who like to really tighten down their laces I can see these deforming with repeated use. The laces seem a little thick for the spacing on the D-hooks (or the hooks themselves are too narrow) as the laces do not glide around them. The laces themselves run long even though I prefer wider lace spacing. The insole is comfortable enough but is thinly padded but feels horribly cheap and seems to be made of similar material as the inner collar (man-made). It provides unnecessary friction as you slip these on with socks so an insole investment may be worthwhile.
Goodyear welt construction means these can be re-soled but I feel this feature is probably redundant given that the lower leather quality despite being full grain is probably not worth re-soling and would actually be cheaper just to buy new instead.
As my feet tend to show displeasure rather immediately (pinky toes being cramped) these were extremely comfortable out of the box and should require minimal break-in. I have E width feet with a higher in-step and it fits well at the tongue with good room at the vamp and toe box.
As for sizing the reviews are all over the place so I was mostly worried on purchasing the wrong size since these were not fulfilled through Amazon. Anyway, I was expecting true-to-size but these absolutely run larger than that, in fact these run larger than other true-to-size brands. For comparison, with my cranky pinky toes and overall size, I am an 8D in my Red Wing Beckmans, 8D in Chippewa GQs, 8E Allen Edmonds 5 last and 7.5 in Converse Chucks so the 7.5 I had ordered had much length to spare. I could fit in a thick pair of socks and still have room in the toes thus a 7 would have best fit me and would still provide wiggle room up top. I would wager that for regular D width feet with a regular in-step in similar length 1 full size down from true-to-size is absolutely necessary and potentially up to 2 full sizes down from more typical fashion/mainstream/mall brands.
I noticed on the Amazon app that there was additional information in the product description not found on the website (as far as I could see) with Golden Fox listing bare foot measurements and what sizing you should correspond with for these boots. They are as follows:
Foot Length (heel to toe):
Size 7 = from 25-25.5cm
Size 7.5 = from 25.6-25.9cm
Size 8 = from 26-26.3cm
Size 8.5 = from 26.4-26.7cm
Size 9 = 26.8-27.2cm
Size 9.5 = 27.3-27.6cm
Size 10 = 27.7-28cm
Size 10.5 = 28.1-28.4cm
Size 11 = 28.5-28.9cm
Size 12 = 29cm-29.7cm
Size 13 = 29.8-30.6cm
As my foot measures roughly 255mm I should’ve gotten a size 7 based on this chart. This might be the most useful for you for sizing these boots.
What else can I say? You could easily do a lot worse in this price range. Obviously there are sacrifices but on the whole it’s a whole lot of boot for not much money. I'm looking forward to testing longevity since these will be my first boots that I'm willing to really beat the hell out of. Time will tell.
I have included photos of the toe box QC issue, tongue backside, leather upper inside, insole, outsole welt stitching and a before/after image from 1 treatment of Obenauf’s LP. Don't mind the Hello Kitty toaster in the background.A cube-shaped house on Vancouver’s Golden Mile that drew mixed reviews while it was being built is hitting the market Friday with an asking price of $14 million.
The 2,280-square-foot house on Point Grey Road has been described as “hideous” and a “box with a skirt” because of its shape, the stark, galvanized-steel exterior on the second-storey and the lack of windows on the south facade.
“If there’s just one window on that facade, there won’t be any comments,” said architect Tony Robins, with a chuckle.
Much of the criticism he received about the house was centred on the absence of windows, he said, during a tour of the completed home Thursday. “It was an affront to many, a challenge to their preconceptions of what a house is.”
But Robins said he’d argue there are more windows on this house than other houses, gesturing toward the generous bank of glass walls on the ground floor.
Even the second floor, which houses two bedrooms and two bathrooms, is unexpectedly bright, thanks to strategically placed windows and a large skylight.
An elevator connects all four levels of the home, from the four-vehicle garage to the rooftop balcony, which has views of the water and mountains.
Robins designed the house for a previous owner, who gave him free rein “based on her needs, but doing what I wanted.”
The owner then had to sell the house, which was bought by the current owner, who told Robins to carry on with the original design, but upped the level of quality of the home’s finishes.
The owner, who lives down the street, thought about moving in, but decided against it. The property is expected to be listed Friday for $14 million.
When the house was last purchased in late 2014, it sold for $3.5 million. The property was assessed at $6.2 million in 2017 — more than double the 2015 assessment.
Most homes for sale on Point Grey Road are listed for more than $10 million. A 3,000-square-foot older Tudor home three blocks away is priced at $17.8 million.
Realtor Loren Dunsworth said the future buyer will likely be “someone who likes architecture, who appreciates really fine things.”
The house isn’t for everyone, but would be a great fit for a single person or a couple who loves to entertain. “You’re selling a lifestyle with this house,” she said.
Nelson Hui, who also lives on Point Grey Road, thinks the house is a good addition to the neighbourhood.
“It’s an architecturally designed house,” he said, pausing from a jog. “Whoever built it built it for a specific reason.” It’s not his cup of tea, he added. “It’s only for certain people. Most people won’t like it but I think they did a good job.”
Robins said he’s happy with how the house turned out. Along with the criticism, he said, there has been much praise, including from other architects.
“I just have to do my best and think of it as attaining a level I’m trying for and hoping other people get it.”
As an architect, it’s always a challenge to have the product you envisaged from the beginning, he said. “There’s a lot of compromises — the city, the client. This time, I got lucky. It’s exactly what I wanted.”
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When Audrey Lorberfeld woke up in her Brooklyn apartment on Saturday, January 28, she was, like much of the country, angry. In the first week of his presidency, Donald Trump had already signed executive orders reinstating an expanded global gag rule, calling for the construction of a border wall between the United States and Mexico, reopening the possibility of the Dakota Access pipeline, and, on Friday, January 27, barring any travelers into the US from seven Muslim-majority countries.
Within hours of the order's signing, two Iraqis who'd flown into JFK—53-year-old Hameed Khalid Darweesh, arriving from Iraq, and 33-year-old Haider Sameer Abdulkhaleq Alshawi, arriving from Sweden—were detained. Overnight, while lawyers representing the two refugees worked to file a suit for their release, news of their detention spread, and by 11 AM on Saturday, organizations like the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC) had put out a call for protesters outside JFK's Terminal 4.
Read more: The Fight to Save London's Beloved Feminist Library
At 9 AM that same morning, Lorberfeld didn't know this mobilization was in the works, and she decided to get a protest going on her own. She gathered up all of the information so far available regarding the executive order—what it actually comprised, what had happened since the signing, which countries were (and weren't) being targeted, who the detainees were, and what their lawyers had been able to do until then—organized it into an easy-to-digest list with links to sources, and published it, albeit nervously, as the first post in a public Facebook event she created calling for a shutdown of JFK. When concerned strangers, many of whom were seasoned activists, pointed her in the direction of the NYIC, Lorberfeld updated the event—which was already spreading further and more quickly than she could have anticipated—and turned it into a supportive action for the protest already underway.
By 2 PM she was onsite with roughly 200 people, a crowd which, by the end of the night, would grow to more than two thousand.
The page she'd created that morning grew with the actual protest, becoming a space for people to share time-stamped news updates (and then fact-check those updates), seek ride shares, post live video feeds, coordinate deliveries of handwarmers and refreshments, and declare support from around the country and globe. It was a real-time, digital forum. Lorberfeld, who stayed at the protest until 6 PM but continued to post updates from home until ten, was relieved, humbled, and energized. She hadn't led the protest, but she'd supported it by finding and disseminating accurate information, providing a space for the open exchange of ideas, and engaging with the community—just as any librarian would do.
Librarians decide what gets preserved and how information is classified, which inherently affects how people find that information and who is likely to find it.
An impromptu protest at an airport without legal or organizational support could have gone very, very poorly. It is a move Lorberfeld, who currently splits her time between grad school and her job as digital technical specialist at the New York Academy of Medicine, would not recommend.
"Once I started getting emails from people I was like, 'Oh my God, what did I get myself into?'" she told me about a week after the protest. "I was super lucky that [the NYIC] protest that started before mine was planned to start. I want to be adamant that nothing I did on Saturday would've been able to happen without that."
Still, looking at the numbers on Lorberfeld's event page—which, at the time of this writing, shows 4,700 people invited, 3,200 interested, and 928 attending—one could assume Lorberfeld's supplementary organizing brought news of the ban and the protest to the attention of many, and perhaps encouraged some of that audience to show up. She helped sustain a protest that lasted nearly 12 hours, and in doing so, continued in a tradition of librarians using their professional skills to support civilian resistance.
That many librarians consider their role to be inherently political, and in some cases radical, might surprise a public whose perception of the job usually involves more shushing than rallying. But in recent history especially, librarians have played key roles in progressive movements. In 1960, the Library Journal condemned segregation in Southern libraries; in 1974 the American Library Association (ALA) endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment. In 1990, the ALA created the Hunger, Homelessness, and Poverty Task Force to disseminate information about poverty, and in 2003, Carla Diane Hayden—ALA president at the time, currently the first black and first female Librarian of Congress—fought for patron privacy in the face of the Patriot Act. "We are fighters for freedom, and we cause trouble!" she said in a 2003 profile in Ms. magazine. "We are not sitting quietly anymore."
Carla Hayden, current librarian of Congress. Screengrab via YouTube
Certainly not. This year, librarians showed up in droves to marches across the country, promising with their signs that they would "make America read again." But their professional expertise—whether in information literacy, privacy protection, coding, or research—gives them a unique ability to drive our culture and educate the electorate. Take New York–based librarian Alexandra Lederman and archivist Katie Martinez, who created a zine about data privacy and handed it out at the Women's March. Or Linden How and J. Turner Masland, in Portland, Oregon, who linked up to create a comprehensive reading list offering historical and theoretical contexts for US labor relations, environmentalism, civil rights, women's rights, and queer liberation movements.
Indeed, librarians' embrace of freely shared knowledge puts them at an advantage when it comes to organizing—especially online. Radical Reference launched in 2006 as an online support site connecting radical librarians with each other and with those who might need their services; now chapters across the country host meetups where librarians and archivists discuss ways they can use their free time and skills to fight for social justice and equality. (Lorberfeld, Lederman, and Martinez are all members of the New York collective.)
There's also Libraries4BlackLives, which launched in July 2016 to empower librarians to keep racial justice at the core of their work, and #LibrariesResist, which launched shortly after the inauguration to offer resources and support. In Storytime Underground, a Facebook group for youth services librarians, members have been sharing ideas for books about refugees, ways to celebrate World Hijab day, and protest signs for displays.
In a political climate where truth is dismissed, it can be difficult to figure out where politics end and moral, or even professional, imperatives begin.
But not all librarians can resist so openly. Ana, 31, has been a public librarian in a "very rich, very red" county in Florida for the past two years, but she's originally from Puerto Rico. (She has requested we omit her last name.) She and her coworkers know being anti-Trump puts them in the minority where they live; over the phone, she recounted to me how, after the election, they huddled, cried, and comforted each other. This is a key difference between working for public and private libraries, and it gets to the core of a debate that has rattled the industry for decades: Should a library be politically neutral?
For Ana, who serves and is answerable to a community largely happy with the election results, resistance manifests creatively. When her library was celebrating its 15th anniversary, just about a month after the election, she suggested they throw a quinceañera. The community, and the library funders, were thrilled.
"I got a band to play Latin music," she told me over the phone. "We held bilingual programs all throughout the month. The city is relatively diverse, but the leadership is not, so I did it to showcase and highlight Latino culture, to celebrate that diversity."
It was a way of fighting for an issue she cares about—Latino visibility and empowerment—without being partisan. But in a political climate where truth is dismissed, diversity is disdained, and free access to resources is a radical notion, it can be difficult to figure out where politics end and moral, or even professional, imperatives begin.
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"There are things that librarians and libraries absolutely cannot remain neutral on, including defending intellectual privacy and intellectual freedom," said Linden How—which is to say that sometimes, the very act of a librarian doing her job can resemble activism.
"Librarians decide what gets preserved and how information is classified, which inherently affects how people find that information and who is likely to find it," said Lorberfeld. It's the who—the almost sacred relationship between librarian and patron—that inspires these librarians to resist a status quo that aims to further disenfranchise the people they serve.
Chantez Neymoss of Charlotte, North Carolina, echoed the sentiment, describing librarians as "radical protectors of information and their communities." It's not hard to see how political protest can feel like an extension of the job. When hateful rhetoric encourages hate crimes, the preservation of safe spaces and cultural exchange is even more vital. When "alternative" facts are legitimized, information literacy must be emphasized. When the future of public education is under threat, continued access to free and unlimited information is paramount. And when a travel ban promises to keep out immigrants and refugees, those who serve immigrant and refugee communities are impelled to fight it.DALLAS - They say revenge is a dish best served cold, and an arctic blast rolled through the Cotton Bowl on Sunday afternoon.
After being knocked out of the Dallas Cup Semifinal last year by eventual-champion Everton and watching the Premier League Academy side celebrate on their own field at Toyota Stadium, the FC Dallas U-18s were out to send a message in the 2017 tournament opening re-match.
They did just that with a dismantling 5-0 win over the Gordon Jago Super Group defending champions.
"[Head coach Francisco] Molina even said before the game, 'If you ever feel like giving up, remember how they celebrated on our field last year.' It was heartbreaking because we knew we deserved that game," said defender Reggie Cannon, who was a member of last year's U-18 squad that came within one game of the Final. "It was great to come out here and do what we do best with that vengeance from last year."
From the opening whistle, FCD dominated the match with a trio of Homegrown signings bolstering the lineup. Cannon, forward Jesus Ferreira and midfielder Paxton Pomykal all returned to their roots for the week, and their presence was unquestionably felt.
Ferreira notched a goal and two assists in a dominating performance, Pomykal tucked a shot late in the first half just inside the far side post and Cannon was a constant overlapping threat down the right side from his outside back position.
Their performances were matched by some of the stars of the U-18 roster as well. Shaft Brewer enjoyed one of his best performances since joining the Academy this season with a goal and assisting both of the Homegrown goals, Brandon Terwege was an equal threat down the opposite wing from his position at left back and Aldo Quevedo single-handedly forced a defensive turnover in the second half and buried his ensuing point-blank opportunity.
"We just wanted to come out here and start out strong and have a good foundation for the rest of the tournament," team captain Terwege said after the match. "We wanted to start off strong, but at the same time we can't get too far ahead of ourselves. We still have two games left and depending on the next few games, how we did in this game could not matter."
As the oldest Dallas Academy team heads into those next two matches, the biggest positive from Sunday was just how seamlessly the three professionals meshed back into a roster they haven't practiced with over the last few months.
"We had an awesome game, worked for each other and played our hearts out," Pomykal said. "We came from the Academy, so it's a pretty easy adjustment to switch and play exactly like we used to play. It's not anything new for us because we've been there and played with them."
"It's easy, they play the same as the pros, we have kind of the same style so it wasn't hard to acclimate in with them, it's just how we work together," Ferreira added. "It's always great to be playing the sport we love, and to do it with my brothers is amazing."
The 18s will return to action on Monday night as they face Liga MX's C.F. Monterrey U-19s at 6:00 at MoneyGram Soccer Park.
Lineup
(4-2-3-1): Carlos Mercado; Brandon Terwege (Arturo Rodriguez - 77'), Brecc Evans, Mark Salas, Reggie Cannon (Jacob Goyen - 79'); Adrian Ramos (Cole Guindon - 79'), Brandon Servania; Aldo Quevedo, Paxton Pomykal (Benji Granillo - 72'), Shaft Brewer; Jesus Ferreira (Blake Willis - 74')
Scoring Summary
FCD: Shaft Brewer (Jesus Ferreira) - 17'
FCD: Paxton Pomykal (Shaft Brewer) - 36'
FCD: Brecc Evans (Jesus Ferreira) - 56'
FCD: Aldo Quevedo - 63'
FCD: Jesus Ferreira (Shaft Brewer) - 66'A closely watched skirmish over the cost of prescription drugs has ended in defeat for a company that sought to challenge the right of a Canadian agency to impose a price cap on a pricey medicine.
In a June 23 ruling, Canada’s Federal Court dismissed a constitutional challenge that Alexion Pharmaceuticals filed against the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board, which early last year sought to keep a lid on the cost of the company’s Soliris medication. The board released the decision two days ago.
The medicine is used to treat a pair of rare diseases and costs either US$383,000 or US$585,000, depending upon the ailment being treated. The government agency had asked Alexion to lower its price and repay sales generated by the drug from 2012 through the first half of 2014.
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The conflict was only the latest instance in which a government pushed back against the cost of prescription medicines. But this particular battle had wider implications. Beyond disputing specific allegations made by the board, Alexion took the unprecedented step of challenging the agency’s power to impose pricing caps.
In dismissing the case, the Federal Court agreed with the attorney general of Canada that the challenge was “bereft of any chance of success,” according to the ruling. In explaining its reasoning, the court noted that the constitutionality of the board and its ability to regulate pricing has been upheld on several other occasions in Canadian courts.
“It is far from surprising,” said Richard Gold, a professor at McGill University who specializes in intellectual property. “Alexion may still appeal in hopes that the Supreme Court of Canada will alter the law. I think the [possibility that the court will find] the provisions unconstitutional are remote. Parliament can create and limit patent rights as it wishes, but pharmaceutical companies have been known for being obstinate in the face of logic.”
An Alexion spokeswoman wrote us that the company is “disappointed” with the decision and will file an appeal today. “We continue to contest the [board’s] allegation that Alexion charges more in Canada for Soliris than in other comparator countries. We have and will continue to negotiate the cost of Soliris with each of the [Canadian] provinces as they require.”
The dispute arose from a comparative pricing mechanism used by the board. Canadian rules require that drug prices should not be higher than the median price found in seven other countries — the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and Switzerland. And the board determined that Alexion set “the highest international price” for Soliris.
Alexion argued that Soliris pricing had not changed or increased in Canada, or dropped elsewhere since the medicine was introduced there in 2009. The company also maintained any pricing difference was due to exchange rate fluctuations, which are outside of its control. But some patients were unable to obtain Soliris due to the cost, according to patient support groups in Canada.
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Soliris is used to combat paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria, or PNH, a genetic disease that destroys red blood cells, and atypical hemolytic uremic syndrome, or aHUS, which is a progressive and life-threatening disease that affects the immune system. The drug generated nearly all of Alexion’s $2.6 billion in revenue last year (see page 58).
For aHUS patients, dosing is based on weight, but the overall price per patient, on average, is similar to PNH. The company has previously explained that a high proportion of aHUS patients are babies and children, and the average cost per year for this group is $80,000. The drug maker argued that the board had cited the highest price in the highest weight category for aHUS.
This post was updated to note that Soliris accounted for nearly all of the company’s $2.6 billion in revenue last year. It was incorrectly stated initially.You would think from the Israeli reactions (even, surprisingly, from Haaretz) that the title of the UNESCO resolution passed on Thursday was, “There Was Never Any Jewish Temple In the First Place.” Haaretz’s headline said the agency was guilty of “nullifying Jewish ties to Temple Mount.” Isaac Herzog said UNESCO was “completely invent[ing] the fantasy that the Western Wall and Temple Mount have no connection to the Jewish people.” You can imagine what Netanyahu and the right wing were saying.
This is Israeli propaganda that I’m sorry Haaretz fell for. (I don’t expect any better from Herzog.)
The resolution, put forward by the Palestinians and six Muslim countries, protests Israel’s actions in and around the Temple Mount and against Muslims praying or seeking to pray there. (Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock stand on the site.)
No mention of these complaints, however, is made in Israel. The only thing in the resolution that got noticed here was that it referred to the Temple Mount, which is what Jews and Christians call the place, only as “Al-Haram al-Sharif” – the “Noble Sanctuary,” which is what Muslims call it. (The measure also referred to the Western Wall as “Al-Buraq Plaza” followed by the words “Western Wall Plaza,” but with the latter in quotation marks, which also pissed Israelis off.)
I don’t know if all the claims made in the UNESCO resolution are true. I don’t know if, as claimed, Israel is blocking Muslim restoration projects or harming Muslim interests with its own earth-moving work. One thing I do not believe is that the State of Israel is deliberately “endangering Al-Aqsa,” as Palestinians and other Muslims are convinced. Moreover, the common Muslim dismissal of Jewish roots at the holy site is a deep insult to Jews, and speaks very badly for popular Muslim attitudes.
But while Palestinian and Muslim notions about the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif are a problem, it’s quite a display of blind arrogance for Israeli Jews to insist that Muslims include the Jewish name for the site in a complaint about Israel’s rule over it, and that if they don’t, they’re guilty of, effectively, anti-Semitism. (Incidentally, the resolution “affirm[s] the importance of the Old City of Jerusalem and its Walls for the three monotheistic religions …”)
I say “blind arrogance” because only the most fastidiously even-handed Israeli Jew ever refers to that site as anything but the Temple Mount. It’s safe to say that most Jews are unfamiliar with the name “Haram al-Sharif.” An even greater majority draw a blank on “Al-Buraq Plaza.”
Should they be accused of “nullifying Muslim ties to Haram al-Sharif”? Does speaking only of the Temple Mount make them, in effect, Islamophobes?
Also, the Israeli reaction is quite a display of colonial hauteur given that the Jewish state is the ruler over the holy site, that Israeli cops are stationed in the general area of Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, that Israel determines who can go there to pray and who can’t, and that it blocks Palestinians in the West Bank from getting not only to Al-Aqsa but to any part of Jerusalem.
Finally, it’s incredible chutzpah for Israelis to insist that the resolution’s Muslim sponsors mention the Temple Mount and the Western Wall (and the latter without the insolent quotation marks, thank you) – when Israel has deliberately erased the names, and often the actual physical presence, of so many Muslim holy sites over the decades.
Israelis don’t forget how Jordan desecrated Jewish holy places in Jerusalem when the Old City fell under the kingdom’s control after the 1948 war. Yet in May 2001, historian Benny Morris (evidently before he swung so sharply to the right) told me in an interview:
“What the Jordanians did to the synagogues in the Old City of Jerusalem pales in comparison to what Israel did to many more mosques all over the country.”
Mosques stood in about half of the 400-plus Arab villages that Israel destroyed during and after the 1948 War of Independence, and except for a few isolated instances, the mosques were destroyed with everything else, Morris said. Another “several dozen” mosques were demolished in cities where Arabs fled or were forced out, such as Jaffa and Ashkelon, he added.
In some cases, mosques were left standing and repurposed, so to speak, by Israel. For instance, Morris said, the mosque in the prewar Arab village of Zakariyya was turned into a fuel storage dump in the postwar Jewish village of Zecharia. He noted:
“If this had been done to a Jewish synagogue, we would call it desecration.”
And in the decades since 1948, as I was told by Meron Benvenisti, author of “Sacred Landscape – The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948” and one-time deputy mayor of Jerusalem, “A great many Muslim burial sites were turned into the graves of Jewish saints.”
So I ask myself: If I were a Palestinian Muslim, and all this was my history, and now I was barred from going to Jerusalem, or at best I had to pass through an Israeli police cordon to |
Relevant common core: “Solve systems of equations”.
Warm up: An Euler brick is a cuboid whose edges and face diagonals all have integer length:
Algebraically, an Euler brick requires finding integers a,b,c,d,e,f such that
and. Verify that (a,b,c,d,e,f) = (85, 132, 720,157, 725, 732) is an Euler brick.
The unsolved problem: A perfect cuboid is an Euler brick whose space diagonal g (see below) also has integer length:
Is there a perfect cuboid?
Background and context: The existence of perfect cuboids requires solving the systems of equations for the Euler brick with the addition of the requirement that with g an integer. The solution of (non-linear) systems of equations in many unknowns is the subject matter of algebraic geometry, in which a bridge is developed between the algebra and a corresponding geometry. Generally speaking the equations are easiest to solve when the solutions can be complex, harder when they are required to be real numbers (real algebraic geometry) and hardest when they are constrained to be integers (Diophantine, or arithmetic algebraic geometry).
High School: Functions
Relevant common core: “Understand the concept of a function and use function notation”.
Warm up: Euler’s totient function denoted by assigns to each positive integer n the number of positive integers that are less than or equal to n and relatively prime to n. What is when p is a prime number?
The unsolved problem: Is it true that for every n there is at least one other integer with the property that?
Background and context: The question is known as Carmichael’s conjecture, who posited that the answer is affirmative. Curiously, it has been proved (in The Distribution of Totients by Kevin Ford, 1998) that any counterexample to the conjecture must be larger than. Yet the problem is unsolved.
High School: Modeling
Relevant common core: “Modeling is the process of choosing and using appropriate mathematics and statistics to analyze empirical situations, to understand them better, and to improve decisions.”
Warm up: Read the biology paper The Biological Underpinnings of Namib Desert Fairy Circles and the mathematical modeling paper Adopting a spatially explicit perspective to study the mysterious fairy circles of Namibia (some basic calculus is required).
The unsolved problem: Develop a biologically motivated mathematical model that explains the fairy circles in Namibia.
Background and context: Fairy circles occur in Southern Africa, mostly in Namibia but also in South Africa. The circles are barren patches of land surrounded by vegetation, and they appear to go through life cycles of dozens of years. There have been many theories about them but despite a number of plausible models the phenomenon is poorly understood and their presence is considered “one of nature’s great mysteries“.
High School: Geometry
Relevant common core: “An understanding of the attributes and relationships of geometric objects can be applied in diverse contexts”.
Warm up: Calculate the area of the handset shape shown moving in the figure below. It consists of two quarter-circles of radius 1 on either side of a 1 by 4/π rectangle from which a semicircle of radius has been removed.
The unsolved problem: What is the rigid two-dimensional shape of largest area that can be maneuvered through an L-shaped planar region (as shown above) with legs of unit width.
Background and context: This problem was posed by Leo Moser in 1966 and is known as the the moving sofa problem. It is known that the largest area for a sofa is between 2.2195 and 2.8284. The problem should be familiar to college age students who have had to manouever furniture in and out of dorm rooms.
High School: Statistics & Probability
Relevant common core: “Describe events as subsets of a sample space (the set of outcomes) using characteristics (or categories) of the outcomes, or as unions, intersections, or complements of other events (‘or,’ ‘and,’ ‘not’).”
Warm up: A family of sets is said to be union-closed if the union of any two sets from the family remains in the family. Write down five different examples of families of sets that are union-closed.
The unsolved problem: Show that for any finite union-closed family of finite sets, other than the family consisting only of the empty set, there exists an element that belongs to at least half of the sets in the family.
Background and context: The conjecture is known as Frankl’s conjecture, named after the mathematician Péter Frankl, and is also called the union closed sets conjecture. It is deceptively simple, but is known to be true only in a few very special cases.The relationship between head trauma and the risk of subsequent neurodegenerative and neuroinflammatory disease, including multiple sclerosis (MS), has attracted considerable interest; however, a limited level of evidence is currently available on the risks of MS following head trauma during childhood or adolescence. Now, a comprehensive analysis of registry data from Sweden indicates that at least one incidence of concussion during adolescence (11–20 years of age), but not during childhood (0–10 years of age), is associated with an increased risk of developing MS in later life.
Image: Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo
“We hypothesized that certain exposures can initiate autoimmune processes that lead to MS,” explains lead author Scott Montgomery. “Experimental data suggest that insults to the nervous system result in the expansion of myelin-antigen-specific T cells, indicating a potential link between trauma and MS risk.”
This hypothesis was tested by analysing data on >7,000 patients with MS. Each patient's medical history was compared with that of 10 demographically matched individuals without MS. The researchers specifically examined the link between MS and concussion, as opposed to all head trauma, as a diagnosis of concussion is more likely to reflect CNS involvement.
“This work further emphasizes the importance of protecting adolescents from head injuries”
A single diagnosis of concussion during adolescence was associated with a 22% increased risk of MS, with a 133% increase in MS risk among individuals with more than one concussion. However, neither single nor multiple diagnoses of concussion in childhood were associated with an increased risk of MS in this analysis.
“This work further emphasizes the importance of protecting adolescents from head injuries,” summarizes Montgomery. “We are examining the role of genetic susceptibility in modifying the influence of this and other exposures on MS risk.”
References 1. Montgomery, S. et al. Concussion in adolescence and risk of multiple sclerosis. Ann. Neurol. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ana.25036 (2017) Download references
Rights and permissions To obtain permission to re-use content from this article visit RightsLink.When I think about the average U.S. life expectancy of 79 years, I immediately hear Trey Songz in my ear singing “Just Gotta Make It.” Susannah Mushatt Jones has surpassed that by more than three decades and, at 116, is now officially the world’s oldest living person. And still fly we might add.
The son of a tenant-farmer, Susie or Tee (short for auntie), as her family members call her, was born in Alabama, the third child and oldest girl of Callie and Mary Mushatt. After graduating from the Calhoun Colored School in December 1922, Susie traveled to the north and began one of many stints as a nanny and caretaker. It’s a role that took Susie to Bel-Air for fancy vacations and led to her meeting Cary Grant, Clark Gable, and Ronald Reagan when she worked for Paul Cokell, the treasurer of Paramount Pictures, and his wife Virginia for some time.
In 1928, Susie married Henry Jones, but, as NY Mag pointed out in their profile of her, the couple soon split up and that’s all she has to say about the ex-husband whose surname she kept. In 1965, Susie retired and returned to her family’s farm in Alabama for a while before returning to New York for good. For the past 35 years, she’s called Brooklyn home, moving into a seniors home in Canarsie when she was about 80.
“At 100, she had to stop cooking for herself and give up her neighborhood-watch role, as her eyesight started to go. (Really, it’s just cataracts, but she is too stubborn to sit for the surgery.),” NY Mag said.
“Late in life, she lost her aversion to curse words, though she’d subsequently deny any cussing she did. Miss Susie is her building’s microcelebrity, and on June 17, she became the world’s oldest living person upon the death of Jeralean Talley, who had six weeks on her. “She is fragile, no question about it. Sleeps a lot, can’t hear well. But she still loves her bacon — four strips, every morning, eaten with gusto. Has a pretty good appetite, in fact. Chews Doublemint gum. Her hair, long since turned white, has come in brown again. She voted for Barack Obama, twice. (A birthday letter from him hangs on her wall.) And next fall, Susannah Mushatt Jones will perhaps get to vote for a woman as well. Whoever’s elected would be her 21st president.”
Check out Miss Susannah Mushatt Jones’ fully profile which appears in the December 14, 2015 issue of New York Magazine here.After 2 years of filming, and 1 year of touring, the feature length LARP documentary is coming to home viewing.
What is Treasure Trapped!?
In December 2012, you helped us make our dream come true, you funded our first feature film - the LARP documentary 'Treasure Trapped'. For those that STILL don't know (you should watch our film!) LARP stands for Live Action Role-Play - it's a curious pastime that we were fortunate enough to spend a few years chasing all over Europe.
Considering it's a film, why not watch the trailer...we'll wait:
In December 2014, after 2 years of filmmaking, we were able to release 'Treasure Trapped' upon the world with a 10 month theatrical tour that took the film all over the world to hundreds of people. This level of success completely blew us away and for all of the continued support in making the film a reality, we thank each and every one of you that has been involved.
A recurring theme over the last ten months has been the great numbers of people who have wanted to buy 'Treasure Trapped' on DVD or BluRay to take home and watch again or to show their friends or share with colleagues. It's these countless requests that has brought us to now.
Bringing Treasure Trapped Home
We thought long and hard about how to deliver 'Treasure Trapped' for home viewing. We spoke with distribution companies, LARPers, other filmmakers and fans. After much debate, we've decided to handle the distribution of 'Treasure Trapped' ourselves. We want to deliver the film as it was seen in cinemas: unedited and unchanged. We also, after many, many requests, know what footage you want more of and we wanted to make this possible by handling DVD/BluRay extra features ourselves.
We've spent the last few months figuring out how to make this a reality and now we're ready to go. We've worked out all the special features, mastered the film for home viewing and found a distribution company willing to print and box DVDs/BluRays to a full-on professional standard.
How does it work/What do I get!?
The best way to think about this is that it's like a pre-order. Our distribution company needs a minimum amount of orders to be able to print and package the discs. Rather than print a load of discs that no one wants, we've put the power back into your hands. We'll be taking pre-orders for two weeks through Kickstarter, all orders we get in this time will be made and delivered by Christmas. Simple as that. If you want the film for home viewing then now is your chance, we don't know if this will happen again!
So here's what your ordering:
- The full film as seen in cinemas, re-mastered for home viewing
- All related shorts mastered for home viewing (Panopticorp, Knowledge Through Play, trailers etc)
- Exclusive special features available NOWHERE else (these will be announced throughout the campaign but expect more LARP, more madness and more sarcastic English people driving around in a van!)
- Animated Menus
- English Subtitles
- DRM-free digital download of the theatrical film.
Thank You!
For reading this, believing in this and making everything that's happened in the last few years possible - THANK YOU! You have literally changed our lives. Here are some FAQs about specifics, but in the meantime happy pre-ordering! We hope this is the home version of 'Treasure Trapped' you wanted!
FAQs
HEY! I backed Treasure Trapped aaaaaages ago where's my digital download I was promised!?
First of all - THANK YOU for backing us back in 2012. We know it's frustrating to not have your download yet but we're working on it. We've been tied up with cinematic exclusivity for the last year so have been unable to release the film for home viewing in any way, shape or form. We are close to inking a deal that will allow you to get your download before the end of the year and you'll be the first to know about it.
DVDs are so 1998, why can't I just download it!?
Vintage is cool right!? Seriously though, lots of people asked us for DVD or BluRay, people want something to hold in their hands and remember the project by. Physical media also enables us to provide special features and lots of them. So for all those people who wanted more footage of each LARP and more interviews then this was the only way. If you REALLY, REALLY don't want a physical copy and have a super minimalist, clutter-free house, then rest assured a digital copy will be available soon, we're working on it!
I was at (insert LARP here) did you film that really specific moment where I spoke to that dragon and will it be in the special features!?
Short answer - maybe! At this moment in time, we can't handle individual requests about footage but we did shoot A LOT and A LOT of it is going to be on this home version. We've tried to provide more of what people wanted, so if we've had a conversation with you about this chances are you'll be happy.
I live in the Antarctic, will the DVD/BluRay work there!?
If you have a DVD or BluRay player then YES you can play 'Treasure Trapped'. We've made all releases region-free as we know lots of different people want one so don't you worry - it'll work. You'll need a TV and power too...and the appropriate cables...and eyes...
What about postage though!? Do you SHIP to the Antarctic!?
So long as humans take mail there then we can deliver 'Treasure Trapped' to you. We have three postage options on each of the rewards but if you have some specific needs or requests send us a message and let us know.
I backed your last Kickstarter and didn't receive my rewards you @*£*!^*££^(!
Oh no! That shouldn't have happened - we feel your pain. All rewards have now been sent out apart from digital copies so there must have been a mistake. Maybe you moved house? Or our e-mails went into your junk folder? E-mail us right now at holla@cosmicjoke.co.uk and we'll fix that right away! Go! E-mail! Now!
Home release!? Does that mean I can't host a screening anymore!?
Absolutely not! As long as people want to see 'Treasure Trapped' in theatres or other venues then it will be there. Drop us an e-mail on holla@cosmicjoke.co.uk to ask about obtaining a screening licence.
Are you going to end this FAQ list with a funny jokey one so it's not all business!?
Probably not...The Rumblehorn is a large grassland Insectivore.
It's horn is actually a hollow resonance chamber.
The bony growth is an adaptation of the sinuses in the front of it's skull. It presses the horn against
the tall trees where it picks up the subtle vibrations of grubs and other insects burrowing
under the bark. It uses it's chisel-like teeth to scrape at the bark of the trees, and a flat
raspy tongue to collect the infestations of bugs.
It must eat nearly a hundred pounds of insects every day.
When it is not foraging for food, it sleeps for fifteen or more hours each day to conserve energy.
The rumblehorn also uses it's horn in communication.
Blowing air across stiff bristle structures on the soft palette of it's mouth, the rumblehorn
emits a strange warbling thrum that is responsible for it's name.Brain Lesions Can Spark Cravings for Fine Food / Disorder called `gourmand syndrome'
Researchers have discovered a new kind of eating disorder in which certain kinds of brain lesions cause average eaters to become addicted to thinking about and eating gourmet food.
The new disorder, called the gourmand syndrome, was observed in 36 patients studied over three years, according to an article in the May issue of the scientific journal Neurology.
"Gourmand syndrome is a rare, benign eating disorder strongly linked to damage of the right hemisphere of the brain," said neurologist and study co-author Theodor Landis of Geneva, Switzerland, in a written statement released yesterday.
Scientists are finding more chemical links between the brain and what were once considered purely psychological dysfunctions, ranging from eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia to obsessive-compulsive behavior such as kleptomania and pathological gambling.
But this may be one of the first studies to link behavior considered normal in places such as San Francisco, New York and Paris -- fine dining -- with damage to the brain.
The research was prompted when two men hospitalized with strokes in Switzerland displayed unusual cravings for gourmet dining as they were recovering.
One patient, a 48-year-old political journalist, became so obsessed with food after his recovery from a stroke that he became his newspaper's restaurant columnist. Prior to his hospitalization, he had no particular interest in food and ate whatever his wife brought to the table, the article said.
But as he lay recovering, he was asked by his doctors what bothered him most. "He instantly replied that he found the hospital food awful, that he felt perfectly healthy, and that he had nothing else on his mind but good, tasty food served in a nice restaurant."
While hospitalized, according to the study, he wrote in his diary: "It is time for a real hearty dinner, e.g. a good sausage with hash browns or some spaghetti Bolognese, or risotto and breaded cutlet, nicely decorated, or a scallop of game in cream sauce with'spaetzle' (a Swiss and southern German specialty)."
The patient complained that he felt "dried up" in the hospital. "Where's the next oasis?" he wrote. "With date trees and lamb- roast or couscous and mint tea, the Moroccan way, real fresh..."
The second patient, a 55-year- old businessman, "had no real food preferences and preferred a tennis match to a fine dinner" before he was hospitalized with a stroke, the study said.
Five weeks after the stroke, he was asked to write down his experiences as a patient. "To our astonishment, his writing almost exclusively contained reflections about fine dining," the researchers said.
These observations led the researchers to draft a comprehensive checklist to assess present and earlier eating habits in 723 patients with known or suspected single brain lesions to determine if there were "clinical and anatomical correlates of this altered eating behavior."
Of the 723 patients studied, gourmand syndrome was observed in 36, many of whom spontaneously reported a preoccupation with eating gourmet food. Thirty- three of the patients suffered from some kind of lesions -- including strokes, tumors, hemorrhages or seizures -- in the right front area of the brain. Only two had damage on the left side, with one showing damage on both sides.
All 36 patients showed a variety of brain dysfunctions, including impairment of memory, conceptual thinking and visual perception. But the researchers described the gourmand syndrome itself as benign.
The study's authors said it was not clear why lesions on the right side caused the disorder but that other eating disorders, such as tumor-caused anorexia, also have been linked in some studies to the right hemisphere of the brain.
Studies of chemical differences between the brain's two hemispheres are rare, the article continued, but recent research suggests a chemical imbalance between the right and left sides of the brain, with levels of such neurotransmitters as serotonin higher in the right hemisphere.
"This new syndrome shows the public that addiction and compulsive disorders, even ones that aren't debilitating, can be due to damage to a limited area of the brain," said psychologist and study co-author Marianne Regard of Zurich, Switzerland, in a written statement.Who among us hasn't been asked by a teacher or a boss to "think outside the box"? It's all well and good when you're looking at a word problem on a Denny's application, not so much when you're staring down a problem with lives on the line. So you have to admire the guys who improvised the following:
5 Building a Supercomputer Out of Hundreds of PlayStations
The U.S. military needed a supercomputer, but didn't want to spend the millions of dollars they typically cost. That second part may surprise you -- we all tend to assume that the U.S. military is on the cutting edge of all things tech (something to do with having more than a half trillion dollars to spend every year). But they're not just a bunch of big kids buying expensive toys with unlimited budgets -- they have hard choices to make, just like us.
Getty
"Nope, no boner flag -- we have our grownup hats on today."
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The Creative Solution:
So they bought almost 2,000 Sony PlayStation 3s and hooked them together to see what would happen.
OK, we're being a bit unfair there. Video game consoles have some serious horsepower for the few hundred dollars they cost, so the solution made sense. The Department of Defense's 1,716 PlayStation 3s were formed into the massive computational megamachine known as the "Condor Cluster." This is what it looks like:NEW DELHI: Congress on Sunday suspended Rajasthan leader Bhanwar Lal Sharma, who had called Rahul Gandhi 'MD of Congress circus'.However, undettered by the action, Bhanwar Lal Sharma continued with his attack and described Rahul as a person who lacked intelligence.Speaking to Times Now, the rebel Congress MLA claimed that he had the backing of other leaders as well.Claiming that there was a leadership crisis in the Congress, Bhanwar Lal said that he did the right thing by raising voice against the top leadership.Bhanwar Lal Sharma had on Saturday described Rahul Gandhi as the "MD of Congress circus" and called him unfit to lead.Sharma, a sixth term legislator from Churu district's Sardarshahar constituency, demanded the party introduce internal democracy to choose new leaders. "People around Rahul are jokers and parachute leaders who were thrust in the organization and on the workers from the top. Party leaders need to be elected in a democratic manner." He said Rahul had surrounded himself with English-speaking sycophants.Bhanwar Lal is the second leader to be suspended from the party for criticizing Rahul.Earlier, former Kerala minister TH Mustafa was suspended from Congress on Thursday for calling Rahul Gandhi a "joker" and saying that he should be removed if he does not resign in the backdrop of the party's debacle in the Lok Sabha polls.Mustafa, a five-time Congress MLA and former minister for civil supplies, also called for the removal of Gandhi from all party posts and demanded his sister Priyanka Gandhi be made the new leader.On Vin Scully's 90th birthday, let's celebrate a great moment from every one of his decades
The inimitable Vin Scully turns 90 years old today. That may seem old to you, but Vin was just broadcasting Dodgers games two seasons ago. And judging from a recent trip to the World Series in 2017, the legendary broadcaster still has the chops and charm to jump right back into the booth.
Alas, that's not happening. Still, we have the memories, and on his 90th birthday, we'd like to celebrate him decade by decade. Let's dive right in.
0-13 years old: Vin meets the Bambino
We'll cheat a little on this one because it's too good a story. Back in 2014, Vin told the story of getting Babe Ruth's autograph at the Polo Grounds when he was 13. Only, The Babe didn't sign anything, he just handed teenage Vin one of his business cards.
13-23 years old: His first broadcast
Vin played baseball for Fordham Preparatory School and then at Fordham University -- where he faced off against future president and Yale first baseman George H.W. Bush. See if you can spot Scully in this Prep picture:
Throwback Thursday, Vin Scully with his High school Baseball team. #FordhamPrep 1944 pic.twitter.com/s6SGydEjMr - Vin Scully (@VinScullyTweet) September 16, 2016
In 1950, at the tender age of 22, he also began broadcasting Brooklyn Dodgers games alongside the legendary Red Barber. Scully told Sports Illustrated, "I was young or younger as most of the players. So as long as I kept my mouth shut, I fit in." He, of course, went on to fit in for the next 67 years.
20-30 years old: Racing Jackie Robinson on ice skates
We'll go back to normal decade-by-decade counts because it's easier. Somewhere during this time period, Scully did something straight out of a baseball tall tale book: He raced Jackie Robinson on ice skates. Listen to the story here and take a look at the photo evidence below:
Vin Scully once raced Jackie Robinson on ice skates. Vin is one of a small group who ever beat Jackie in any race. pic.twitter.com/bbMAS8Ft38 - Dodgers History (@Dodgers_History) December 19, 2013
30-40 years old: Koufax's perfecto
At the age of 38, Scully called Sandy Koufax's perfect game against the Cubs in 1965. The Dodgers broadcaster already had his characteristic flair for setting the scene -- "29,000 in attendance and a million butterflies." Listen to the entire ninth inning below:
40-50 years old: No. 715
Now we're getting to the really good stuff. Nearly 50 years after meeting home-run king Babe Ruth in person, Scully called Hank Aaron's record-breaking 715th homer in 1974. Cue the goosebumps.
50-60 years old: "Behind the bag!"
Maybe his most famous call. The full Mookie Wilson at-bat is below, but for the key moment, scroll to the 4:15 mark.
60-70 years old: "And look who's comin' up..."
Sorry, this may be his most famous call (it's very hard to choose).
70-80 years old: 9/11
It was hard for the nation to return to normalcy after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But baseball helped us get there, and Vin was a big reason why.
80-90 years old: The final send-off
We could've gone with Scully talking about Madison Bumgarner freeing a rabbit from a snake's digestive tract or calling Yasiel Puig the "Maestro of bat flips," but we'll just leave you with his simple, final send-off to the world. Happy 90th, Vin.The Senate Judiciary Committee will be introducing its first gun control bill on January 17, at 3:30 PM in Hearing Room F at the Capitol.This is the bill we told you was coming banning private transfers and starting the registration process. The draft of the bill is number LC 154 and is not yet available for the public to see. But we have it. The legislature is not scheduled to start proceedings until February so they are getting out in front in their efforts to attack your rights. As you know, all gun registration starts with “background checks” and no doubt this bill will extend the failed background checks to virtually all transfers. So if you want to give a gun to your oldest friend or your nephew, you will now need to ask the State Police for “permission.”If the system is down you are out of luck.These background checks are how the state builds a list of gun owners. These lists have been used over and over to begin the confiscation process, not only in Nazi Germany but in New York and now in California. It’s imperative that you contact the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and tell them in no uncertain terms that you oppose extending the failed background check system to a private transfer and you oppose any new gun registrations. (Update 01.09.14 We have asked why the Democrats are insisting on bringing back a bill they lacked the votes to pass last year. One possible answer is this video of Republican Senator Bruce Starr. It is troubling, however soon after someone posted it on our Facebook page Starr responded with a comment “I will not be supporting any new gun laws in Oregon.” We expect him to honor that pledge.)Below is a list of members of the committee with contact info and a suggested cut and paste message: ______________________________________________ Senator Floyd Prozanski
Democrat – District 4 – South Lane and North Douglas Counties Capitol Phone: 503-986-1704 District Phone: 541-342-2447
Email: Sen.FloydProzanski@state.or.us
Senator Betsy Close Republican – District 8 – Albany Capitol Phone: 503-986-1708
Capitol Address: 900 Court St. NE, S-303, Salem, Oregon 97301
Email: Sen.BetsyClose@state.or.us
Senator Michael Dembrow Democrat – District 23 – Portland Capitol Phone: 503-986-1723 District Phone: 503-281-0608
Capitol Address: 900 Court St. NE, S-407, Salem, Oregon 97301
Email: Sen.MichaelDembrow@state.or.us
Senator Jeff Kruse Republican – District 1 – Roseburg Capitol Phone: 503-986-1701 District Phone: 541-580-3276
Capitol Address: 900 Court St. NE, S-315, Salem, Oregon 97301
Email: Sen.JeffKruse@state.or.us
Senator Arnie Roblan Democrat – District 5 – Coos Bay Capitol Phone: 503-986-1705
Capitol Address: 900 Court St. NE, S-417, Salem, Oregon 97301
Email: Sen.ArnieRoblan@state.or.us
___________________________________________________________________ Dear Senator, The current background check system for gun purchases is a total failure. Qualified buyers are often delayed and denied. I strongly urge you to reject any expansion of this failed system to private transfers. We have seen how these policies lead to confiscations as they have in New York and now California. Vote against any restrictions on private transfers. Yours, _______________________________________________________________No budget? No excuse. Here’s a practical guide to UX on the cheap.
Vinny Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 5, 2017
Let’s rub the magic lamp and see what we can do for free! (Thanks to Nikita Kozin for the icon at Noun Project)
Here’s a problem I’ve encountered over and over again during my 5 years as a UX designer at Melbourne agencies: no budget.
“We would love to do user testing, but we can’t afford it.”
It can be hard to sell user experience design. Especially when you’re working with a small or medium-sized business with a modest website budget. Every dollar is a fight, and spending 25% of the budget on “just talking to people” can be a hard sell.
People outside our field often seem to think talking to users is a waste of money. Well, let’s entertain that premise. Given that one of a UX designer’s core skills is empathy, let’s make an effort to see things from these outsiders’ perspective.
The way to view this challenge is not to ignore user testing (or whatever else it might be that you don’t have the budget for). It’s to explore ways to get around these constraints.
If you show value to your clients through work that had zero budget, well, you’ve just earned yourself a budget.
“Design is easy. Getting people to give a shit about design is what’s hard.” — Tim Evans, head of UX at My Local Broker
So, in this series, I’m going to share some tips and tricks I’ve learned along the way to help you get great results with little to no budget. I’ll use a popular design framework to base it on. I’ll take you through the steps required to get some great insights, while not spending very much of your website’s budget.
The Design Process
In order to set the scene for this, there has to be a process. A method behind the madness. Personally, I prefer to shoot for the stars then strip back. Map out your ideal process, then look at what you’re really trying to achieve with each step. Get beyond the ‘what’ you are doing to the ‘why’ you are doing it — you’ll find that there’s plenty of ways to achieve the one goal.
There are plenty of great processes out there, but context is incredibly important. Choose a process that’s close to what you require. Then feel free to improvise upon it until it suits your project’s needs.
For the purposes of this article, I’m going to loosely base my process on IDEO’s circular design methodology, which you can read much more about here.
Circular design method — read more on the IDEO website
It’s worth noting that while I’m referring to this design process, a key methodology I’m employing throughout is that of Lean UX. Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden’s excellent book is well worth a read to get an idea of what I really mean by this, but my interpretation of Lean UX in this context is really “do as little as you can to validate your ideas.”
Why? It’ll save you time and money in the long run.
In this first article, I’ll be looking at step one: understand.
How to Understand
OK, you’ve got a new client. You’ve got a new website to create. Life is good. The first thing you need to do is start understanding why the client came to you. Usually this begins with a kick off meeting. My advice here is to make this as much of a one way meeting as possible. It should almost feel like you’re conducting an interview with your new client.
A word of warning: if it’s a small business and you’re dealing with a Director, there can be a tendency to go off track a bit. The person you’re talking to is usually used to selling their business, and you might start to get more of a sales pitch than a true insight. As with any other user interview, you’ll need to use all your skills to try and keep the interview on point and drill in to get some deeper insights to the business, which will make your long term job a whole lot easier.
I’d also strongly recommend recording this meeting to come back to later. Keeping minutes always helps, but a recording is much better to come back to.
As part of this meeting, or possibly even before, it’s also a great time to get as many details as you can from the client. Collect Google Analytics details (gold dust!), get logins for their existing CMS, try to get the FTP access, anything really related to their existing website.
OK — not all that easy. Image from quickmeme.com
OK, this stuff isn’t actually that easy. There can be old agencies involved, bad relationships, among other things. Be prepared to wait for this stuff, but make sure you follow it up. Multiple times. This process is not fun, but it’s critical as it’s the difference between starting with zero and starting with something tangible.
Analytics Mode
OK, now your armed with some analytics data. This is a start. You can look in there, start to do your analysis — where are people going on the site, where are we losing them, how are they getting there. The picture is starting to be built in your head. While you’ll want to spend a good deal of time analyzing this data, it’s also a good idea, very early on, to improve the analytics on the site. Try to buy yourself another month’s worth of data, once you’ve got some access yourself.
Why is this? Well, you can get deeper. While a lot of websites will have analytics installed, they won’t all have things like event tracking or goals setup. Personally, I like to track everything as an event. Every button click on the page, should be an event. This is fairly easy to implement, especially if you are using Google Tag Manager. Which leads me to my next point…
Learn how to use Google Tag Manager.
This makes your life easier. You can add multiple snippets of code in one place, and reduce your reliance on developers. Even for those of us comfortable with FTP, the less time we spend in FTP, the more time we can spend analyzing and producing insights — what we are paid to do.
With Google Tag Manager, you can very easily add more tracking codes to your website, for other useful tools. A favorite tool of mine to add at this stage is Hotjar. Hotjar does have a paid tier for extra insights (which is awesome if you can afford it), but it’s free version you can install on your website, through Google Tag Manager, and it’ll do a lot for no cost.
If you need to find out how to do something in tag manager, here are some excellent resources:
Simo Ahava’s blog (for more advanced ideas)
Google Tag Manager Academy (getting started)
There are tons of great resources out there on the web, so if you are keen on it make sure and have a Google!
Why use Hotjar?
You can get screen recordings of people using the website
You can produce heat maps of popular pages (just like Crazy Egg, but free)
You can install free, short surveys on the website
Hotjar does more than that (funnels, for example) but those three features I find useful in every web project. It’s still analytics, and has to be taken as that (numbers alone don’t tell us everything), but it lets us get a bit deeper |
This proves that you can."
"Until people are directly under a runway, people don't take notice of it," said Argionis. "…We have to make sure that the environment is safe for our children."
"It's something that's beyond Park Ridge and affects us all," he added, referring to wind patterns. "You can't know whether it is or isn't until you get a supplemental study done."White House officials say the idea to tax so-called 529 accounts turned into ‘a distraction’ after coming under fire from both sides of aisle and the public
Facing pressure from both sides of the aisle in Washington as well as parents and students across the United States, President Barack Obama has abruptly dropped a proposal to tax earnings on withdrawals from a popular college savings plan.
After an idea to swap out tax breaks for the wealthy turned into “a distraction”, White House officials on Tuesday confirmed that the administration would not implement its proposal to tax earnings on so-called 529 accounts. The initiative was part of a wider program, unveiled as part of his State of the Union speech last week, to amend the US tax code and help middle-class families.
Prominent Democratic representatives including House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, of California, and Chris Van Hollen, of Maryland, campaigned for Obama to keep earnings on the accounts tax-free.
Republicans were more public in their dissent, saying that losing the 529 plans would hurt the middle class. “It’s another example of this outdated, top-down approach when our focus ought to be on providing opportunity for all Americans,” said House speaker John Boehner, of Ohio, on Tuesday.
White House officials told reporters that the administration was dropping the proposal to allow Congress to focus on the broader tax initiative.
“We proposed it because we thought it was a sensible approach, part of consolidating six programs to two and expanding and better targeting education tax relief for the middle class,” a White House official told the Associated Press.
“Given it has become such a distraction, we’re not going to ask Congress to pass the 529 provision so that they can instead focus on delivering a larger package of education tax relief that has bipartisan support.”
Families with 529 plans and a similar college-savings program called Coverdell “typically have more wealth and education that these accounts”, according to a December 2012 report from the Government Accountability office. The report also said that median financial asset value for families with these types of accounts was $413,500.Socialize with Kinguin, Steel, m0E and get 1 of 3 CS:GO knives!
Target spotted: Huntsman Knife, Flip Knife, Falchion Knife. Rock social media with Kinguin & Steel & m0E and grab 1 of 3 knives!
You must have heard about these two! They are both CS:GO players, and together they’re a true lethal mixture! Steel and m0E are teaming up again, but this time in Kinguin’s giveaway.
These CS:GO items are selling like hot cakes, and luckily for you today you can get them totally for free! Try your hand at this competition and give your new item a try in your next scuffle.
In today’s giveaway we have 3 impressive treats for CS:GO players:
Watch Steel and m0E on their Twitch channels, you can find a lot of cool content over there. Observe them playing CS:GO together or separately – either way it’s always so much fun!!!
3 #CSGO knives are up for grabs! Join the #giveaway with @m0E_tv @JoshNissan.
Ready? Let’s go!
Use the app below and choose your way to enter! The more you use, the more chances you have to win one of the prizes.
Socialize with @Kinguin.net & @JoshNissan & @m0E_tv
The giveaway starts on February 19th and ends on February 25th, 2016.
In order to recieve your prize please contact us on socialmedia@kinguin.net within 7 days from announcing the winners.
Good Luck Guys!Todd Starnes has written about some of Franklin Graham’s most recent ramblings. Did you know that Christians have it terribly in this country?
“I believe we are perilously close to the moral tipping point for the survival of the United States of America,” Graham wrote in Decision magazine. “I refuse to be silent and watch the future of our children and grandchildren be offered up on pagan altars of personal pleasure and immorality.”
Yes, it’s the goal of any decent parent to keep their kid from personal pleasure. You’ve not succeeded as a father unless your children are miserable for Jesus.
The Supreme Court has already redefined marriage. The nation has become a killing field for Islamic radicals. And Christians have become targets for practicing their First Amendment rights.
They have? Can you name a single Christian who’s in jail for saying same-sex marriage is bad? I mean, there’s plenty of people who think people who oppose equality for gay people are dicks — lots of them are Christians. It’s not a Christian thing, it’s a being a dick thing. It’s just the primary force telling people to be dicks to gay people is, well, Christianity.
“There now exists deep-seated antagonism and hostility toward Christianity in every seat of power in this nation – government, media, courts and education,” Graham wrote. It has become open season on Christians.”
Deep-seated antagonism in every seat of power? The President is a Christian. You have six of the nine Supreme Court Justices (the other three are Jewish), which is the lowest percentage of Christians in the SCOTUS’s entire history! Christians make up almost 92% of Congress!
From whence is this antagonism toward Christianity coming from? Christians?
Jesus Christ, how can persecution possibly look like being in charge to you lot? There’s literally no group in America persecuted less than Christians, and yet it’s not good enough for Franklin Graham. I keep hearing Christianity makes people joyous, yet so many have become incapable of seeing how good they have it. They’re not happy, they’re pissed off nobody’s let them appoint themselves kings and queens of everybody else’s sex lives.
Instead of ignoring the rotting of America’s culture, the president and CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association has decided to do something about it.
Please let his solution be finding some way, any way to acquire some god damn perspective.
Earlier this month, Graham launched the “Decision America Tour,” a series of prayer rallies at the capitol buildings of all 50 states.
He’s going to loiter. Boy, ain’t Graham a man of action.
Ok, fine, but until he shows up can we try the whole human ideas and human actions approach?
I caught up with Graham just after his inaugural prayer gathering in Des Moines. More than 2,000 people turned out in frigid weather – to petition the Almighty. It was one of the rare moments in Iowa where politicians were not recognized nor were they allowed to speak. “If a candidate showed up – we’re not going to recognize them,” Graham said. “We’re not going to give them a microphone.” That’s because “Decision America Tour” is not about politics.
Yes, holding them at political buildings is just coincidental.
And that’s when he dropped this evangelical bombshell.
“To be honest with you, the problems we have in America today are the failure of the church,” he said.
That’s a bombshell? He might as well have said “The problem is Christians who think Jesus wants something different from what I think Jesus wants.” It’s a weak put down, not a bombshell.
I reckon that comment just made a lot of folks start wiggling in the pews.
Not really. The people in Graham’s pews already think they’re super special with the Lord and all the other Christians probably don’t give the first shit what Graham thinks.
But Graham has a valid point. The government has taken on many responsibilities that were once in the hands of the local church.
“The churches have allowed the government to take away their responsibility and so the government is feeding people, the government is clothing people, the government is now in charge of health care,” he said.
Yeah, and our government largely does them without wasting resources trying to convert people that could be spent feeding them.
What’s more, this was always the government’s job. The government is tasked with looking out for the welfare of its citizens and is accountable to the degree it succeeds. If the government fails there’s no shrugging its shoulders and saying, “Ah well, Jesus forgives me. At least we convinced x number of people that a guy rose from the dead 2,000 years ago so I call it a win.”
Graham is a self-entitled boy disappointed with the natural outcome of democracy — namely that he doesn’t get to issue edicts to the entire population in god’s name. He’s about as loony as any man with a microphone has ever been, so you know how Todd Starnes describes him:
Franklin Graham is a voice crying in the wilderness.
Crying to the wilderness from the comfort of a private jet. In fact, there’s no wilderness, just lots of crying.https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/yemen-and-me-and-you/
Finally, after a week of hysterical warnings about “worldwide terror,” as though one of those James Bond bad guys finally got that nuke-the-planet-Earth machines working, we learn from yesterday’s news what all the warnings are about. As reported on the ABC evening news, the U.S. Spying Empire claims to have overheard one of the old geezer al Qaeda guys say that it would be nice to kick the asses of some of the CIA guys in Yemen.
In other words, if the report is true, it has nothing to do with any ordinary American. None of us is in any danger whatsoever. The only ones in danger are state stooges and paid murderers who are sticking their noses where they don’t belong — in the politics of foreign countries in the Middle East. When the state is threatened with retaliation from its murderous ways, it wants us to believe that WE are somehow endangered by it. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
10:03 am on August 6, 2013
The Best of Thomas DiLorenzoFebruary will see Amdavadis have a new place to dock their palates, with an underwater restaurant making its way into the city’s culinary landscape. Or should someone say, waterscape?
Advertising
Opening on February 1, in the South Bopal area, the unique restaurant has already garnered 150-odd bookings for the opening day through radio, online and print promotions.
Also see: First look — A unique underwater-themed restaurant in Ahmedabad
Called The Real Poseidon, the dining area has been created 20ft below ground level and is run by Ahmedabad-based businessman Bharat Bhatt, who owns an engineering unit and is also into construction. “I had been part of building a restaurant back in 2004-05 and had been toying with this idea to float a restaurant with a novel concept since several years. Once we decided on this concept and we were sure it could be done, we started work on it,” says Bhatt.
Plush with 150,000 litres of water that is revitalised with a filtration tank on the 3,000 sq. ft property, the restaurant features around 4,000 fish and marine species sourced from local markets in Ahmedabad, Rajkot and Vadodara. For those concerned about the available dishes at the restaurant (read: eating seafood while being surrounded by fish), then worry not. The multicuisine, 32-seater restaurant does offer Punjabi, Thai, Chinese and Mexican fare, but it’s all vegetarian.
Also see: Water, water everywhere — 10 underwater-themed restaurants in the world
While the concept and design took several months to finalise, Bhatt spent a whopping Rs 2 crore on the construction, which took two years.
“Guests need only take the stairs down to a tunnel-based dining hall of 1,200 sq ft, where they can dine while enjoying the view. While there could be aquarium-based restaurants in Surat, we feel this is the first underwater restaurant in the city,” says Bhatt who runs the The Real Poseidon with his wife Varsha.
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The duo is also planning a live orchestra/band for their diners’ entertainment in the near future.Learning a new UI engine is always tricky. Thankfully, the Flutter team has highlighted the basic widgets. For this code tutorial, we will focus on Row and Column, which lay out a list of child widgets in the horizontal and vertical direction respectively.
First off, my favourite thing about them is that, even though you may mistake them for Android SDK’s LinearLayout at first, they are actually far more flexible, yet easy to understand.
To figure out how Row and Column work, we will start from 3 different mock-ups and lay them out using them. We will do this as part of an app with 3 screens (one screen per example).
For each example, we will have a rough sketch of what we want, with notes to describe how each part of the layout behaves. Why rough hand drawn sketches and not fancy mock ups done in Photoshop? Because I want to show you a simple process that you can apply to your own mock ups. Oh, and also because pen and paper is a very useful tool (see Tip 3 of 4 tips to boost your software development career).
A few basic rules to remember
The documentation is rich in explanations about how Flutter lays things out, but, when you’re starting out, this is a bit daunting. So, I’ve extracted a few basic Flutter UI rules that will allow you to build many layouts.
if you want to split your screen horizontally, ie several elements to the right or left of each other, use a Row
if you want to split your screen vertically, ie several elements above or below each other, use a Column
if you want to specify padding, a background colour, or a fixed height or width for an item, wrap it inside a Container
if you want a child element of a Row or Column to expand to fill in the available space, wrap it inside an Expanded
elements have sensible names and the search feature on the website is pretty good, so use it! For example, if you search for text, you will see both the Text widget and a page listing the different types of available Text widgets.
Looking for a Flutter job? Check out my job board dedicated to Flutter at flutterjobs.info
Code tutorial setup
To follow the code tutorial, create a new app as follows.
Create new app flutter create rowcolumnexample 1 flutter create rowcolumnexample
If you’re unsure how to set up a Flutter app, check out Getting started with Flutter official tutorial.
We will set up the app to have 3 screens, namely Example1Page, Example2Page, and Example3Page.
So let’s amend main.dart to launch the app on the first example screen.
main.dart import 'package:flutter/material.dart'; import 'example1_page.dart'; void main() { runApp(new MyApp()); } class MyApp extends StatelessWidget { // This widget is the root of your application. @override Widget build(BuildContext context) { return new MaterialApp( title: 'Row & Column Example', theme: new ThemeData( primaryColor: const Color(0xFF43a047), accentColor: const Color(0xFFffcc00), primaryColorBrightness: Brightness.dark, ), home: new Example1Page(), ); } } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 import 'package:flutter/material.dart' ; import 'example1_page.dart' ; void main ( ) { runApp ( new MyApp ( ) ) ; } class MyApp extends StatelessWidget { // This widget is the root of your application. @ override Widget build ( BuildContext context ) { return new MaterialApp ( title : 'Row & Column Example', theme : new ThemeData ( primaryColor : const Color ( 0xFF43a047 ), accentColor : const Color ( 0xFFffcc00 ), primaryColorBrightness : Brightness. dark, ), home : new Example1Page ( ), ) ; } }
Now, we create example1_page.dart, example2_page.dart and example3_page.dart, with a simple navigation from 1 to 2 and from 1 to 3 via buttons in the toolbar.
example1_page.dart import 'package:flutter/material.dart'; import 'example2_page.dart'; import 'example3_page.dart'; // Note: for simplicity, this is a stateless widget but, in a real app, // a full screen is likely to be a stateful widget. class Example1Page extends StatelessWidget { @override Widget build(BuildContext context) { List<Widget> menu = <Widget>[ new IconButton( icon: new Icon(Icons.send), tooltip: 'To Example 2', onPressed: () => _toExample2(context), ), new IconButton( icon: new Icon(Icons.help), tooltip: 'To Example 3', onPressed: () => _toExample3(context), ) ]; return new Scaffold( appBar: new AppBar( title: new Text("Example 1 Page"), actions: menu, ), body: new Padding( padding: new EdgeInsets.symmetric(vertical: 0.0, horizontal: 0.0), child: new Text('Example Page 1 content'), ), ); } void _toExample2(BuildContext context) { Navigator.of(context).push(new MaterialPageRoute<dynamic>( builder: (BuildContext context) { return new Example2Page(); }, )); } void _toExample3(BuildContext context) { Navigator.of(context).push(new MaterialPageRoute<dynamic>( builder: (BuildContext context) { return new Example3Page(); }, )); } } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 import 'package:flutter/material.dart' ; import 'example2_page.dart' ; import 'example3_page.dart' ; // Note: for simplicity, this is a stateless widget but, in a real app, // a full screen is likely to be a stateful widget. class Example1Page extends StatelessWidget { @ override Widget build ( BuildContext context ) { List < Widget > menu = < Widget > [ new IconButton ( icon : new Icon ( Icons. send ), tooltip : 'To Example 2', onPressed : ( ) = > _toExample2 ( context ), ), new IconButton ( icon : new Icon ( Icons. help ), tooltip : 'To Example 3', onPressed : ( ) = > _toExample3 ( context ), ) ] ; return new Scaffold ( appBar : new AppBar ( title : new Text ( "Example 1 Page" ), actions : menu, ), body : new Padding ( padding : new EdgeInsets. symmetric ( vertical : 0.0, horizontal : 0.0 ), child : new Text ( 'Example Page 1 content' ), ), ) ; } void _toExample2 ( BuildContext context ) { Navigator. of ( context ). push ( new MaterialPageRoute < dynamic > ( builder : ( BuildContext context ) { return new Example2Page ( ) ; }, ) ) ; } void _toExample3 ( BuildContext context ) { Navigator. of ( context ). push ( new MaterialPageRoute < dynamic > ( builder : ( BuildContext context ) { return new Example3Page ( ) ; }, ) ) ; } }
example2_page.dart import 'package:flutter/material.dart'; // Note: for simplicity, this is a stateless widget but, in a real app, // a full screen is likely to be a stateful widget. class Example2Page extends StatelessWidget { @override Widget build(BuildContext context) { return new Scaffold( appBar: new AppBar( title: new Text("Example 2 Page"), ), body: new Padding( padding: new EdgeInsets.symmetric(vertical: 0.0, horizontal: 0.0), child: new Text('Example Page 2 content'), ), ); } } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 import 'package:flutter/material.dart' ; // Note: for simplicity, this is a stateless widget but, in a real app, // a full screen is likely to be a stateful widget. class Example2Page extends StatelessWidget { @ override Widget build ( BuildContext context ) { return new Scaffold ( appBar : new AppBar ( title : new Text ( "Example 2 Page" ), ), body : new Padding ( padding : new EdgeInsets. symmetric ( vertical : 0.0, horizontal : 0.0 ), child : new Text ( 'Example Page 2 content' ), ), ) ; } }
example3_page.dart import 'package:flutter/material.dart'; // Note: for simplicity, this is a stateless widget but, in a real app, // a full screen is likely to be a stateful widget. class Example3Page extends StatelessWidget { @override Widget build(BuildContext context) { return new Scaffold( appBar: new AppBar( title: new Text("Example 3 Page"), ), body: new Padding( padding: new EdgeInsets.symmetric(vertical: 0.0, horizontal: 0.0), child: new Text('Example Page 3 content'), ), ); } } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 import 'package:flutter/material.dart' ; // Note: for simplicity, this is a stateless widget but, in a real app, // a full screen is likely to be a stateful widget. class Example3Page extends StatelessWidget { @ override Widget build ( BuildContext context ) { return new Scaffold ( appBar : new AppBar ( title : new Text ( "Example 3 Page" ), ), body : new Padding ( padding : new EdgeInsets. symmetric ( vertical : 0.0, horizontal : 0.0 ), child : new Text ( 'Example Page 3 content' ), ), ) ; } }
Example 1
For this example, we will create a screen with a subtitle (below the toolbar) which is always shown, a call to action button at the bottom, which is also always shown, and some other content in between the two.
From mock to Flutter widgets
Let’s start with a sketch of the screen, annotated with descriptions in plain English. Then, we convert the descriptions into Flutter widgets.
Code
Now, we implement the design in example1_page.dart.
example1_page.view/build @override Widget build(BuildContext context) { List<Widget> menu = <Widget>[ new IconButton( icon: new Icon(Icons.send), tooltip: 'To Example 2', onPressed: () => _toExample2(context), ), new IconButton( icon: new Icon(Icons.help), tooltip: 'To Example 3', onPressed: () => _toExample3(context), ) ]; Widget subtitle = new Container ( padding: new EdgeInsets.all(8.0), color: new Color(0X33000000), child: new Text('Subtitle'), ); Widget middleSection = new Expanded( child: new Container ( padding: new EdgeInsets.all(8.0), color: new Color(0X9900CC00), child: new Column( crossAxisAlignment: CrossAxisAlignment.stretch, children: <Widget>[ new Text('Some data here'), new Text('More stuff here'), ], ), ), ); Widget bottomBanner = new Container ( padding: new EdgeInsets.all(8.0), color: new Color(0X99CC0000), height: 48.0, child: new Center( child: new Text('Bottom Banner'), ), ); Widget body = new Column( // This makes each child fill the full width of the screen crossAxisAlignment: CrossAxisAlignment.stretch, mainAxisSize: MainAxisSize.min, children: <Widget>[ subtitle, middleSection, bottomBanner, ], ); return new Scaffold( appBar: new AppBar( title: new Text("Example 1 Page"), actions: menu, ), body: new Padding( padding: new EdgeInsets.symmetric(vertical: 0.0, horizontal: 0.0), child: body, ), ); } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 @ override Widget build ( BuildContext context ) { List < Widget > menu = < Widget > [ new IconButton ( icon : new Icon ( Icons. send ), tooltip : 'To Example 2', onPressed : ( ) = > _toExample2 ( context ), ), new IconButton ( icon : new Icon ( Icons. help ), tooltip : 'To Example 3', onPressed : ( ) = > _toExample3 ( context ), ) ] ; Widget subtitle = new Container ( padding : new EdgeInsets. all ( 8.0 ), color : new Color ( 0X33000000 ), child : new Text ( 'Subtitle' ), ) ; Widget middleSection = new Expanded ( child : new Container ( padding : new EdgeInsets. all ( 8.0 ), color : new Color ( 0X9900CC00 ), child : new Column ( crossAxisAlignment : CrossAxisAlignment. stretch, children : < Widget > [ new Text ( 'Some data here' ), new Text ( 'More stuff here' ), ], ), ), ) ; Widget bottomBanner = new Container ( padding : new EdgeInsets. all ( 8.0 ), color : new Color ( 0X99CC0000 ), height : 48.0, child : new Center ( child : new Text ( 'Bottom Banner' ), ), ) ; Widget body = new Column ( // This makes each child fill the full width of the screen crossAxisAlignment : CrossAxisAlignment. stretch, mainAxisSize : MainAxisSize. min, children : < Widget > [ subtitle, middleSection, bottomBanner, ], ) ; return new Scaffold ( appBar : new AppBar ( title : new Text ( "Example 1 Page" ), actions : menu, ), body : new Padding ( padding : new EdgeInsets. symmetric ( vertical : 0.0, horizontal : 0.0 ), child : body, ), ) ; }
Voila!
Example 2
For this example, we will create a screen with a subtitle (below the toolbar) which is always shown, a list which takes up 2 / 3 of the space below the subtitle, and a grid which takes up 1/ 3 of the space below the subtitle.
From mock to Flutter widgets
Let’s start with a sketch of the screen, annotated with descriptions in plain English. Then, we convert the descriptions into Flutter widgets.
Code
Now, we implement the design in example2_page.dart.
example2_page.view/build @override Widget build(BuildContext context) { Widget subtitle = new Container ( padding: new EdgeInsets.all(8.0), color: new Color(0X33000000), child: new Text('Subtitle'), ); Widget listSection = new Expanded( flex: 2, child: new ListView( scrollDirection: Axis.vertical, shrinkWrap: true, children: _generateListItems().map((String value) { return _displayListItem(value); }).toList()), ); Widget gridSection = new Expanded( flex: 1, child: new GridView.count( crossAxisCount: 4, childAspectRatio: 1.0, mainAxisSpacing: 4.0, crossAxisSpacing: 4.0, children: _generateGridItems().map((String value) { return _displayGridItem(value); }).toList()), ); Widget body = new Column( // This makes each child fill the full width of the screen crossAxisAlignment: CrossAxisAlignment.stretch, mainAxisSize: MainAxisSize.min, children: <Widget>[ subtitle, listSection, gridSection, ], ); return new Scaffold( appBar: new AppBar( title: new Text("Example 2 Page"), ), body: new Padding( padding: new EdgeInsets.symmetric(vertical: 0.0, horizontal: 0.0), child: body, ), ); } Widget _displayListItem(String value) { return new Container ( padding: new EdgeInsets.all(8.0), color: new Color(0X9900CCCC), child: new Text(value), ); } Widget _displayGridItem(String value) { return new Container ( padding: new EdgeInsets.all(8.0), color: new Color(0X99CCCC00), child: new Text(value), ); } // Note: Placeholder method to generate list data. List<String> _generateListItems() { List<String> listItems = new List<String>(); for (int i = 0; i < 20; i++) { listItems.add('List Item'+ i.toString() +'title and description'); } return listItems; } // Note: Placeholder method to generate grid data List<String> _generateGridItems() { List<String> gridItems = new List<String>(); for (int i = 0; i < 24; i++) { gridItems.add('GI'+ i.toString()); } return gridItems; } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 @ override Widget build ( BuildContext context ) { Widget subtitle = new Container ( padding : new EdgeInsets. all ( 8.0 ), color : new Color ( 0X33000000 ), child : new Text ( 'Subtitle' ), ) ; Widget listSection = new Expanded ( flex : 2, child : new ListView ( scrollDirection : Axis. vertical, shrinkWrap : true, children : _generateListItems ( ). map ( ( String value ) { return _displayListItem ( value ) ; } ). toList ( ) ), ) ; Widget gridSection = new Expanded ( flex : 1, child : new GridView. count ( crossAxisCount : 4, childAspectRatio : 1.0, mainAxisSpacing : 4.0, crossAxisSpacing : 4.0, children : _generateGridItems ( ). map ( ( String value ) { return _displayGridItem ( value ) ; } ). toList ( ) ), ) ; Widget body = new Column ( // This makes each child fill the full width of the screen crossAxisAlignment : CrossAxisAlignment. stretch, mainAxisSize : MainAxisSize. min, children : < Widget > [ subtitle, listSection, gridSection, ], ) ; return new Scaffold ( appBar : new AppBar ( title : new Text ( "Example 2 Page" ), ), body : new Padding ( padding : new EdgeInsets. symmetric ( vertical : 0.0, horizontal : 0.0 ), child : body, ), ) ; } Widget _displayListItem ( String value ) { return new Container ( padding : new EdgeInsets. all ( 8.0 ), color : new Color ( 0X9900CCCC ), child : new Text ( value ), ) ; } Widget _displayGridItem ( String value ) { return new Container ( padding : new EdgeInsets. all ( 8.0 ), color : new Color ( 0X99CCCC00 ), child : new Text ( value ), ) ; } // Note: Placeholder method to generate list data. List < String > _generateListItems ( ) { List < String > listItems = new List < String > ( ) ; for ( int i = 0 ; i < 20 ; i ++ ) { listItems. add ( 'List Item'+ i. toString ( ) +'title and description' ) ; } return listItems ; } // Note: Placeholder method to generate grid data List < String > _generateGridItems ( ) { List < String > gridItems = new List < String > ( ) ; for ( int i = 0 ; i < 24 ; i ++ ) { gridItems. add ( 'GI'+ i. toString ( ) ) ; } return gridItems ; }
Voila!
Example 3
For this example, we will create a widget that would most likely be used in a list. It has an icon on the left and one on the right, a title which itself is made up of an image, and 2 separate pieces of text (one of those to be truncated as required), and a description to be restricted to 2 lines.
From mock to Flutter widgets
Let’s start with a sketch of the screen, annotated with descriptions in plain English. Then, we convert the descriptions into Flutter widgets.
Code
Now, we implement the design in example3_page.dart.
example3_page.view/build @override Widget build(BuildContext context) { Widget titleRow = new Row( children: <Widget>[ new Icon(Icons.people), new Expanded( child: new Container( padding: new EdgeInsets.symmetric(horizontal: 4.0), child: new Text('This is quite a long name that will be cut off', overflow: TextOverflow.ellipsis, maxLines: 1, ), ), ), new Text('0111 222 333'), ], ); Widget textSection = new Container( color: new Color(0X3300CC00), child: new Column( crossAxisAlignment: CrossAxisAlignment.stretch, mainAxisSize: MainAxisSize.min, children: <Widget>[ titleRow, new Text('We have a description here. It may fit on 2 lines,''or it may fit on 1 line. Or will require more lines than 2, but''we only show 2 lines maximum f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f.', overflow: TextOverflow.ellipsis, maxLines: 2,) ], ), ); Widget body = new Container( color: new Color(0X33000000), child: new Row( children: <Widget>[ new IconButton( onPressed: null, // Not implemented in this code tutorial icon: new Icon(Icons.send), ), new Expanded( child: textSection), new IconButton( onPressed: null, // Not implemented in this code tutorial icon: new Icon(Icons.edit), ), ], ), ); return new Scaffold( appBar: new AppBar( title: new Text("Example 3 Page"), ), body: new Padding( padding: new EdgeInsets.symmetric(vertical: 0.0, horizontal: 0.0), child: body, ), ); } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 @ override Widget build ( BuildContext context ) { Widget titleRow = new Row ( children : < Widget > [ new Icon ( Icons. people ), new Expanded ( child : new Container ( padding : new EdgeInsets. symmetric ( horizontal : 4.0 ), child : new Text ( 'This is quite a long name that will be cut off', overflow : TextOverflow. ellipsis, maxLines : 1, ), ), ), new Text ( '0111 222 333' ), ], ) ; Widget textSection = new Container ( color : new Color ( 0X3300CC00 ), child : new Column ( crossAxisAlignment : CrossAxisAlignment. stretch, mainAxisSize : MainAxisSize. min, children : < Widget > [ titleRow, new Text ( 'We have a description here. It may fit on 2 lines,''or it may fit on 1 line. Or will require more lines than 2, but''we only show 2 lines maximum f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f.', overflow : TextOverflow. ellipsis, maxLines : 2, ) ], ), ) ; Widget body = new Container ( color : new Color ( 0X33000000 ), child : new Row ( children : < Widget > [ new IconButton ( onPressed : null, // Not implemented in this code tutorial icon : new Icon ( Icons. send ), ), new Expanded ( child : textSection ), new IconButton ( onPressed : null, // Not implemented in this code tutorial icon : new Icon ( Icons. edit ), ), ], ), ) ; return new Scaffold ( appBar : new AppBar ( title : new Text ( "Example 3 Page" ), ), body : new Padding ( padding : new EdgeInsets. symmetric ( vertical : 0.0, horizontal : 0.0 ), child : body, ), ) ; }
Voila!
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What next?
From one of your favourite apps, or an app you are working on now, choose a screen, and work out how you would lay it out in Flutter.
RelatedAmber Heard has been in a public relationship with one of the world’s most recognizable actors, Johnny Depp, since 2011. Although she’s been acting since 2004, her star has risen considerably since then, and not just because of her beau. At 28, Amber has starred in NBC’s The Playboy Club and five feature films in the last five years, including The Rum Diaries with her new husband. That’s right: Johnny and Amber are now officially married. The year before she met Johnny, Amber came out |
seat in Congress this year, said Trump has been effective in building support among tea party activists, who have played an important role in GOP elections since 2010, and conservatives longing for an outsider.
"His support is stronger and his base is more unified," Griffin said, comparing Trump to Clinton's Democratic base. "You hear a lot more about wailing and gnashing of teeth about Trump in D.C. than in North Carolina."
Voter registration statistics underscore a competitive state: North Carolina has about 2.6 million registered Democrats, compared with 2 million registered Republicans and 1.9 million unaffiliated registered voters. Women make up about 53 percent of registered voters.
Much of Clinton's focus will center on registering new voters in the Triangle — the cities of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill — and mobilizing black voters throughout the state. In 2012, Obama trailed Romney in North Carolina for much of the election but was able to keep the contest competitive because of the support of black voters, who turned out in large numbers.
Democrats reported registering about 340,000 voters in 2012 and black voters accounted for about 23 percent of the electorate that year, slightly more than in 2008.
At least for now, Clinton has the airwaves largely to herself. Her campaign plans to spend more than $4 million on ads in North Carolina before the Democratic National Convention in late July — her third largest investment behind battleground heavyweights Florida and Ohio.
Priorities USA, a super PAC backing Clinton, is similarly focused on the state. The group plans to spend at least $12 million in North Carolina by the November election, according to Kantar Media's CMAG advertising tracker.
Trump's campaign has not begun advertising in the general election anywhere in the country. And none of the groups supporting him has put up commercials in North Carolina.
"She could do what (Obama) did eight years ago," said Gary Pearce, a Democratic strategist and adviser to former Gov. Jim Hunt, a Clinton supporter. "It's hard to see a way that a Republican gets to the White House without winning North Carolina."Fisheries officers confident Tasmania will be carp-free within months
Updated
Fisheries officers are confident they will declare Tasmania carp-free next year, boosting the state's reputation as a world-class trout fishery.
It has been a two-decade battle for the state's Inland Fisheries Service (IFS) to stop the carp wreaking the same havoc as they have in waterways interstate.
More than 40,000 carp have been eradicated from Lake Sorell in the Central Highlands, but the pest species has proved remarkably resilient.
Let's unpack some of the key questions when it comes to the "rabbit of the river".
Where have carp been living in the island state?
European Carp facts Native to central Asia
Introduced into Australian waterways more than 100 years ago
Adult fish have no natural predators
Known to degrade habitat of native fish
Adapts to conditions including low-oxygen and brackish water
Carp were actually first discovered in the state's north-west in 1975 and again in 1980 and were destroyed with the fish poison rotenone.
But the real battle started when they were found in the neighbouring Central Highlands lakes — Lake Crescent and Lake Sorell in 1995.
Lake Crescent was cleared of carp in 2008 and the job is almost done at Lake Sorell, with hope it will be opened back up to anglers in 2018.
Why has it taken 20 years?
When it comes to survival of the fittest, carp are king.
They are ferocious breeders, with each female laying up to 1 million eggs. Apart from fisheries workers, the adults have no natural predators.
In the past decade the IFS thought it was close to clearing Lake Sorell, but all it took was a few spawning females and the numbers shot back into the thousands.
University of Tasmania researcher Jawahar Patil has studied carp for decades and said the pest species was much smarter than most fish.
"They learn to evade capture," Dr Patil said.
"If they get used to a particular fishing method they learn to avoid it pretty quickly."
Carp are also much hardier than native fish and are not fussed by poor water quality or a drop in oxygen levels.
What's been the breakthrough?
Fisheries officers like Chris Wisniewski, who has been tackling carp for most of his career, said there had been no one silver bullet.
He said the battle had been more like "trench warfare".
"The indication is they haven't spawned for the last couple of years is probably because we've been fishing the big fish out as they come in, so our techniques are working," he said.
But one key advantage has been the ability to radio-track the carp to see where they move, in particular where they spawn.
In Mr Wisniewski's words "to think like a carp".
This data allows the team to set up net traps in the best locations.
Another trailblazing technique is to use females pumped full of pheromones to attract the males into the nets.
This winter has thrown up another challenge.
The lake's water level has risen to make available new spawning locations.
So fisheries workers put up a 14-kilometre barrier net, which funnels carp looking for those new fertile breeding grounds into attached gill and fyke nets.
Why go to all this effort?
The Tasmanian Government has spent about $10 million on eradicating carp in the past two decades.
The Federal Government has supported carp eradication in Tasmania since 2011 with $2.1 million.
Trout fishing is one of the state's biggest tourist drawcards and Lake Sorell used to be a prized location and a hive of activity in summer, but since carp were discovered it has been closed.
Local fisherman Ken Orr Junior is one of many anglers keen to see it return to its former glory.
"It was one of the world's best fisheries and that has stopped," he said.
"My grandfather fished here, my father fished here, I fished here, but my kids who are in their 20s now haven't fished here."
Tasmania is also desperate to avoid the infestations seen in New Zealand and the US and even closer to home where millions of carp have decimated habitats in the Murray-Darling system.
Dr Patil said fishing bodies abroad were looking to Tasmania's success for inspiration.
"Tasmania has almost been a trailblazer in terms of developing new technologies and adopting new technologies," he said.
Topics: pest-management, water-management, rivers, pests, fishing-aquaculture, fish, campbell-town-7210, hobart-7000, launceston-7250
First postedFX
In his review of “The Wind Cries Mary,” last Thursday’s episode of Archer, Todd VanDerWerff accused the show of “gay panic” and noted that “the sexual politics of the storyline are kind of tortured and convoluted.” He’s absolutely right—but, to quote Archer himself, that’s really just the tip (of the iceberg, that is). Archer has played a dangerous game with gay humor throughout its entire run, with “The Wind Cries Mary” simply revealing more than usual about the show’s uneasy relationship with homosexuality.
On the one hand, Archer does feature an openly gay character (Ray) who also happens to be voiced by the show’s creator, Adam Reed. Ray seems to be quite competent and sharp; he may not be a role model, but he’s an interesting, rounded character, so far as either of those terms apply to the Archer universe. Moreover, most gay-related humor on Archer involves Mallory Archer’s homophobic jibes at Ray, which are received with disgust by the other characters. We’re meant to laugh at her homophobia, not with it.
On the other hand, Archer often plays off the kind of homophobic stereotypes that historically fostered so much fear and hatred toward gay people. Ray is often depicted as hypersexualized, and while he’s not alone in being oversexed (see: Pam), the trait feels quite loaded when applied to a gay man. That’s not to say Reed should handle Ray with kid gloves: Most characters on Archer are, after all, charmingly twisted. All too often, however, Ray’s actions play into distorted societal misconceptions about gay people where Archer’s or Malory’s misdeeds would merely be absurdly funny. That might be the price Reed pays for bold comedy, but it is, at times, a high one given Ray’s more shocking antics. Most notably, in “Blood Test,” Ray casually raped an unconscious Cyril, with no apparent character motivation other than an urge to have sex. Later, Ray is stricken with paraplegia from the waist down, a rather obvious form of symbolic emasculation. That’s troubling. Anyone with a faint knowledge of LGBT history will know that gays were long demonized as hypersexual beasts unable to control their impulses, and as sexually aggressive threats to straight men, and that one historic punishment for sodomy was castration. Ray’s character arc has distressingly loud echoes of such discrimination–as did “The Wind Cries Mary.”
In last week’s episode, perhaps Reed was attempting to circumvent potential allegations of homophobia by making Luke Archersexual rather than homosexual, but I think he failed: Luke reads as gay, comically so, right down to renovating a B&B in Vermont. And his attraction to Archer is so strong that he’s willing to murder his fellow agents and betray his country. Archer is a comedy, and all of this was meant to be taken lightly. But fears of such uncontrollable hypersexuality drove LGBT intolerance for centuries, and it’s probably a little too soon to play them for laughs.
Maybe the episode would have been less fraught had it not ended with the (ostensibly comical) revelation that Luke once raped Archer. To understand how risky that twist is, just tweak the plot line slightly: imagine a show in which a hypersexualized black man killed a bunch of people so he could have sex with a white woman. Now imagine the final scene’s twist—years ago, the black man raped the white woman while she was unconscious! Would we laugh? I’m not so certain. That arc would play on two powerful taboos: the black man with uncontrollable sexual urges for white women, and male-on-female rape (which plagues society and dominates political discourse). Both of these taboos are probably too strong, too appalling to be used as comic fodder. But we laugh at Archer’s gay-rape twist because Archer is a dolt, and everybody’s silly, and Luke was just a guest character voiced by Timothy Olyphant, and, hey, aren’t we basically over anti-gay discrimination, anyway?
I think Reed feels comfortable injecting this kind of startlingly homophobic humor into his show because it also features an openly gay character. Actually, I think he feels entitled to do it. He shouldn’t. Archer derives many of its laughs from its political incorrectness, which is great–most fans (myself included) revel in its frequent bursts of deeply transgressive humor. But “The Wind Cries Mary” dove too deep into the waters of still-fresh bigotry for my taste. Tolerant viewers might watch it with a grin and shrug off its problematic undertones. But for less tolerant viewers, the episode reinforces the notion that an oversexed monster lurks inside every gay man. We should expect more than that from Archer. What makes the show great is that Adam Reed usually doesn’t play stereotypes for easy laughs. Instead, when the show’s at its best, he explores them and explodes them in discomfiting ways. That kind of bold comedy, of course, can’t always work. So perhaps we should forgive Reed his mistakes and appreciate the fact that his show exists perpetually in the danger zone.The Lukari Restoration Initiative represents their attempts to utilize Protomatter to undo damage dealt by the Tzenkethi. Their expertise in using Protomatter, combined with their sustainability doctrine and scientific focus, has resulted in an approach to exploration that revolves around leaving the universe a better place for all those who share it.
This new reputation will be available with Season 12’s release and will feature all new traits, kit modules, space equipment sets and a ground equipment set.
Progression
Submitting Lukari Marks will increase your standing with the Lukari Restoration Initiative. These can be earned by participating in the “Gravity Kills” and “Tzenkethi Front” queues, as well as the Tzenkethi Battlezone. Each source of marks allows for scaling rewards, increasing the number of Lukari Marks received by performing above expectations or completing bonus objectives.
Protomatter Microcontainers can be earned by participating in the Advanced and Elite versions of queues which reward Lukari Marks, as well as completing significant events within the Tzenkethi Battlezone. Protomatter Microcontainers hold trace amounts of Protomatter, used by the Tzenkethi for making Protomatter bombs. Because Protomatter is notoriously unstable, the Tzenkethi usually keep it in small, isolated quantities. Allied forces encourage collection of Protomatter for safe disposal. High-end gear projects will require a small number of Protomatter Microcontainers to claim the best equipment the Lukari Restoration Initiative has to offer. The Lukari Restoration Initiative will also exchange Protomatter Microcontainers for Dilithium Ore.
Rewards
Lukari Marks and Protomatter Microcontainers can be submitted for Reputation XP and new, high-quality gear acquisitions. Here are a few examples of the items which can be earned by advancing your standing with the Lukari Restoration Initiative:
Lukari Restoration Initiative Starship Technologies (Space Set – 4 Pieces)
Lukari Restoration Initiative Deflector Array Mk XII Lukari Restoration Initiative Deflector Arrays are designed to enhance a ship's ability to be a combat-ready support vessel. They vastly increase the Hull and Shield Restoration capabilities of ships and additionally provide resistance to Radiation Damage and enemy drain effects, while increasing outgoing drain effectiveness.
Lukari Restoration Initiative Combat Impulse Engines Mk XII Lukari Restoration Initiative Combat Impulse Engines are especially reactive to the state of their ship; they come standard with additional kinetic resistance and additionally grant a mobility and regeneration buff when your hull suffers excessive damage in a short duration.
Lukari Restoration Initiative Regenerative Shield Array Mk XII Lukari Restoration Initiative Regenerative Shield Arrays are adapted to have extra resistance to Tetryon damage. They additionally have enhanced shield emitters that cause them to heal nearby allies’ shields passively, in addition to their own.
Lukari Restoration Initiative Reinforced Warp / Singularity Core Mk XII Matter / Antimatter Core: Lukari Restoration Initiative Warp Cores are designed to overcharge auxiliary and shield power levels, increasing a ship’s maximum and current Auxiliary and Shield power. The warp core also gives bonus Shield power based on your current Auxiliary power level, increasing the shield defense and regeneration strength of ships. This warp core is additionally equipped with Point Jump technology, which allows it to move to a point in front of a friend to heal them, or in front of an enemy to attack.
Below are the set bonuses for this new space equipment set:
Lukari Restoration Initiative Starship Technologies Set Bonuses (Space)
Rapid Restorative Technologies (2 piece) – Passive 10% Recharge Time reduction on Hull and Shield Healing Bridge Officer abilities.
Supercharged Shield Emitters (3 piece) – Enhancement Regenerative Shield Overflow (Set Shield Passive) Range increased from 2.5km to 5km.
Enhanced Point Jump (4 piece) – Click Point Jump Reduced Recharge to 120 sec and Gain Temporary Hit points for 10 sec. Foes within 5km: receive a penalty to Shield Hardness for 10 sec.
Lukari Restoration Initiative Armaments (Weapon Set – 3 Pieces)
Console – Universal – Piezo-Electric Focuser Mk XII The Piezo-Electric Focuser Universal Console utilizes advanced technology to generate Piezo-Electric power from the natural vibrations of the ship and boost the efficiency of various parts of your starship. Slotting this console grants an increase to Polaron damage, turn speed, and maximum shield capacity.
Advanced Piezo-Photon Torpedo Launcher Mk XII The Advanced Piezo-Photon Torpedo Launcher has been heavily enhanced, with different effects under different firing modes. This torpedo prevents Tzenkethi ships from creating Protomatter Radiation Hazards on death for 10 seconds after impacting them. When fired normally, or as a transported warhead, it has a chance to inflict a shield hardness debuff and shield drain on nearby foes. When fired as a salvo, or with the photonic shockwave upgrade, it drains and debuffs the hardness of your enemy's shields in a massive area around your primary target. When fired as a high yield torpedo, the launcher fires one single destructible torpedo that deals heavy kinetic damage to your main target, inflicts a shield hardness debuff and bigger shield drain to all foes in range, and additionally deals shield-bypassing electrical damage to all foes in range.
Advanced Piezo-Polaron Weapon Mk XII Beam Array: The Advanced Piezo-Polaron Beam Array has a chance to heal you and nearby allies for a percent of their hull and shields over time. Additionally, when first activated while Beam Overload or Surgical Strikes are active, this weapon triggers a Technical Overload on the target that deals electrical damage in an area around the target that is increased if the target is electrical. Dual Heavy Cannons: The Advanced Piezo-Polaron Dual Cannons have a chance to heal you and nearby allies for a percent of their hull and shields over time. Additionally, when first activated while Cannon Rapid Fire or Surgical Strikes are active, this weapon triggers a Technical Overload on the target that deals electrical damage in an area around the target that is increased if the target is electrical.
Below are the set bonuses for this new space equipment set:
Lukari Restoration Initiative Armaments Set Bonuses (Space)
Piezo-Electric Technologies (2 piece) – Passive Increased Photon Projectile Damage Increased Polaron Weapon Damage Increased Drain Expertise
Protomatter-Infused Torpedoes (3 piece) – Passive If your High-yield Advanced Piezo-Photon Torpedoes are shot down before reaching the target, they will spawn a Protomatter Hazard that grants allied players a hull and shield regeneration boost for flying into it.
Lukari Restoration Initiative Operative (Ground Set – 3 Pieces)
Lukari Proto-Restorative Combat Armor Mk XII Lukari Proto-Restorative Combat Armor is the result of Lukari scientists compromising on an exploratory, peaceful policy in the face of a dangerous threat. The armor comes equipped with active regenerative properties and advanced adaptive engineering for encounters with enemies of similar technological prowess.
Lukari Proto-Reactive Personal Shield Mk XII As with all Lukari technology, the Lukari Proto-Reactive Personal Shield is designed to be adaptable. Powered using refined Protomatter energy harnessing techniques, the Lukari have made a highly regenerative shield. Also equipped within the shield projector is a countermeasure for when power reserves drop significantly. The shield will disperse a Protomatter regenerative field so that the wearer and nearby allies can be saved in the case of sudden, unexpected dangers.
Lukari Piezo-Electric Wrist Apparatus Mk XII The Lukari have ideals which must not be lost among the conflicts of space. This lead their engineering teams to develop a wrist device that was capable of both reinforcing offensive capabilities and providing a support role if the scenario warrants it. Additionally, due to the electrical output of the device, enemy offensive and supportive electronics can be dispatched quickly and tactically.
Below are the set bonuses for this new ground equipment set:
Lukari Restoration Initiative Operative Set Bonuses (Ground)
Advanced Support Methodology (2 piece) – Passive Increased Outgoing Healing bonus Increased Electrical Damage
Lukari Proto-Energy Mastery (3 piece) – Passive Chance when taking damage while shields are active to convert some incoming damage for a few a seconds into shield healing.
Kit Modules
Engineering Kit Module - Protomatter Generator Drone Mk XII The Protomatter Generator Drone Fabrication creates a mobile drone that follows the user and provides passive health and shield regeneration to allies that stand near it.
Science Kit Module - Piezo-Electric Lattice Mk XII Piezo-Electric Lattice will root and cause electrical damage over time to the target and up to 4 other nearby targets. Affected targets may also suffer from a weapon malfunction for a short time. This duration is doubled against Electrical targets.
Tactical Kit Module - Piezo-Electric Grenade Mk XII Throws a grenade at the target. The grenade explodes on contact, dealing area of effect kinetic damage as well as a high amount of electric damage over time. The Piezo-Electric Grenade also has a high chance to hold affected targets for a short time. Electronic targets are always held if struck by this grenade's blast. It is possible for the target to move away from the blast radius while the grenade is in transit. Damage from the explosion partially ignores shields, and does additional damage to electronic enemies.
Traits
The Lukari Restoration Initiative introduces the following new traits:
Tier 1 – Ground
Slippery Target (Passive) Gain immunity to Control effects for a short duration when you are the target of a Root, Hold, Disable or Knock effect.
Viral Weapon Overload (Passive) When you critically strike an enemy, you additionally disable their weapons.
Tier 2 – Space
Evasive Tactics (Passive) Gain immunity to Control effects for a short duration when you are the target of a Root, Hold, Disable or Repel effect.
Viral Engine Overload (Passive) When you critically strike an enemy, you additionally take their impulse engines offline and reduce their flight speed and turn rate.
Tier 3 – Ground
Reactive Protomatter Infusion (Passive) Being critically hit will grant you a large increase to your health and shield regeneration rate for a short time.
Piezo-Electric Discharge (Passive) 10% Chance for your weapons to cause an AOE shield drain centered on your primary target.
Tier 4 – Space
Automated Protomatter Conduits (Passive) Being critically hit will grant you a large increase to your hull and shield regeneration rate for a short time.
Piezo-Electric Weapon Amplification (Passive) 5% Chance for your weapons to cause an AOE shield drain centered on your primary target.
Tier 5 – Ground
Piezo-Electric Perimeter Snare (Click) Piezo-Electric Perimeter Snare creates a patch of mechanical tendrils at the target, which damage and root foes. Any foes that move into the snare will be slowed. All targets caught in the patch will receive electrical burns, which deals damage over time. All Damage from Piezo-Electric Perimeter Snare partially ignores shields.
This brand-new reputation will be available with the launch of Season 12: Reckoning, and will be available for testing on Tribble soon. We look forward to seeing players make the most out of these reputation rewards. See you in-game!
NOTE: All abilities and items found within this blog are subject to change.
Rob “CrypticRidi” Hrouda
Systems Designer
Star Trek OnlineWe often build tools that help forecast or teach the concepts behind our statistical methods. Turning our internal tools into public property takes some time and tuning. The spreadsheet performs a Monte Carlo simulation to generate a delivery date forecast for a single feature. There are no macros, everything in this spreadsheet is based on formulas.
Features –
Given a start date, story count range estimate and throughput/velocity it gives date and probability forecasts
Throughput can be story count based or velocity based
If historical throughput/velocity data is available, it can be used instead of a simple range estimate
If risks are known, they can be used to forecast their impact – totally optional
Charts so you can see the analysis visually – just for teaching
NO MACROS – No security issues to have to worry about. We only do what Excel does in formulas and don’t share or send any data externally.
Get it here –
Throughput Forecaster.xlsx
(See all of our free tools here: http://bit.ly/SimResources)
How it works –
Given the feature count estimate range, 500 hypothetical completions of this feature are simulated. These simulated trials are used to compute how likely a given delivery date is against others. This analysis correctly computes how the uncertainty in feature size performs against the uncertainty of delivery rate (historically or estimated).
We will be posting hands-on labs about its application in the future. For now, we just ant to make our internal tools available for use by the industry so that we can improve on the simplistic and flawed current methods of forecasting that plague the software development industry.
Troy.Mission to Mars: the human problem (part 2)
The Earth Departure Stage of a proposed NASA Mars mission, docked to the Crew Exploration Vehicle, Image Credit: NASA
David Darling
The closest Mars ever gets to Earth is more than 100 times the distance between the Earth-Moon distance (about 250,000 miles), so crewed trips to and from the Red Planet involve far more than mere extensions of Apollo-type missions. The closest approximations are long-term stays aboard space stations but even these can hardly prepare astronauts for the hardships and dangers that interplanetary travel pose.
Loss of bone density and the wasting away of muscles – including those of the heart – are well-known problems facing those who spend many months in conditions of zero gravity. Regular, intense exercise, such as on a treadmill, can partly offset these, but the fact is that a return journey to Mars will take longer than anyone has ever spent in space before. Without some provision for artificial gravity, in the form of a large rotating section of the spacecraft, astronauts might be so deconditioned by the time they arrived on the surface of Mars that lifting reasonably heavy objects could cause debilitating injuries.
If someone were to fall seriously ill aboard the International Space Station, there’s the means to return them quickly to Earth. But on a Mars excursion, the crew is on their own with no means to carry out emergency surgery or deal with anything other than minor malaises and injuries. If an emergency were to arise – and the chances of such an emergency are greater the longer the mission goes on – it would most likely be catastrophic for both the individual and the rest of the crew.
Nor are the potential health issues all physical. According to NASA’s 2009 Human Research Program report, cooping up for long periods a small group of people, however carefully they’d been selected for psychological fitness, is a recipe for generating stress, tension, and even major psychiatric problems. The report was based on studies of extended, claustrophobic isolation in places such as Antarctica and undersea habitats. A Mars mission might seem, at first glance, like an action-packed adventure but the months of drifting through a starry void, following an intense but monotonous routine, would lead to “increased human performance errors due to sleep loss, fatigue, work overload, and circadian desynchronization.”
Most of these health-related difficulties would also face astronauts working on the surface of Mars for extended periods, and would acutely affect colonizers. But those on the ground would also be confronted by the alien environment of the Red Planet itself. Paramount among the hazards unique to Mars is the toxic ultra-fine dust that blankets much of its surface. This dust would quickly be blown into a habitat and also carried inside on astronauts’ boots and clothing, and become more than just an irritant. Martian dust contains highly chlorinated salts – perchlorates – that can cause thyroid damage and react with moisture in the lungs to trigger respiratory problems. Gypsum, too, has been found on Mars, by NASA’s Curiosity rover, and, although not toxic, it could build up in the lungs in the same way that coal-dust does in the lungs of miners.
The prospects for the human exploration of Mars and other worlds in the solar system is an exciting one. But the obstacles are formidable and the prospects of help for travelers many millions of miles from home is zero – facts that future mission designers must keep firmly in mind as they make their ambitious plans.
The views expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The SpaceFlight Group.
Welcome to The Spaceflight Group! Be sure to follow us on Facebook: The Spaceflight Group as well as on Twitter at: @SpaceflightGrpFacing overwhelming evidence against him and a possible death penalty, Esteban Santiago's legal team has only two realistic options, experts say: Try to make a swift plea agreement or pursue an insanity defense.
Neither of those choices is a sure thing, say lawyers who have handled these kinds of challenging cases.
Santiago, 26, is accused of fatally shooting five people and injuring six others last week at the international airport in Fort Lauderdale.
"People think, 'How do you defend someone when everything is on videotape and it's so high-profile?'" said Reuben Cahn, a federal public defender who has represented several people in capital punishment cases.
"But you're not defending against guilt in these types of cases; you're defending against the punishment. The focus of any lawyer in this kind of case is to keep the client from going to death row," Cahn said.
CAPTION A stampede of officers is predictable in such situations, experts say, but the Broward County Sheriff’s Office was not prepared to manage the situation, according to a draft review by the sheriff’s office. A stampede of officers is predictable in such situations, experts say, but the Broward County Sheriff’s Office was not prepared to manage the situation, according to a draft review by the sheriff’s office. CAPTION A stampede of officers is predictable in such situations, experts say, but the Broward County Sheriff’s Office was not prepared to manage the situation, according to a draft review by the sheriff’s office. A stampede of officers is predictable in such situations, experts say, but the Broward County Sheriff’s Office was not prepared to manage the situation, according to a draft review by the sheriff’s office. CAPTION Fort Lauderdale airport shooter Esteban Santiago checked nothing but a gun on his one-way flight. Was it hard? We sent our reporter to five cities on one-way tickets, with a semi-a... Fort Lauderdale airport shooter Esteban Santiago checked nothing but a gun on his one-way flight. Was it hard? We sent our reporter to five cities on one-way tickets, with a semi-a... CAPTION An internal draft review relased Friday by the Broward Sherff's Office revealed numerous failures by the agency to contain the chaotic situation that arose from a deadly shooting at the Fort Lauderdale Airport. An internal draft review relased Friday by the Broward Sherff's Office revealed numerous failures by the agency to contain the chaotic situation that arose from a deadly shooting at the Fort Lauderdale Airport. CAPTION The Transportation Security Administration said Wednesday it has been testing the procedure at 10 airports for more than a year, and it may be expanded nationwide. The Transportation Security Administration said Wednesday it has been testing the procedure at 10 airports for more than a year, and it may be expanded nationwide. CAPTION A Sun Sentinel investigation revealed that deficiencies in training, communications and passenger support made a challenging and terrifying situation worse. A Sun Sentinel investigation revealed that deficiencies in training, communications and passenger support made a challenging and terrifying situation worse.
Complete coverage of the Fort Lauderdale airport shooting
Cahn used to work as a federal defender in the Southern District of Florida and the state public defender's office in Broward County.
He was one of the lawyers for Jared Loughner, who pleaded guilty to shooting and severely injuring former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killing six others in Tucson, Ariz., in 2011.
Loughner is serving seven life terms without parole, plus 140 years, after he pleaded guilty.
Santiago has not yet been formally charged, but the allegations carry a maximum punishment of execution or life in prison.
Death penalty rarely sought
Death penalty defense lawyers disagree about how likely it is that prosecutors would formally seek the federal death penalty against Santiago.
Federal prosecutors rarely seek a death sentence and even more rarely persuade jurors that execution is appropriate.
The federal death penalty is completely separate from Florida's troubled state death penalty, which is in limbo because of appellate and legislative problems but has been frequently sought and imposed.
The federal death penalty statute is different: After determining guilt, federal jurors issue a separate verdict — which is not a recommendation and must be followed by the trial judge — on whether the person should be executed. A unanimous verdict for death is required.
Only 63 people are on federal death row, including Dylann Roof, who was sentenced to death on Tuesday. And only three death row inmates have been executed in recent history, in 2001 and 2003.
Judges and jurors in Florida have sentenced only two men to federal death row since Congress reinstated the death penalty in 1988. Both were prosecuted in federal court in West Palm Beach.
Drug runners Daniel Troya and Ricardo Sanchez Jr., both 33, were each sentenced to two death sentences and two life terms in 2009 for slaughtering a Greenacres family along Florida's Turnpike in 2006. Troya and Sanchez are both imprisoned in Terre Haute, Ind., and are appealing their sentences.
The life terms were for fatally shooting the parents and the death sentences were for murdering their sons, ages 3 and 4.
Prosecutors said the murders were ordered to settle a drug debt with the father.
"Death penalty lawyers have a saying: 'It's not really about who you are; it's about who you kill,'" said James Eisenberg, a West Palm Beach lawyer who represented Troya.
Mental health concerns
Eisenberg thinks it is likely that prosecutors will seek the death penalty for Santiago because they have evidence he killed multiple victims, those victims would be considered vulnerable because of their ages, and because Santiago told investigators he planned the murders and took a flight to Fort Lauderdale to carry out his plan.
"If they don't seek the death penalty, it will be because of his history of mental health problems, the fact that he is a veteran who served in Iraq — we [society] treat veterans differently — and he went to the government looking for help with his problems before the crime," Eisenberg said.
It's not yet clear if federal prosecutors would negotiate a plea agreement that would avoid a trial and guarantee multiple life terms in prison for Santiago, lawyers said.
And insanity defenses almost never get suspects acquitted, the experts said.
Former U.S. Attorney Jeff Sloman, who is now in private practice, said an initial review of what is publicly known about Santiago suggests the aggravating factors — what lawyers call the reasons for seeking death — seem to slightly outweigh the mitigating factors, or reasons not to seek death.
"But I don't think they will seek death because of what we know so far about his mental health problems," Sloman said.
In 2007, jurors voted against the federal death penalty for Kenneth Wilk, after convicting him of fatally shooting Broward Sheriff's Deputy Todd Fatta during a raid on Wilk's Fort Lauderdale home.
Jurors in the Fort Lauderdale trial wrote on the verdict form that the way the search was mishandled by law enforcement contributed to their decision to give Wilk life in prison.
They also mentioned several other factors, including Wilk's mental health problems and his AIDS diagnosis. Wilk, now 55, is imprisoned in Arizona.
'He went seeking help'
Veteran South Florida defense lawyer Fred Haddad said he thinks prosecutors will not seek the death penalty and Santiago will plead guilty and receive several life terms in prison.
"If he goes to trial, there's no other defense — it would have to be insanity and that's a tough one because jurors don't like it," said Haddad. "I think the prosecution will be relieved if he pleads guilty — the man is a war veteran and he went seeking help. When someone seeks help, especially a veteran, they should get it."
The initial decision on whether to seek death is made by U.S. Attorney Wifredo Ferrer, but the U.S. attorney general would have to sign off on it. Before any final decision is made, both sides would get to present the pros and cons to a panel of experts from the U.S. Department of Justice, experts said.In a round table discussion devoted to the future of Burma (Myanmar), the country's human rights activist and leading opposition politician, Aung San Suu Kyi stressed that more international support was needed in Burma to bring about democratic reforms.
The Nobel Peace Prize Laureate said that despite recent elections, there had been no meaningful political change.
"I know there were elections. But the government that took over after the elections consists of the same people that were in power before them," she told a forum which was organized by DW-TV in collaboration with the Hertie School of Governance.
Speaking from a secret location in Rangoon, she lamented the lack of international support and poorly coordinated international aid.
Europe, she said, was "unfortunately too disunited" when it came to Burma, adding that other countries and international organizations needed to become involved as well.
"I do not believe that Europe, the ASEAN states or the US can help Burma on their own. A coordinated approach is needed," she told a group of students, lecturers and journalists.
Human rights abuses
Suu Kyi was released from house arrest last year
During the discussion, Aung San Suu Kyi also noted that, insofar as people in her country had any access to uncensored media sources at all, they were following developments in the Arab world with great interest.
Young people in Burma, she said, were slowly realizing that they would have to take their fate into their own hands if they wanted to bring about change.
Aung San Suu Kyi, is Burma's most famous dissident. She was released from house arrest last winter after decades of outspoken condemnation of the repressive Burmese military regime.
Burma held its first elections in twenty years in November last year, but it is believed that the Burmese military remains highly influential.
On Friday, a senior US diplomat returning from a visit to the isolated country expressed concerns about human rights abuses and the regime's relations with North Korea.
A US Embassy statement said Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Joseph Yun had reiterated the United States' willingness to improve relations provided the government took "meaningful, concrete steps toward democratic governance, respect for human rights and the release of all political prisoners."
Author: Charlotte Chelsom-Pill
Editor: Andreas IllmerBy the time Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president of the United States in 1932, the Great Depression had been underway for three years—and Prohibition had gone on for what the literary critic and crank H.L. Mencken quite accurately described as nearly "Thirteen Awful Years." A quarter of the American workforce was unemployed. FDR had run on Repeal, proposing a win-win solution: The federal government would allow states to reopen the breweries and distilleries to create much-needed jobs, then heavily tax the alcohol to pay for what would become the New Deal.
Prohibition, which started as a "noble experiment" in 1920, ended up rolling out the red carpet for organized crime. Violence wracked cities as criminal syndicates fought over territory while the police force, politicians, and Prohibition |
me and grabbed my forearms. I hadn’t been expecting him to grapple me, and I cursed myself as I realized that I’d just attacked three full grown men, and gotten myself grappled by one of them.
I struggled as hard as I could, with no success at all, barely even able to budge Don’s arms as he spoke, though there were a few brief hesitations in his voice as he concentrated on me when I changed how I struggled against him. “Emerald, drop Allen’s staff and get Rikard back to Quartermaster Brown at the loading area. I’ll follow as soon as I’m sure Allen here isn’t going to pick up his staff and try to break one of us with it.” He paused. “I don’t think we would be as lucky next time if he comes at us expecting all three of us to resist him. Someone would be hurt, badly, I fear.”
Rikard stood, favoring his side a little where my staff had clipped him, pointing at me. “Did you see that, he attacked me!”
I spit at Rikard, over Don’s shoulder. Don jerked back a bit, and I tried to break free again. Despite his reflexive avoidance of my spitting, I couldn’t break Don’s grip, so I just hissed a response, angry enough to forget that I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone what had happened that day. “You tried to rape her on the day before your sixteenth birthday, because you knew it wouldn’t count towards prison colony time, even if you did end up getting sent to the county jail for a couple years. You tried to threaten my swine with poisoning if I said anything when I found you two in the woods, following Marza’s yells.” I glared at Rikard as Don’s fists got even tighter on my arms. “If you somehow managed to arrange a marriage with her, you’d be on your way to a prison colony after the third time you tried to have sex with her, because it would be violent rape every time.”
Don spoke, urgently, and in a low tone. “Stop this. Now.”
A thought struck me. I ignored Don and smiled a wolf’s smile at Rikard, baring my teeth. Don got a frightened look on his face and his hands grew tighter on my arms. I continued, angrily, “That is, if the Gonzalez family men didn’t just pick straws to see who would kill you and go to jail for a few years for taking out the garbage. You missed your chance to get into the gene pool when you tried to rape a thirteen-year-old. Your own right hand probably doesn’t want anything to do with you.”
Rikard looked at Don holding me, and started to walk towards me, smiling a little while balling his fists. I struggled harder, and Don’s arms actually moved a little.
Don, quietly, angrily, said “I will let him go if you take one step closer, Rikard.” He paused and his voice got a little louder, but less angry sounding. “Emerald, like I said, drop that staff and get Rik out of here before he says or does something even more stupid.”
Rikard hesitated, and my eyes bored into his. Remembering Ma’s advice, all of a sudden, I didn’t just stare into his eyes, I watched what his pupils were doing. I saw his hesitation, as his eyes flickered away from me, towards Don, and he stopped in place. His pupils danced back and forth a couple times between Don and me. Don was also watching Rikard with a cold look, but his fists were still locked tight on my forearms.
Emerald dropped the staff and pushed it away from him with a quick kick. As the staff rolled, it rattled over the cobbles until it came to a stop against the fence of the Countyman’s home a few feet away from me. Emerald hastily grabbed Rikard by the arm, speaking severely, but not loudly. “You come with me. Now. I told your pa that he shouldn’t have chosen you, because you would be trouble.” He paused, and in a menacing low tone, spoke. “Maybe now I understand why he really sent you. The fact that Don isn’t saying anything to defend you means the rumors were apparently not just rumors.”
Emerald glanced at Don as he spoke and Don nodded with a grimace. Emerald’s expression got even grimmer.
Rikard glared at all three of us, in turn, before shrugging and allowing Emerald to drag him away, while commenting over his shoulder. “Even if I can’t have Marza, I’ll be happy enough if you don’t make it home.”
I threw myself forward, pushing with my legs against the ground as hard as I could, while simultaneously pulling my arms apart, rather than just trying to pull them away. I almost got loose from Don’s grip, but not quite.
Don did have to take a step back and nearly lost his balance as he struggled to keep his grip on me. His hands clamped down even tighter on my forearms, and I gasped in pain as my bones felt close to breaking. All of Don’s attention was on me, and I tried to head butt him. I had no luck with that, he had been drawing my forearms together again, and lifting them to his shoulder level. My head missed him without him even needing to jerk his head back. I tried to knee him between the legs, but he turned his hips slightly in time to take the blow on his thigh rather than where I was trying to hit him.
Don shook me like a rag, briefly. “Allen, I spent some time with family in another county learning about cattle ranching. I’ve wrestled calves three times as heavy as you. You aren’t getting away from me, but I won’t hold you for him either, if he doesn’t leave like I’m trying to get him to do.”
As Don finished explaining to me that I wasn’t getting away from him, Emerald turned to Rikard and slapped him, a resounding slap that sounded almost like a whip crack. As Rikard looked at him, stunned, Emerald leaned forward in a furious, low toned verbal assault that I barely heard. “You just don’t know when to shut up, do you, boy? You tried to rape the girl who he’s planning on marrying, you threaten the animals that are his livelihood, and then you make hopeful comments about him dying when you are both going to war in the same militia unit? How many kinds of idiot are you trying to be today?”
Rikard looked like he was actually thinking about resisting Emerald, but that wasn’t happening. Emerald simply jerked him hard, almost pulling him off his feet, dragging Rikard down the road. “Don’t even think about it, boy. I didn’t really hurt you, I just got your attention. Shut your mouth and come with me.”
I wasn’t entirely certain Albert would agree with that assessment, but I couldn’t imagine Rikard trying to bring a complaint to the Countyman about it. I didn’t think he was that stupid.
As Rikard and Emerald walked away, Don watched. After a few seconds, when they didn’t appear to be stopping, he turned to me. “If I let you go, are you going to try to catch him and fight him again? Or attack me?” He stared into my eyes. “I’m pretty good at knowing when folks lie. Got plenty of practice with that one, and had to set straight some of the other relatives younger than him, who tried to follow in his footsteps.” His head jerked a bit in the direction where I could still see Rikard being dragged off by Emerald.
“If I was going to lie, I’d do it a lot better than he could.” I stared at Don.
After a moment, he started shaking a bit. As the smile started, I realized the shaking was him chuckling without letting it out. “No. No you wouldn’t. You have a face like an open book. That’s one thing Rik is actually quite good at. Lying. Even though he’s not as smart as he thinks he is, he’s not as stupid as he tries to appear. Not when he has time to try to think things through.”
“As much as I hate to admit that he’s better at anything than me, other than lifting heavy things, I think you’re right.” I paused. “You knew? I thought the Countyman only told his pa, since I stopped it?”
Don looked at me, his eyes bored into mine, clearly more interested in getting my answer than giving one of his own. “Are you going to go after him, or me, or can I let you go?”
“No. I won’t go after either of you. I’m going to have to talk to the officers and maybe the Countyman about it though. I can’t let his threat pass. Not with our history.” I met Don’s eyes, challenging him to say I was lying, or mistaken about how serious the problem was.
Don sighed and released my arms, watching me closely as I walked over to pick up my staff. “His pa is my uncle. We’re almost twenty years apart, but despite our age difference, his pa and I always got along very well, almost like brothers.” He began, pausing before continuing. “Some burdens are too heavy to bear alone. I help Rik’s pa bear the burden of knowing something is wrong in Rik’s head. His ma has never believed anything is wrong with her boy. Despite the fact that she’s an otherwise excellent person in every way, she just can’t see any bad in Rik.”
There wasn’t much I could say to that, other than the obvious. “But he’s family.”
Don sighed. “Exactly. He’s family. One of us until he does something too heinous, like almost happened when you stopped the rape. Thankfully there aren’t any others like him in the family.” Another pause, Don’s eyes closed briefly in a pained facial expression, and then he opened his eyes and continued. “Unless they are a whole lot better at lying than Rik, which doesn’t seem likely.”
He stopped watching me as closely and his shoulders slumped a little bit, not in defeat, but just the slump of a man bearing a heavy load. “Between us, his pa and I thought we were making a change in him in the last few months. He’s actually been working pretty hard, with few complaints, being genuinely helpful. Emerald was wrong about why his pa sent him. It wasn’t to get him away, and hope he wouldn’t come back. It’s because he’s the weakest link and we were hoping he’d come back stronger. Not that much of a difference, but it is a difference.”
I grunted, noncommittally. Don seemed to be trying to paint Rikard in a better light than I’d ever be willing to see him in.
After my grunt, Don shook his head a little and frowned. “Like I said before, Rik was never really stupid. After he finally finished school, and started having to work around the different family farms, it was a combination of collapsing complex lies and several pretty clever ideas to make things easier that made us realize he was a lot smarter than he’d been pretending to be. It’s pretty hard to hide intelligence when you’re motivated to use it to make your life easier.”
He clearly wasn’t finished so I said nothing, just politely letting him speak while I watched Rikard and Emerald walk farther away out of the corner of my eye. I hadn’t heard anything yet to make me change my belief that Rikard’s best contribution to the world would be after he was cremated, when his ashes were spread in his family’s fields.
Don’s fists clenched, which got my undivided attention before they relaxed again. Then he looked up, avoiding looking at me, as he continued. “He’s short-sighted about consequences though. If he’d actually used his brains in school to learn, instead of pretending to have been brain-addled by a fall from a horse so he wouldn’t have to do chores for three years, we could have sent him to university. The family farms are successful enough that we might have been able to get him the education needed to learn how to do a job that would put calluses on his backside rather than his hands.” He turned his head away from me and spat on the cobbles. “After he failed two years of school in a row, no university will take him now. Except, maybe, as a janitor or groundskeeper.” He looked at me with a sad face. “After what Rik tried to do to Marza though, his pa and I would do what we could to sabotage any efforts of his to get a job like that, unless we saw long-term improvement in his behavior. Too many young women at university, too much temptation to try the same thing again.” He looked at me, and sighed as he turned to walk towards the loading area. “I’ve said too much. I hate to say this about my own family, but watch your back. Carefully.”
During the last few seconds of the conversation, I realized that I had completely misread Don’s intent. He hadn’t been trying to make me see Rikard in a better light, he’d been warning me to not underestimate him. I couldn’t imagine how much that must have hurt Don to say that about family. “I understand, Don. Thank you.”
Don said nothing as he walked away, just raising his right hand jerkily while nodding his chin down and to the right, wordlessly acknowledging what I’d said.
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AdvertisementsST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (October 24, 2017) — By all indications, Saturday night’s Eastern Conference Semifinal between the Tampa Bay Rowdies and New York Red Bulls II should be an entertaining one.
In two matches against one another this season, the teams have combined for an incredible 11 goals, with both teams winning their home game and losing on the road.
It’s indicative of how the defending USL Cup champions have played all season and how they managed a berth in the playoffs despite having a negative goal differential and more losses than wins.
Nine of New York’s 33 matches this season have seen five or more goals scored, with the Red Bulls posting a record of 2-1-6 (W-T-L) in those wild shootouts. Only five of the Rowdies’ matches totaled five or more goals.
While it’s impossible to know exactly how Saturday’s match will play out, it seems likely that the teams will line up in opposing 4-2-3-1 formations.
According to USL stats partner Opta, the Red Bulls have deployed a 4-2-3-1 in 28 of their 33 matches this season. They used a 4-4-2 three times, but haven’t gone that direction since April 8. Curiously, New York Head Coach John Wolyniec has picked a 4-3-3 twice and both times were for road matches in Ottawa. Both games ended in 2-2 draws.
It’s worth noting of course that the differences between a 4-2-3-1 and 4-3-3 can sometimes be extremely subtle to the point where a team plays a 4-3-3 with the ball and drops to a 4-2-3-1 when defending.
In the first meeting between the Rowdies and Red Bulls, played in New Jersey on Sept. 2, both teams selected a 4-2-3-1 from the start, but the composition of the teams could hardly have been more different. While the Rowdies rely on experience and craft, New York fields one of the youngest teams in the USL, relying on athleticism and speed.Share this article via flipboard
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(Picture: Flickr/ Ricky Romero)
A ‘kill switch’ added to iPhones has cut crime and should be mandatory on all smartphones, US prosecutors said.
Since Apple added the option to its ‘Find My iPhone’ app, robberies involving the company’s products have dropped 19 per cent in New York in the first five months of this year.
However, those involving rival Samsung soared by 40 per cent.
‘The statistics released today illustrate the stunning effectiveness of kill switches,’ New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman said.
Tech hub San Francisco also saw Apple-related robberies drop 38 per cent, while those involving Samsung devices increased 12 per cent.
Meanwhile, London saw robberies involving iPhones and iPads drop 24 per cent, compared with a three per cent rise for Samsung.
San Francisco district attorney George Gascon called for legislation ‘at all levels’ to make anti-theft solutions mandatory.
Microsoft plans to offer ‘theft-deterent features’ as an update for phones running Windows 8.
Apple introduced the ‘activation lock’ and ‘delete phone’ options last September.It’s been a turbulent couple of weeks for Toro Rosso team principal Franz Tost. First the news that the Italian squad are switching to Honda power next season – and losing star driver Carlos Sainz in the process. Then the decision to replace Daniil Kvyat with Red Bull rookie Pierre Gasly for the ‘next Grands Prix’. We sat down for an exclusive chat in Malaysia to quiz Tost on the logic behind – and potential benefits of – all the changes… Q: Franz, no team is likely to face more upheaval than Toro Rosso in 2018 - new drivers and a new engine (again)! Can we start with the power unit? Talk us through the events that led to the Toro Rosso-Honda deal… Franz Tost: That is easy: the partnership with McLaren and Honda was a bit difficult in the past, as both parties has made public. We knew that McLaren wanted another partner, so we started negotiating with Honda and in the end we found an agreement for the next three years. Q: Is it a done deal, the three years? FT: Yes it is. Q: McLaren definitely wanted to part with Honda for obvious reasons. Where do you see the beauty of your deal? FT: *The beauty is that we expect a successful cooperation with Honda, because otherwise we would not have done the deal. I am convinced that Honda will sort out all technical topics – and I am also convinced that the engine is already much better than many people think because McLaren is quite close to us – unfortunately – and sometimes even faster than us. So I am sure that this cooperation will be successful. * Q: McLaren’s racing director Eric Boullier said that he believes Honda will produce a successful power train in the future, but that he cannot wait that long. Can you? FT: The question is about what time frame we are talking. I do expect that already next year Honda will come up with a competitive package.
"I am convinced that the engine is already much better than many people think" - Franz Tost on Honda's power unit
Q: It has seemed in the last couple of races that Honda have caught up somewhat. Could it be that you will harvest the fruits of McLaren’s labour? FT: If so, fine! (Laughs) Why not? We are open and flexible! And don’t forget, for Toro Rosso the co-operation with Honda means a 100 percent step forward. At Renault we are the third team and at Honda we are their only team, so we expect to get out a lot on the design side as well as from the cooperation. So once again: for us this deal means a big step forward. Q: What about the gearbox situation? This was one of the reasons Sauber called off their planned Honda deal – because they didn’t want to get caught in a situation where McLaren no longer runs a Honda engine but would build the gearbox for a Honda customer? FT: Ha, a clear plus on our side: we produce our own gearbox. Therefore it is totally easy for us. That is Toro Rosso – we are flexible! Q: Could it be that Toro Rosso will be the ‘guinea pig’ next season ahead of a possible Red Bull Racing-Honda partnership in 2019? FT: For that you have to speak with Red Bull Racing. We only know that we have a three-year contract. Q: In recent seasons Toro Rosso have switched back and forth between an Italian engine supplier – Ferrari – and a French one – Renault. Now you are moving from a French one to a Japanese one. How do you cope with so many changes – both technical and cultural? Surely stability would be better? FT: It shows first and foremost how flexible we are. We are used to this, so it’s easy for us. Nothing can shock us. Imagine, the last change from Ferrari to Renault was 10 months ago! (Laughs) But now it is Japanese in – and that will stay for the next three years. I also see the benefit of having a certain degree of stability, but that comes from within the team. [Technical director] James Key and his group of engineers are the source of stability and this is where we get our strength from. And we’ve shown that we are capable of fighting with teams that have much more stability than we ever had. With all the changes that we always have to cope with, we have always been in a position to finish the car in time for the first test – and that is paramount. But then again, it is not a ‘must’ to change during the season. (Laughs) Regarding our new Japanese partners, the good news is that I have lived in Japan for a year so I am aware of the difficulties that might arise in communication and we are already working on this matter.
"It is all open - he is still a Red Bull driver and has a valid contract" - Franz Tost on Daniil KvyatHeavy Rain
By Chris Ford
The heavy Buenos Aires rain fell onto the fresh corpses of the two guards outside the regional data exchange. Terrorists had tried and failed to blow the place up only last year, but thankfully the endless bureaucracy of government meant they still hadn’t gotten around to updating the security.
Nothing but meat and antiques guarding the place, almost to easy. The old finger print scanner didn’t bother to check that the finger I placed on it was still connected to it’s owner, who lay dead back in my apartment. The big secure looking metal doors just slid aside and I walked right in. A dozen security cameras watched my every move, but I just ignored them. I was going to get caught, I had known from the moment the orders reached me.
The place was quiet, hardly anyone about. The guard and technician I met walking about the place were both dead before I noticed them – My prosthetic arm set to auto kill had lifted my silenced gun and shot them both in the tiniest fraction of a second.
I reached the prize, a interplanetary network hub, it’s digital firewall made it the most impregnable of all targets for hackers. Here though, in person, it was wide open. I loaded the program then sat down and waited to be caught.
The job was done… The seed planted… Soon the network will go down… No communications to all the starships travelling about the solar system… But not before some of those big automated cargo haulers have been told to change course.
Earth may think that we have no way of striking back. That we have no ships to stop them as they crack open our dome habitats from orbit. They are right of course, we have no starships… which is why we are going to borrow theirs. A few heavy cargo haulers ramming into the Earth and they’ll soon understand the suffering they’ve caused us.
The suffering they’ve caused me.Featuring classic cuts from Skream, Loefah and Digital Mystikz.
Back in 2006, Bristol-based dubstep imprint Tectonic released a series of 10″s as part of a series called Tectonic Plates. These limited-edition singles featured tracks from a number of the scene’s brightest stars, including Skream, Loefah, Digital Mystikz, DQ1, Distance and MRK1.
When the series came to a halt, the singles were collected and assembled as a compilation – Tectonic Plates Vol. 1. Now, Tectonic is set to reissue the collection on double vinyl for the first time, bundling it with a CD of label boss DJ Pinch’s exclusive mix of the tracks. If you missed the run of 10″s at the time, this is the perfect opportunity to fill out your dubstep wax collection.
Tectonic Plates Vol. 1 will be released on Tectonic on June 24, and you can check out the tracklist below.
Tracklist
A1 Skream – ‘Bahl Fwd’
A2 Distance – ‘Temptation’
B1 DQ1 – ‘Wear The Crown’
B2 MRK1 – ‘Slang’
C1 Loefah – ‘System’
C2 Digital Mystikz – ‘Molten’
D1 Armour – ‘Iron Man’
D2 Hijak – ‘Nightmarez’
Read next: FACT’s 40 best dubstep singles of all time.There are hundreds of Linux desktop distributions. What's a would-be Linux desktop user to do? Luckily for you, you don't have to try them all out to find a good fit.
sjjvn
The key question is: "What do you want to use Linux for?" Once you know that, everything else is easy.
For those of you who haven't met me before. I've been using Linux as a desktop operating system since 1993, two years after Linux was created. Since then I've used dozens of different Linux distribution and I used to run a website called Desktop Linux. Today, I use three different Linux desktops on a regular basis. In short, I know the Linux desktop.
So, let's get started shall we?
1. Who needs a "desktop" when I have the web?
Do you use the web for everything? Do you write with Google Docs, use Mint for your personal finances, and Gmail for your email? If that's you, then what you want to use is Google's Chrome OS.
Chrome OS, the operating system behind Chromebooks, is based on Gentoo Linux. But then again, that's the point of Chrome OS. It's meant to be invisible.
Sure, you can crack open a Linux shell interface on Chrome OS if you really want to, but you'll never need to. Chrome OS uses Google's Chrome web browser for its interface so if you're reading this article, you already know how to use it.
You don't even need to buy a Chromebook to use Chrome OS. A company called Neverware offers a program named CloudReady. With it, you can convert your old XP PCs or Macs into a much more usable and safer Chrome OS based system.
To be more precise, you'll be running Chromium OS. This is the open-source foundation for Chrome OS. Legally, you're not running Chrome OS, since it and Chromebook are Google trademarked products, but there's no practical difference.
2. I want a PC replacement but I don't want to learn nitty-gritty Linux.
Want a simple-to-use desktop? Then use Ubuntu.
How easy is Ubuntu with Unity to use? I got my 82-year old mother-in-law up and running on it and we don't even speak the same language!
Anyone who tells you Linux is hard to use has been hiding under a rock for the last decade. Don't believe me? Can you use an Android smartphone? Yes? Congratulations, you're a Linux user. And, thanks to the forthcoming Android N freeform windows mode, you may yet end up running an Android desktop by this time next year.
True, the Ubuntu's Unity interface is different from most desktops, but it's mindlessly simple to use. Many old school Linux hands don't care for Ubuntu because they find its Unity interface to be radically different from the old school Windows, Icons, Menu, and Pointer (WIMP) interfaces such as KDE and GNOME. You've met the WIMP interface before in the Windows XP and Windows 7 interface.
Still, for someone who wants a simple-to-use interface they can quickly master, which isn't me, but it is most people, Unity works well.
In short, if you want Linux with an easy learning curve go with Ubuntu.
3. I'm moving from Windows to Linux.
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Getting tired of Microsoft trying to force Windows 10 on you? What's an old school Windows XP or 7 user to do? He or she should turn to Linux Mint, in particular, the version using the Cinnamon interface.
Unlike Chrome OS and Ubuntu Unity, Mint with Cinnamon uses the WIMP interface you've grown to know and love. It's not a one-to-one match with XP or Windows 7, but Windows users will find Cinnamon a comfortable fit.
Linux users who grew up with the GNOME 2.x style interface will also love Cinnamon. Another worthwhile alternative for people who are fond of GNOME 2.x, and which is also integrated into Mint, is MATE. While Cinnamon rests on the foundation of the GNOME 3.x desktop, MATE is an outright GNOME 2.x fork. MATE is also available on Mint.
If you still need some Windows programs, you can always try Crossover Linux to run them on Linux. It won't run all Windows apps by any means, but it does surprisingly well.
Mint, unlike many distributions, also comes with easy access to proprietary software. Some Linux users hate such programs and hardware drivers, but I've found that they make Linux easier to use.
Personally, Mint 17.3 with Cinnamon is my favorite Linux desktop.
4. I'm a developer, not a user!
If that's you, you probably already know the distribution for Linux developers. You, along with Linus Torvalds and most Linux kernel developers know -- it's Red Hat's community distribution Fedora.
Fedora is cutting edge Linux so you need to be a little careful lest you cut yourself with it. If you're not already a Linux expert, or determined to become one, you shouldn't use Fedora.
Oh it's not hard to use. While I'm no fan of the latest version's Fedora 23 default desktop, GNOME 3.18 still works well. It's just not to my taste. Of course, you can, as with all Linux distributions, choose to use another desktop. Fedora, it should be noted, makes it easier than most to run its Linux with Cinnamon, KDE, MATE, or other desktops thanks to its Fedora Spin program.
Fedora always includes the newest versions of Linux and open-source programs. Sometimes these work well, other times, not so much. When you're running on the cutting edge, you can expect to bleed a little bit.
5. Users just want to have fun.
There are many other worthwhile Linux desktops. Here's my current pick of the best ones.
I haven't picked out some popular Linux distributions not because they're not good enough, but because I think they're more suited for server use rather than the desktop. The top two in this class are CentOS and Debian. That's not to say you can't use them as a desktop, it's just that I think you'll be better served by other more desktop-specific distributions.
Moving on, I continue to be very fond of openSUSE. It comes in two versions, Tumbleweed, which is a rolling release, and Leap, a more conventional Linux. A rolling-release Linux is one that's constantly being updated. If that sounds to you like DevOps' idea of continuous deployment, you're right. That's exactly what it is.
In both cases, these openSUSE variants are a lot like Fedora. They're meant for Linux professionals working on software or cloud projects.
Arch Linux is another rolling-releases distribution. Unlike openSUSE's Tumbleweed, Arch is a lightweight, user-friendly distribution. Its design philosophy is "keep it simple". Its developers deliver on that promise.
Except that is, for its installation. There, instead of an easy-to-use installation program, you have to manually install the operating system. If you like the idea of a simple Linux, but don't feel comfortable installing it by hand, I recommend you try Manjaro Linux. It directly answers that point.
Finally, PCLinuxOS continues to be a very good, solid desktop distribution. Its unique feature is its FullMonty desktop. Based on KDE, you start with a simple interface with six different desktop windows. Each desktop has a specific purpose: Internet, office, gaming, and so on. It's a handy concept and makes good use of Linux's built-in multi-window functionality.
By now, you should have a good idea which desktop is right for you. After all, no matter your needs, there is a Linux desktop that will meet them.
Related Stories:We bet that a lot of you think brushing your teeth is annoying. You might even try to skip it every now and then, when you think your parents won't catch you!
Well, imagine what your life would be like if you didn't have a modern toothbrush to clean your pearly whites.
You'd do what people did before the toothbrush was invented: Find another way.
Thousands of years ago, people wanted to keep their teeth and gums clean, their breath fresh and their teeth white, just like people do today. They found different tools with which to do it.
Before toothbrushes, people used rough cloth and water to clean their teeth. They would also rub things like salt and chalk across their teeth to try to get rid of the grime.
The ancient Egyptians made a kind of brush by splitting the end of a twig. And the ancient Chinese chewed on twigs with a special flavor to freshen their breath.
People also used forms of toothpaste that they made out of ingredients you probably wouldn't want to put in your mouth.
Sometimes a powder was made of the ashes of ox hooves and burned eggshells. The ancient Greeks and Romans used materials such as crushed oyster shells and bones.
The Chinese are believed to have made the first natural-bristle toothbrush in the 1400s by using bristles from pigs' necks. The bristles were attached to a handle made of bone or bamboo.
The first toothbrush that resembles the one you use today was made in England in the 1770s. A man named William Addis came up with the idea while he was in prison, put there for having started a riot. He didn't think the rag he was given was cleaning his teeth well enough, so he saved a small bone from a meal. He put tiny holes in it and used glue to attach pig bristles he had gotten from a prison guard.
The first patent for a toothbrush was awarded to an American named H.N. Wadsworth in 1857, but it wasn't until the invention of nylon in the 1930s that toothbrushes came to look like the ones you use.
And it wasn't until after World War II that Americans started brushing their teeth regularly. U.S. soldiers brought the daily habit back home with them from abroad, and that helped make the practice popular.
Now go ahead and admit it: It would be pretty gross if you didn't have a toothbrush to clean your teeth, wouldn't it?
-- Valerie StraussSagar Narayan's father says he may not have survived on his own if he had been deported.
A severely intellectually disabled man who was served a deportation order has now been granted a residence visa for New Zealand, his father says.
Sagar Narayan, 20, who lives in the West Auckland suburb of Kelston, was served a deportation order in April this year and was given until October 27 to leave New Zealand for Fiji.
However, the then newly-sworn Associate Minister of Immigration Kris Faafoi stepped in to review the case and stopped the deportation just hours before it was to be carried out.
MAHVASH ALI/STUFF Sagar Narayan needs help for everyday things.
Narayan's father Lalit Narayan said he learned of the "good news" through his lawyer on his December 20 and was waiting for written confirmation.
READ MORE:
* Minister to review deportation
* Immigration NZ to deport disabled man back to Fiji on health grounds
* Immigration lawyer says new minister may allow disabled man to stay in New Zealand
* Couple's frustration festers as Immigration NZ officers contradict each other
* Married couple forced apart as Immigration NZ leaves them in the dark
"I am happy. I would like to thank the Government and the people of New Zealand for this."
Lalit Narayan had earlier said his son would not be able to survive independently in Fiji.
He said he knew sending his son to Fiji would have been "certain death" for the disabled man who needed assistance with day-to-day tasks.
The Narayan family were granted permanent residence when they arrived in New Zealand in 2008.
However, Sagar Narayan was withdrawn from his father's application at the time and he remained in Fiji.
That was where he lived until his grandparents died in 2009.
An aunt initially cared for him but her ill-health meant she could no longer be his caregiver.
Lalit Narayan decided to bring his son to New Zealand.
The father - who is a professional caregiver - said he has spent thousands of dollars to keep his son in the country.
Sagar Narayan lived in New Zealand on temporary visas until January 2016, before Immigration NZ declined his residency under the dependent child category.
In April, he was served deportation orders and five months later Immigration NZ ordered him out of the country by the end of October.May 26, 2015, 6:58 PM GMT / Updated May 26, 2015, 9:12 PM GMT By Suzanne Gamboa
The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to lift a Texas judge's injunction that put on hold Obama administration immigration programs providing deferrals of deportations and work permits for millions of immigrants illegally in the U.S.
The programs were made possible through executive action ordered by President Barack Obama. The appeals court ruled 2-1 against the administration Tuesday. The decision arises from a lawsuit filed by 26 states opposing the programs, known by their acronyms DACA and DAPA. The lawsuit did not challenge a more limited form of DACA that Obama authorized in 2012.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, whose state is leading the legal challenge, hailed the decision saying Obama's "attempt to bypass the will of the American people was successfully checked again today."
The federal government had asked the appeals court for an emergency stay, setting aside the Texas judge's block on Obama's action. But the appeals court said the government is unlikely to succeed in its appeal of the Texas judge's decision and so would not issue the stay. In addition, the appeals court rejected an additional government request that the programs be allowed to go forward |
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The industry attempt to undercut state investigations comes a few months after New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman filed a lawsuit against Charter and its Time Warner Cable (TWC) subsidiary that claims the ISP defrauded and misled New Yorkers by promising Internet speeds the company knew it could not deliver.
NCTA-The Internet & Television Association and USTelecom, lobby groups for the cable and telecom industries, last month petitioned the Federal Communications Commission for a declaratory ruling that would help ISPs defend themselves against state-level investigations. The FCC should declare that advertisements of speeds "up to" a certain level of megabits per second are consistent with federal law as long as ISPs meet their disclosure obligations under the net neutrality rules, the groups said. There should be a national standard enforced by the FCC instead of a state-by-state "patchwork of inconsistent requirements," they argue.
Another cable lobby group, the American Cable Association (ACA), asked the FCC to approve the petition in a filing on Friday. An FCC ruling in favor of the petition wouldn't completely prevent states from filing lawsuits, but such a ruling would make it far more difficult for the states to protect consumers from false speed claims.
Consumer advocacy groups urged the FCC to reject the petition, arguing that the commission doesn't have authority to preempt states in this matter and that the state investigations are important for protecting consumers. If the FCC "allow[s] providers to make unrealistic claims with an asterisk," then "services with vastly different peak performance characteristics may be advertised as equal with true differences in performance revealed only on a web page somewhere that explains the actual inferiority of their service," the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) said in a filing on Friday.
Attorneys general from New York, 33 other states, and the District of Columbia also urged the FCC to reject the petition, which they said is "nothing more than the industry’s effort to shield itself from state law enforcement." Representing liberal states such as Massachusetts and conservative states such as Texas, the 35 attorneys general described themselves as a "bipartisan group" that seeks to enforce consumer protection laws in their states.
Charter last month asked a New York state judge to dismiss the lawsuit filed by Schneiderman, saying that FCC rules should prevent the case from moving forward, according to MediaPost.
Net neutrality’s role
The broadband lobby groups argue that states should not investigate ISPs' speed claims because the ISPs already follow speed disclosure rules set down by the FCC as part of its 2010 net neutrality order. These network transparency rules are the only major portion of the FCC's 2010 net neutrality order that remained in place after Verizon's lawsuit against the FCC eliminated the core net neutrality rules in 2014.
The FCC's transparency rules "created a specific safe harbor for [broadband] providers that disclose their average downstream and upstream speeds during the period of peak demand," the lobby groups argued. "The Commission should prevent this framework from being undermined by issuing a declaratory ruling confirming that a broadband provider’s description of speeds based on this average peak-hour metric complies with the Commission’s transparency requirements."
Disclosures on the providers' websites are enough to meet the federal standard, the petition said. The FCC's treatment of broadband as an interstate service should also preempt state actions, the petition argued.
The lobby groups also cited the FCC's 2015 net neutrality rules and classification of ISPs as common carriers—even as FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is planning to eliminate the 2015 rules that have been consistently opposed by these same lobby groups. For as long as the 2015 order remains in place, the FCC should declare that ISPs' current disclosures meet the order's standard that providers' practices must be "just and reasonable," NCTA and USTelecom argued.
The FCC's ongoing deliberations on what the existing net neutrality rules should be replaced with provides another reason to hinder state lawsuits, the groups claim.
"Protecting the Commission’s authority to establish national, uniform rules is particularly important at this time, as the Commission is about to launch a proceeding to put in place a national 'light-touch framework' to govern [broadband] providers and preserve a free and open Internet," they wrote.
States cry foul
The 35 attorneys general say the industry petition "ignores the Federal Communications Act’s preservation of concurrent state authority over unfair and deceptive practices," as well as the history, purpose, and text of the FCC's transparency rule. There is also nothing in the Communications Act that "preempts state anti-fraud or consumer-protection claims or reflects any intention by Congress to make federal law the exclusive means of bringing such claims against broadband providers," the states' law enforcement officials said.
Disclosures made to comply with federal law do not alter companies' obligations under state law, the attorneys general wrote.
"[I]t appears that the petition is really seeking to alter disclosure obligations under state law, including state consumer protection laws’ prohibitions on false and misleading statements and material omissions in consumer-facing advertisements," they wrote. "Such a ruling would plainly exceed the scope of the Commission’s authority granted by Congress, and would be improper."
There is also "no factual basis" to determine that ISPs' speed disclosures meet the FCC's "just and reasonable" standard, they argued. "The request is plainly seeking a factual finding, despite the complete lack of any factual record to support such a conclusion," they wrote.
ISPs say states’ speed tests are redundant
State-level speed tests aren't necessary, the cable and telecom lobby groups argued, because the FCC runs the Measuring Broadband America program to verify whether the largest ISPs' in-home broadband speeds match the providers' speed claims.
"The New York Complaint, however, relies on different, unofficial measurement tools as its basis for alleging that TWC subscribers “received speeds that were consistently well below the speeds that they paid for," NCTA and USTelecom wrote. "Such state-level actions are causing significant uncertainty, confusion, and potential unwarranted liability."
ISPs that follow the FCC's guidance should not be subjected to "inconsistent standards" applied in each state, the lobby groups wrote. The lobby groups are worried about states holding ISPs to their promises that speeds will be "up to" a certain amount, since Internet speeds are often slower than the maximum level. The NCTA and USTelecom petition said:
These state investigations have sought to determine, among other things, whether the typical advertising practice of offering 'up to' a particular speed threshold (e.g., 'download speeds up to 50Mbps') accurately describes the 'actual' performance of the service. … As litigation proceeds in New York, there is a significant risk that other jurisdictions will commence their own parallel actions, arguing that state law mandates the disclosure of broadband speeds measured under approaches that diverge from those approved and encouraged by the Commission.
The FCC "should confirm that it is consistent with federal law for broadband providers to advertise the maximum ('up to') speeds available to subscribers on a particular tier, so long as the provider otherwise meets its obligations under the Commission’s transparency rules," they wrote.
The ACA, which represents small and medium-sized cable operators, told the FCC that lawsuits filed by states could disproportionately harm small ISPs.
"The action brought by the New York State Attorney General is already problematic for [broadband] providers, particularly smaller providers, who reasonably fear their states may follow New York’s lead," the ACA wrote. "Defending oneself in such an enforcement action incurs significant costs, which would be especially burdensome for smaller providers with limited staff and resources."
Consumer advocates weigh in
Consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge urged the FCC to reject the industry petition in a filing last week, saying that states have the authority and the expertise to regulate ISPs' speed claims. Although broadband network traffic is interstate, ISPs' communications with consumers are intrastate and can thus be regulated by individual states, the group argued.
Moreover, Congress has not clearly authorized the FCC to preempt the ability of states to prevent fraud and misrepresentation, Public Knowledge said.
“The marketplace needs honest information to work”
"[T]he federal measurement scheme can coexist with state consumer protection laws," and "states are equipped with the expertise and personnel to police fraudulent and deceptive business practices carried out within the state," Public Knowledge wrote.
The ILSR argued that the FCC "does not have authority to simply remove states’ ability and authority to protect their [broadband] subscribers from misleading or potentially dishonest claims about advertised services."
State actions are important because FCC rules require that ISPs post average speeds, "but national averages may not be particularly useful for a given state," the ILSR wrote.
"The marketplace needs honest information to work—some networks use technologies that are capable of consistently delivering advertised speeds whereas others use technologies more likely to have bottlenecks during high demand," the ILSR wrote. "A fundamental question is whether some providers mislead customers by advertising rates that are not achievable under common conditions, regardless of whether providers make some additional information available at a location unlikely to be visited by someone shopping for broadband."
Disclosure: The Advance/Newhouse Partnership, which owns about 13 percent of Charter, is part of Advance Publications. Advance Publications owns Condé Nast, which owns Ars Technica.Technically, this won't be Matt Williams' pro debut in his hometown and college haunt. But this time it is closer to something for real.
After battling an ankle sprain at the start of the Orlando Pro Summer League on the Orlando Magic’s practice court at the Amway Center, Williams showed enough with the Miami Heat in July to earn an invitation to training camp. That now will put him on the main court Saturday at Amway when the Heat play the third of their six exhibitions.
After dominating from distance at Jones High School in Orlando and then the University of Central Florida, it is yet another showcase in his Orlando evolution.
"It just feels good, just to know that all my hard work paid off, five long years, two great coaches, and I learned a lot," Williams said of his time at UCF that left him undrafted but on the Heat's radar. "I learned a lot about trying to be a professional."
Williams finished his collegiate career as UCF's all-time leader in 3-pointers (274) and became the 18th player in program history to score at least 1,000 points. As a senior, he set the single-season school and conference records for 3-pointers (126) and set the Knights' single-game 3-point record with 11 against South Florida on Jan. 17.
Based on coach Erik Spoelstra's comments about this being a no-cut camp, it means Williams will, at worst, be moving on to the Heat's developmental-league affiliate, the G League Sioux Falls Skyforce, with at least a $50,000 payout to start his pro career.
"It just shows that my hard work's paying off," Williams said. "Hopefully I have a good showing in front my whole family, UCF fans and just everyone in Orlando."
The 6-foot-5 guard has seen limited action to this point in the preseason, playing five minutes in Sunday's preseason-opening victory over the visiting Atlanta Hawks, then two in Thursday's road loss to the Brooklyn Nets.
"He's got a lot of the Miami Heat DNA qualities that we like," Spoelstra said. "He has a tremendous work ethic, very consistent. You can see why he was successful in college. The way he shoots the ball and can pass the ball is not an accident.
"He spent a lot of lonely hours in a gym by himself honing that craft, and he's shown that all summer long, really has been a diligent worker. His shooting numbers would rival all of our best shooters. So I think he's definitely someone we're looking forward to developing."
After mostly going with his rotation players in the first two exhibitions, Saturday could provide an opportunity Saturday for prospects such as Williams.
"I should have a good showing," Williams said of support in the stands, which was not an option at the Orlando summer league, since that event was closed to the public. "I should have a lot of family coming."
Richardson OK
Josh Richardson iced his left ankle after Friday's practice but otherwise was able to go through full court work after rolling the ankle when he stepped on the foot of Brooklyn Nets forward Trevor Booker during Thursday's loss at Barclays Center...
Spoelstra said he was taken by the spirit of his team in recognizing that they did not bring the need effort in Thursday's loss. "That's what I love about this group," Spoelstra said. "They want to play well for each other. They don't see these games as preseason games. They want to compete."
CAPTION Spoelstra: No need to show anger to appease outsiders. Spoelstra: No need to show anger to appease outsiders. CAPTION Spoelstra: No need to show anger to appease outsiders. Spoelstra: No need to show anger to appease outsiders. CAPTION Dwyane Wade: Braids a tribute to Iverson Dwyane Wade: Braids a tribute to Iverson CAPTION Miami Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra says his team showed grit in loss to the Phoenix Suns. Miami Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra says his team showed grit in loss to the Phoenix Suns. CAPTION Miami Heat guard Dwyane Wade says his team's loss to the Phoenix Suns hurt his team and their hopes of getting to the playoffs. Miami Heat guard Dwyane Wade says his team's loss to the Phoenix Suns hurt his team and their hopes of getting to the playoffs. CAPTION Miami guard Josh Richardson talks about the obstacles that lead hs team's loss to the Phoenix Suns. Miami guard Josh Richardson talks about the obstacles that lead hs team's loss to the Phoenix Suns.
iwinderman@sunsentinel.com. Follow him at twitter.com/iraheatbeat or facebook.com/ira.winderman
For daily Heat mailbag go to sun-sentinel.com/askiraAUSTIN Texas (Reuters) - A bipartisan and high-profile group of lawyers on Monday filed a brief seeking to have abuse of power felony charges against Texas Governor Rick Perry thrown out, arguing the indictment against him is constitutionally flawed.
Texas Governor Rick Perry (C) and his lawyers David Botsford (L) and Tony Buzbee attend a pre-trial hearing to face abuse-of-power charges in the 390th District Court at the Blackwell-Thurman Criminal Justice Center in Austin, Texas November 6, 2014. REUTERS/American-Statesman/Jay Janner/Pool
Perry, seen as a possible Republican candidate in the 2016 presidential race, has said he was within his rights as governor in vetoing funds for a county prosecutor, a veto that resulted in the two felony charges being laid against him.
“Reasonable people can disagree on the political tactics employed by both Governor Perry and his opponents. But to turn political disagreement into criminal prosecution is disturbing,” said the amicus brief filed at a court in Austin by more than a dozen lawyers.
“Both counts of the indictment are unconstitutional and must be dismissed,” said the brief, whose signers included Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel who investigated Democratic President Bill Clinton, and Paul Coggins, a former U.S. attorney appointed by Clinton.
The longest-serving governor in the state’s history, Perry became the target of an ethics investigation last year after he vetoed $7.5 million in funding for the state public integrity unit run from the district attorney’s office in Travis County, a Democratic stronghold in the heavily Republican state.
Perry’s veto was widely viewed as intended to force the resignation of Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg, a Democrat, after she had pleaded guilty to drunken driving.
Perry was indicted in August by a grand jury in Travis County over his funding veto for the ethics watchdog, which has investigated prominent Texas Republicans. He was charged with abuse of official capacity, a first-degree felony that can bring up to 99 years in prison, and coercion of a public official, a third-degree felony.
The special prosecutor in the Perry case, Michael McCrum, has said the grand jury found probable cause that Perry acted improperly in trying to force out a democratically elected official from office.
Perry made his first court appearance in the case last week for a pretrial hearing, where his lawyers sought to have the charges dropped.
Perry did not seek re-election this month as he tests the waters for another presidential run. He dropped out of a gaffe-filled campaign for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination but has been attempting a political comeback.A Saudi student who was accepted to a US university faces execution by beheading for attending anti-government protests.
Mujtabaa al-Sweikat, who was 17 at the time, was arrested on his way to the airport in Dammam in 2013, while trying to travel to the United States to attend college.
Sweikat, who had been accepted to Western Michigan University (WMU), was sentenced to death last year; the verdict was upheld by the country's high court in May. According to the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), on Saturday he was moved to Riyadh, where executions usually take place.
AFT, a union for educators, condemned Sweikat's death sentence, calling on US officials to intervene on the student's behalf.
President Donald Trump visited Riyadh in May. He has repeatedly emphasised ties with Saudi Arabia and personal friendship with its monarch, King Salman.
AFT president Randi Weingarten called the sentence "unthinkable" and a despicable violation of international law.
He added that Sweikat was arrested with others who took part in pro-democracy demonstrations, including a disabled man.
"Should these executions occur, Saudi Arabia should be considered a pariah nation by the world," Weingarten said in a statement. "We implore President Trump, as the standard-bearer for our great nation, to do everything in his power to stop the atrocities that may otherwise take place in Saudi Arabia."
WMU spokeswoman Cheryl Roland told Middle East Eye that the university is following the situation closely. Sweikat had planned to get a degree in finance, according to Roland.
The university said in a statement that it was “stunned” when it recently learned about Sweikat’s case.
Saudi cash aids extremism in Europe, says former UK diplomat Read More »
"The AFT information makes it clear that the critical national political figures with influence in such a situation are informed," the statement reads. "We join the AFT in urging them to use that influence to ask the Saudi government to exhibit compassion."
UK-based rights group Reprieve said Sweikat is one of 14 Saudis facing "imminent" execution for protest-related offences.
The group pointed to a “further escalation of executions” under new Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.
Among the protesters facing the death sentence is Munir al-Adam, a 23-year-old Saudi who is half-deaf and partially blind, according to Reprieve.
Maya Foa, director of Reprieve, called on Trump and UK Prime Minister Theresa May to tell bin Salman "loudly and clearly" that the executions are unacceptable.
“This is an extremely worrying move from the increasingly brutal regime in Saudi Arabia,” Foa said in a statement. “To execute a disabled man and a juvenile protester would be an appalling breach of international law and world leaders cannot stand silently by and let this happen.”Manufactured outrage
A noticeable number of overly sensitive folks are screaming into their keyboards in outrage over the latest Baldur's Gate expansion, Siege of Dragonspear, which bridges the gap between the original game and Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn over its "25+ hour" run time. The culprit? A transgender character is in the game.
Mind, there do seem to be a lot of bug complaints across Steam, GOG, and Metacritic user reviews, though it's hard to imagine that warrants the slew of 0/10 scores. There are vague complaints about "the writing," though most of the user reviews I've read that are more pithy than "it's bad" are complaining about how the DLC, "pushes needles [sic] SJW stuff" and "is too politically correct" and has an "anti white anti straight hatred" that perpetuates "the reality of regressive left fascism."
Which is code for a bunch of people complaining about the developer "pushing its politics on gamers" by, uh, pushing their politics on gamers that use these reviews as a resource/the developer, the lovely irony doomed to forever go unacknowledged. The mere existence of a minor NPC who mentions she's transgender is enough to push these people over the edge.
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Look at this down-throat-shoving agenda!
On the other hand, the alleged inclusion of memes and modern vernacular, damn, that's an A+ gripe. I was pretty bummed to see the practice reach as high as Nintendo's recent localization. An internet meme in a Zelda game does feel unwelcome, so too does the stale, "it's about ethics in..." joke apparently used in Dragonspear. And the bugs! If they're there, the bugs are unwelcome. The problem is there are plenty of positive reviews that don't mention bugs so it becomes hard to tell who just has an ax to grind beyond the folks that are blatantly telegraphing their ax grinding with cackles and smithery pantomime. This disrupts the utility of the user review as assholes have proxy wars in the most visible places they can find.
The game's Steam page with the default "Filter by -> Helpful" lists only overwhelmingly negative reviews.
Except if you poke around you'll find 103 positive reviews to 45 negative reviews. The spread is way worse on GOG and Metacritic, but that's because you don't have to own a copy of a game to leave a review on those platforms. The latter has a long history of people score-bombing games for any old reason. Someone doing something different with a beloved classic is, often, a reason in and of itself. But on the exceedingly negative end of Dragonspear's spectrum, there's mad hyperbolic language, rampant unironic use of "SJW," and plenty of offensive language about a minor NPC who tells you something about herself if you ask her two specific questions about it.
Writer Amber Scott said, "I'm the writer and creator. I get to make decisions about who I write about and why. I don't like writing about straight/white/cis people all the time. It's not reflective of the real world, it sets up s/w/c as the 'normal' baseline from which 'other' characters must be added, and it's boring." Beamdog founder Trent Oster asked fans in the game's forum, "If you are playing the game and having a good time, please consider posting a positive review to balance out the loud minority which is currently painting a dark picture for new players."It has been 68 days since Hurricane Irma took down much of Puerto Rico’s aging power grid and 54 days since Hurricane Maria finished the job, leaving nearly all 3.4 million residents without electricity. The island’s state-owned utility company, the U.S. government and workers on loan from other utilities are installing new poles, lines and power distribution circuits to replace those blown away by the storms. Despite the progress that has been made, more than half of Puerto Rico continues to soldier on without some of modern life’s bare necessities—including lights, refrigeration, air-conditioning and access to computer networks. Without significant improvements to create a more resilient grid, however, many are questioning how Puerto Rico can avoid a similar catastrophe the next time a major storm hits.
The consensus among the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and others involved in the current restoration project is that Puerto Rico is—and has been for a long time—in desperate need of a power grid makeover. Last Wednesday, during a press conference, Ricardo Ramos, executive director of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA), indicated the utility has created a “transformation plan” to improve service. Within 24 hours of the press conference a transmission line supposedly repaired a few days earlier failed, plunging San Juan and several other cities back into darkness until power could once again be restored in the following days.
Such is the nature of power in Puerto Rico, as PREPA struggles to keep its fragile electrical grid online while promising to make improvements that to date have failed to materialize. A three-day blackout in September 2016 derailed the power utility’s previous push to upgrade the island’s fragile grid. (pdf, in Spanish) Ramos’s new plan lacks specifics but includes two key components: better distribution of power plants throughout the island and the implementation of microgrids that serve fewer customers but can keep the lights on when the main grid fails.
Planning for Failure
A microgrid is a local, self-sufficient network of generators, storage devices (typically batteries) and equipment that routes electricity to homes, businesses and other structures that require service. A key benefit of such a setup is that it can operate as part of the main grid or function autonomously. These grids can be powered by diesel-burning generators or a combination of fossil fuels and renewable energy sources such as solar and/or wind.
Distributing the load in this way can alleviate reliance on one main system whose failure could cut power to the entire island. Puerto Rico needs a mix of microgrids disbursed throughout the island to provide electricity in a cost-effective way, says José Antonio Santiváñez, a professor of industrial management engineering at Puerto Rico’s University of Turabo. “Another reason microgrids are a good option for Puerto Rico is that there are hard-to-reach places on the island where [PREPA] said it would never be able to deliver power.” Those residents live off the main grid and already rely mostly on portable generators for electricity.
Many businesses and tourist resorts in Puerto Rico also have their own self-contained power networks in order to operate during emergencies or even PREPA’s normal power outages. PREPA’s customer outage rate is four to five times higher than other U.S. utilities (pdf). “The main problem, though, is that people living in rural areas don’t have the money to build or manage their own microgrids,” so the government would have to step in to help, Santiváñez says.
There are other drawbacks to these self-contained systems: “A lot of people want to be part of the main grid because the quality of the power is much better,” says Mike Hyland, senior vice president of engineering services for the American Public Power Association, a trade group for the utility industry. “That’s a big issue when it comes to electronics and manufacturing businesses, in which they can’t have transient spikes or blips causing sudden changes in voltage that could [damage] or freeze up their electronics.” The main grid’s large-scale energy production enables it to smooth over sudden changes in voltage in ways that a microgrid cannot. “I’m a big fan of microgrids, but they aren’t the saviors that many people think they are,” he adds.
The PREPA plan’s mention of distributed generation is an acknowledgement the island needs more generators positioned throughout the island, and that they need to be closer to their consumers. Many of PREPA’s largest power plants are in Salinas, Guayanilla and other towns near the island’s southern coast, where land is less expensive and the Commonwealth Oil Refining Co. once operated a large (now defunct) oil refinery. Most of the population, however, lives in the northern half of the island separated from the south by a mountainous central region.
It has been decades since the south was home to large facilities that needed lots of power, and “Puerto Rico’s governor has an interest in locating the power generators closer to the population that they support,” Maj. Gen. Donald Jackson, deputy commanding general for the Army Corps’ Civil and Emergency Operations, testified at an October 31 U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing. “That would obviate the long transmission lines currently needed across the island. The [U.S. Department of Energy] is looking at that.”
Such a move is long overdue, according to Santiváñez. “Bringing power from the southern part of the island to the northern part has been a lost cause,” he says. It has been more than two months since the storms and “most people still don’t have electricity.”
In addition to better distribution of power plants throughout the island, increased use of underground cabling could enable the power company to deliver electricity to customers without worrying about poles and lines downed by hurricane gales. That approach has been effective in areas of Puerto Rico’s capital, San Juan—although the cables could be vulnerable to damage from flooding. The limitations on underground cable include high costs—10 times greater than aboveground lines and poles—and the island’s mountainous terrain. Underground power cables also require more time and money to manufacture than do overhead wires, Hyland says. And, because they are out of sight, it is difficult to know when they have been damaged, he adds. Still, Hyland acknowledges it makes sense to consider subterranean lines in specific parts of the island for the future.
Another approach would be to supplement more of the grid’s diesel oil generators with power from solar and wind farms, although such power sources are too intermittent to replace a fossil fuel grid, Santiváñez says. Renewable energy sources such as solar panels would be good for one house or a group of homes—if they could afford it—but not for the entire island, he adds. “I have a suspicion that those solar panels in particular would be gone with the wind in the event of another category 5 storm,” he says.
Solar panel debris is seen scattered in a solar panel field in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Humacao, Puerto Rico on October 2, 2017. Credit: Ricardo Arduengo Getty Images
Red Tape
None of those upgrades will happen anytime soon, however, because FEMA is not allowed to fund them. The 1988 Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act authorizes government agencies only to restore utility service to its predisaster condition. Additionally, PREPA has no money to pay for upgrades. “The U.S. Army Corps is working to reestablish the grid to U.S. code standards,” FEMA Administrator Brock Long testified at the October 31 Senate committee hearing. “Typically, we have to restore to a predisaster condition, but obviously that is not optimal and not the way I would ever recommend [Puerto Rico] to go. We do not want to be back in this situation again.”
A category 4 or 5 storm such as Irma or Maria will knock down any aboveground wires, Long added, even if they are attached to newly installed poles. “The discussion that needs to be taken after that is: How do we build a power grid that is resilient?” Long told the committee. “That’s going to require authorities far greater than the Stafford Act affords me and FEMA.” The agency needs additional legal authority from Congress for money to make any additional improvements, according to Long.
PREPA’s bankruptcy in May further complicates Puerto Rico’s efforts to improve grid resilience. The government-owned power authority is responsible for about $9 billion of the island’s $73-billion debt. Puerto Rico formed PREPA in 1941 to be the sole provider of electricity for the island’s then 1.5 million customers. The company’s power plants are, on average, currently more than 40 years old, Long testified, adding, “worldwide, the average age of power plants is 18 years.”
PREPA made headlines recently for awarding a couple of large contracts that would have spent a lot of FEMA’s money, apparently without |
efficiency. This could have major repercussions in the realms of desalination and sterilization, and perhaps for concentrated solar thermal power generation as well.
The new material, developed by MIT mechanical engineer Hadi Ghasemi, consists of a thin double-layered disc. The bottom layer consists of spongy carbon foam that doubles up as a flotation device and a thermal insulator that prevents solar energy from dissipating into the fluid underneath. The top layer — the active layer — consists of flakes of graphite that were exfoliated using a microwave. The microwave causes the graphite to bubble up “just like popcorn” according to Gang Chen, another researcher involved with the work. [doi:10.1038/ncomms5449 – “Solar steam generation by heat localization”]
When sunlight hits the graphite, hot spots are created that draw water up through the carbon foam via capillary action. When the water reaches the hot spots in the graphite, there’s enough heat to turn the water into steam. The efficiency of the material is linked to the amount of incoming light — at a solar concentration (intensity) of 10 times that of a typical sunny day, 85% of incoming solar energy is converted into steam (assuming there’s enough water nearby; this doesn’t magically create steam out of thin air). “There can be different combinations of materials that can be used in these two layers that can lead to higher efficiencies at lower concentrations,” says Ghasemi. Graphene, anyone?
As for what this little spongy steam-maker might actually be used for, there’s a variety of possibilities. The low solar intensity requirement (10x is easy to obtain with a simple lens or reflector) means this could a very good way of producing clean water or sterilizing equipment (to this day, steam is still a very popular way of sterilizing things). Bulk desalination is another possibility, though we wonder if the carbon foam wouldn’t get clogged up with the leftover salt crystals.
And then there’s the most exciting possibility: Good ol’ power generation. In modern-day concentrated solar thermal power generation, fresnel lenses or parabolic reflectors are used to concentrate sunlight by up to 1,000 times. If steam can be produced with just the intensity of 10 suns, then system costs can probably be reduced and overall efficiency increased. A lot more work needs to be done before this stuff revolutionizes power generation, though: So far, though, MIT hasn’t gone any further than “ooh, this stuff produces steam!” As we mentioned before with regards to desalination, it’s very likely that this new material would clog up with mineral deposits rather quickly (i.e. fouling), completely destroying any semblance of efficiency.
Still, it’s clearly early days. Problems like fouling (limescale! corrosion!) have been around forever, and as such there are lots of ways to combat it. If MIT really has stumbled across a way of cheaply and easily producing steam from sunlight, then this could be big news.One of the best things about mountain biking is that it doesn’t matter what type of riding you’re into. Downhill, XC, Freeride, Enduro, call it what you want! The only thing that matters is that you ride it your way and enjoy the awesome times that a bike can bring!With this edit, we really wanted to highlight how so many riders use our trails in different ways. We see a huge range of riders, from XC riders smashing the climb in sub 15 minutes, world-class downhill riders pinning it down 50 Shades Of Black, the freeride crew sending the biggest jumps in the park and to course those who don’t fit a category, they just love to ride.What better way to celebrate the diversity of riding styles we see here at BikePark Wales than to reach out to some of the world’s best riders and ask them to ride the park their way, for one day. We were extremely fortunate, thanks to Fox Racing to get international superstars Loic Bruni, Tahnee Seagrave and Andreu Lacondeguy as well as a host of local talent for one day in September to film here at BikePark Wales. The resulting edit was filmed 100% on GoPro, in one single day!The entire day was captured using GoPro Hero 5, Karma Grip, Karma Drone and a huge range of mounts to capture the most unique angles.We hope you enjoy watching the edit as much as we enjoyed making it, the riders really showcased not only the variety of terrain we are lucky enough to have but how an individual can use that terrain to express their individual style. Next time you visit, let us see how you like to ride the park!NaturalMotion’s head of talent acquisition Peter Lovell has left the Dawn of Titans outfit after two years to re-join RuneScape developer Jagex.
Lovell had worked at Jagex for eight years prior to joining NaturalMotion in 2015, working his way up from senior recruiter to head of talent acquisition.
Now back at the Camrbridge developer, he’ll take up the role of director of talent acquisition.
Jagex return
“My time at NaturalMotion / Zynga has been amazing beyond words,” Lovell told PocketGamer.biz.
“I've worked with the most remarkable people and experienced the hard push and thrill of two massive title releases. I'm hugely proud of my contribution over the two years there and will be forever grateful to everyone at NaturalMotion and Zynga for their support. A truly remarkable company from tip to toe.
“There are amazing things going on at Jagex right now, and yet still so much potential to unlock. I am deeply honoured to be re-joining at this exciting time and can’t wait to get out there and tell people what's happening behind the scenes.
“I’m truly blessed to have the opportunity to be returning to a company that is such a huge part of my own history and professional DNA. You can take the man out of Jagex, but you never take Jagex out of the man.”Ireland have officially lodged a bid to host the 2023 World Cup alongside France, Italy and South Africa.
The four unions involved submitted their bid applications ahead of Thursday's deadline, World Rugby has confirmed.
Ireland, along with their three bid rivals, completed their bid questionnaire, outlining detailed information regarding key criteria for hosting the event.
A statement from World Rugby read: "The process to identify the host of one of the world's biggest sporting events kicked off last year and now moves to a key information-gathering stage on the road to confirmation of the host union by the World Rugby Council in November 2017."
"The applicant submissions will now be evaluated by a World Rugby Technical Review Group.
"The outcomes of the evaluation will be independently assessed to ensure a fair and consistent approach. Applicants that meet the criteria outlined will move to the candidate phase on 1 November, 2016. The Rugby World Cup 2023 host will be selected in November 2017."
Of the four nations hoping to stage the tournament in seven years time, only Ireland and Italy have never previously been hosts. South Africa held it in 1995 and France in 2007.
Applicants that meet the criteria for evaluation will move to the candidate phase on 1 November before the successful bid is announced in November 2017.
The applicant submissions are to be evaluated by a World Rugby technical review group and the outcome of the evaluation will then be independently assessed to ensure a fair and consistent approach.
The Irish Rugby Football Union confirmed in 2014 they were putting together an all-Ireland bid to stage the tournament, revealing that their plans would be underpinned by the Northern Ireland Executive and Irish Government.
"We are delighted by the strong level of serious interest from unions and governments, which truly underscores the enormous hosting appeal of Rugby World Cup as a low-investment, low-risk, high-return economic, social and sporting driver," World Rugby chairman Bill Beaumont said.
"Great events are built on strong partnerships and this process represents a major milestone in the planning and preparation phase for unions and supporting government agencies who intend to bid for Rugby World Cup 2023.
"We welcome further dialogue with all parties as the process progresses to the candidate phase and we continue the process to confirm our next host."
GAA grounds such as Croke Park are to be part of the IRFU's world cup bid and games will be staged at the Association's venues if the it is successful.Torture acceptable in some circumstances according to 20pc of Australians, survey reveals
Updated
One in five Australians think it is acceptable to use torture to obtain military information during war, a Red Cross survey has found.
The survey found Australian men were more likely than women to agree that captured soldiers can be tortured to obtain information.
Overall, 24 per cent of men think Australian soldiers can be tortured as opposed to 18 per cent of women, while people aged under 20 or over 65 were less likely to support torture.
World War II veteran Keith Campbell has expressed shock at the survey results.
The RAAF bomber was captured by the Germans after his plane collided with another aircraft while doing bombing runs, and he became a prisoner of war.
While he was never personally subjected to, or witnessed any torture at the camps he was held at, he believes "it went on because the German SS were noted for it".
But the 93-year-old says he finds it "appalling" that so many Australians approve of using torture against either Australian or enemy soldiers.
"My personal views of torture are that it's quite barbaric," he said.
"There's absolutely no excuse to torture any person, no matter what their nationality or beliefs.
"A person is a person and doesn't deserve to be ill-treated to that extent to obtain information. Certainly I appreciate information is vital, but to subject a human being to such conditions I don't think is acceptable.
"I think it's appalling that an Australian person could condone torture."
'Torture is illegal'
The Australian survey coincides with a global report by the International Committee of the Red Cross which found overwhelming support for the laws of war designed to protect civilians and healthcare.
Australian Red Cross CEO Judy Slatyer says the local survey shows that while most Australians care very much about their fellow human beings, others needed to better understand why humanitarian laws and values matter.
"Torture is illegal and unacceptable in any circumstances," she said.
"It has a devastating impact on those tortured as well as our collective humanity.
"The good news for us is that the vast majority of Australians believe torture is wrong. Having said that, 21 per cent thought it was OK to torture an Australian soldier, which we found quite shocking."
While the survey did not ask people to explain why they held that view, Ms Slatyer said there could be several factors contributing to it.
These include living in an age of terrorism, the "saturation of gruesome images every evening on the television news" and rhetoric which "creates fear", and also a view in popular culture that torture is normal.
"But I think as we all know, torture is prohibited in international law around the world for good reason," she said.
"It's a stain on our humanity. It generates hatred and triggers cycles of violence and research shows the information obtained through torture is not always reliable.
"The reason we wanted to draw attention to it was because now is an important time to remind Australians that having limits to war and conflict are important.
"And those closest to war are the ones who believe most strongly that wars should have limits and it's time to draw the line on these sorts of things.
"It's important we talk about it and remind ourselves of the things that we used to hold dear decades ago after World War II are still important as we go forward as a society."
Topics: ethics, community-and-society, unrest-conflict-and-war, australia
First postedDC Comics has provided ComicBook.com with an exclusive preview of Convergence: Green Arrow #1, from writer Chryisty Marx and artists Rags Morales and Jean-Claude St. Aubin.
The issue sees the return of the classic Emerald Archer, beard and all, form the Zero Hour era of the DC Universe. The story sees Oliver Queen meeting his son, Conner Hawke, for the very first time.
Check out the preview in the gallery below. Convergence: Green Arrow #1 goes on sale April 15. Convergence: Green Arrow #1
Publisher: DC COMICS
(W) Christy Marx (A) Rags Morales, Jean-Claude St. Aubin (CA) Rags Morales
STARRING HEROES FROM ZERO HOUR! Don't miss the first meeting between Oliver Queen and his son, Connor Hawke! Father and son may be united, but is their world about to end? Item Code: FEB150180
In Shops: 4/15/2015
SRP: $3.99A British firm, Intelligent Energy, has demonstrated a new iPhone 6 fuel cell that integrated seamlessly into the existing chassis and can reportedly run the device for up to a week. The manufacturer won’t directly confirm that it has worked directly with Apple to develop a fuel cell infrastructure for the company’s products, but reporters claim to have glimpsed prototype Macbook Air and iPhone devices.
You can already get various fuel cell chargers that combine lithium ion batteries and their own internal hardware, but what Internal Energy has worked on is (supposedly) quite different. The Telegraph reports that the company’s fuel cell technology can be integrated into an iPhone without any visible changes to the device, save for some additional vents that discharge water vapor. Total iPhone charge time? One week.
The infrastructure problem
The current iteration of Intelligent Energy’s hardware reportedly refuels the hydrogen fuel cell via the headphone jack (there’s no information on whether or not the jack remains usable for other purposes) and doesn’t replace the existing lithium-ion battery, only supplements it. There are multiple questions about how such a system would work in deployment. Intelligent Energy wants to license its technology, not produce kits wholesale, which means a phone manufacturer like Apple would need to take a substantial up-front cost and integrate the technology into a new handset run. Doing so would mean the device needs to be tested in a number of scenarios to ensure that the fuel cell doesn’t rupture or that the vents don’t become obstructed when the phone is slipped into various pockets or purses.
Deal with that problem, and there’s still the question of how device refills are handled and how much it costs to top up the fuel cell. At a few dollars per fuel cell, being able to carry a week’s worth of phone juice would be an amazing feature. Intelligent Energy already has a fuel cell recharger in the market, dubbed Upp, but the hardware is a separate boxy unit that connects to a device via USB. Some of these problems are analogous to those faced by the fuel cell vehicle industry, which currently has a limited market.
Upp’s own website notes that there are no authorized upp resellers within 125km of my own home, which points to the early adopter problems in the hydrogen economy. Right now, it’s difficult to convince people to adopt an additional means of powering devices that relies on external power packs or cartridges when wall power is cheap and sockets aren’t hard to find. Obviously a weeklong battery charge for an iPhone or other smartphone could be a lifesaver in the right conditions, but unless you’re heading out to hike the Appalachian Trail, it’s not a critical need.
Still, if any company can sell consumers on the value of a hydrogen fuel cell over and above the traditional Li-ion battery, it’s Apple. No word yet on whether or not the prototypes IE created will ever come to market, but this is the kind of technology play that could take several years to come to fruition. Sometimes that works out, as when Apple added fingerprint sensors. Others, like the company’s ill-fated sapphire glass venture, later come to naught.For the longest time, I found it really difficult to orgasm. Even with the most sensitive partner, it would often take a long while, if at all. I would often resort to faking it because I was taking too long. Even while masturbating, it sometimes took me up to an hour, despite being really turned on.
Then I started seeing someone new, stopped faking orgasms and tried to worry less. I started coming, and it became easier and more reliable. Now it happens every time, sometimes multiple times. While masturbating, I can orgasm within seconds, which was never, ever possible before. What's going on here?
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"I wish I knew." That's Barry Komisaruk's matter-of-fact answer, and he's the leading expert on the science behind the female orgasm.
His lab at Rutgers University was the first to produce a video of the brain during climax in women -- just last November. "We're in the embryonic stage of understanding," he says. "It's not even in its infancy." That's in large part because it's tremendously difficult to get funding for sex research -- but that's a story for another day (and you can bet I will be telling it someday soon).
Komisaruk, whom I've interviewed before, and his team have made huge strides, but still, he says nobody fully understands the mechanism at work here. Just to give a sense of the range of scenarios, Komisaruk explains, "What about people who used to have orgasms but now they're on antidepressants or antipsychotics and they no longer can have orgasms? The blockage could occur in a part of the brain that's different from people who, say, have had a traumatic psychological event like sexual abuse and no longer can have an orgasm." There is no one thing that makes it difficult, or impossible, for women to orgasm.
It's not unusual for a new partner to come with a change in your orgasmic experience. Recently, a woman who had never orgasmed called Komisaruk and volunteered to do a brain scan for his research. "I set it up and then a couple days before the scan was scheduled, she called me up and said she just got a new boyfriend and she had her first orgasm," he says. "So, bummer -- for me, not for her!"
What's most interesting in your case, is that your experience of orgasm even during masturbation changed profoundly and, it sounds like, without a dramatic adjustment in technique. "It seems like it's more of a psychological factor," he says. "If somebody can suddenly start having orgasms, there could be attitudinal changes. It seems more likely that it would be an attitudinal change rather than a physiological change." There's also the annoying irony of getting what you want when you stop trying.
An important part of what's going on here is that by no longer preempting your orgasm with fake ones, you were able to begin experiencing legitimate climaxes with your partner. I asked Komisaruk if it's possible that you experienced a snowball effect: The more orgasms you had, the easier it became to come in the first place. In my supreme scientific in-expertise, I suggested: Maybe she, like, burnt new neural pathways? He responded: "We don't really know; it's possible."
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You see, there are many possible explanations. What's important is that you've got ahold of your orgasm. Enjoy it, treat it well and don't let it go!The Doungkhae family, owners of Yai’s Thai Kitchen in Richmond, serve the same foods at their restaurant that they eat at home, said Oaky Nagorski, niece of owners Mno and Suchada Doungkhae.
“It’s the food we ate growing up,” Nagorski said.
The Doungkhaes have been in the restaurant business since they came to the U.S. in 1990. The couple opened a Thai restaurant in Houston called Bangkok Palace, and after only a few years, expanded to five restaurants with the same name. In 2007, the Doungkhaes got out of the restaurant business and focused on event catering instead.
Oaky and the Doungkhaes’ children grew up working in the family restaurants, Nagorski said, and they missed it.
The family opened Yai’s in January 2016, after Nagorski and the Doungkhae siblings asked the couple to go into business with them as a family and teach them how to cook their signature dishes. Yai means “grandmother” in Thai, and many of the recipes served in the restaurant belonged to their grandmother, she said.
“We wanted to keep those recipes going,” Nagorski said. “We really believe in our food. We just want to share that with people.”
Yai’s features an open kitchen, in which the family can be seen cooking, separated from the seating area by a glass wall.
“Little kids like to see the flames come off the stir fry,” Nagorski said.
As of now, Mno and Suchada do the majority of cooking at the restaurant, Nagorski said. However, they are slowly teaching the children how to cook the signature sauces and myriad dishes on the menu with the understanding they will take over the restaurant when the couple retires. The family said there is no timetable being considered.
“We’re not sure when we’ll retire,” Mno said. “We’re not even thinking about retirement.”
The family plans to begin serving beer and wine in the future, but for now, Yai’s is a BYOB establishment.
“It’s fun,” Nagorski said. “We like to work together and eat together.”
Yai’s Thai Kitchen
7035 W. Grand Parkway S., Ste. 90, Richmond
281-201-2065
www.yaisthaikitchen.com
Hours: Mon.-Sat. 11 a.m.-10 p.m., Sun. 11 a.m.-9 p.m.
3 dishes to tryThe hashtag #We_DoNotWant_Sisi in Arabic, went viral on social media on Tuesday night, following a remark made by the Egyptian president that he would "not remain in his position for one second," if the people did not want him.
Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's remarks came during his speech at the third National Youth Conference on Tuesday in the Egyptian governorate of Ismailia. The conference has traditionally commemorated Sinai Liberation Day by bringing together youth representatives from around the country.
"I swear to God, I swear to God, I swear to God," said Sisi. "If the Egyptians do not want me, I will not stay in my position for another second. Not a second."
Sisi's words came in response to an audience member's question: "What would happen if you [Sisi] do not succeed in the election?"
Egypt is set to hold a presidential election in early 2018, in which Sisi is expected to run for president for a second time.
Following a military coup that deposed president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013, Sisi ran for president and was sworn into office in June 2014.
His response sparked the launch of a social media campaign by Egyptian activists calling on Sisi to step down, using the Arabic hashtag #We_DoNotWant_Sisi.
The hashtag was trending worldwide on Tuesday and Wednesday, and was the No 1 trend in Egypt on both Facebook and Twitter.
#مش_عايزين_السيسي لأن في عصرك لا يوجد أرخص من الروح المصريه والأرض المصريه — Amr Khalifa (@Cairo67Unedited) April 25, 2017
Translation: #We_DoNotWant_Sisi because Egyptian blood has never been cheaper than during your reign.
مجرم من طراز نادر
خليط من الشر و الجهل و الجنون
#مش_عايزين_السيسي — محمد النمنم (@mohmd_alnmnm) April 26, 2017
Translation: A one of a kind criminal, a mixture of evil, ignorance and madness.
#مش_عايزين_السيسي
كفاية تطبيل بقي تعبنا غور وسيبها وارحمنا بقي 😡 — ahmed esmail (@EngMidoesmail) April 26, 2017
Translation: #We_DoNotWant_Sisi Enough is enough. Leave and have some mercy on us.
#مش_عايزين_السيسي...انتا الى قولت لو الشعب مش عيزنى همشى خليك راجل وعند كلمتك — إبراهيم على (@AnILgoMasBBTwil) April 26, 2017
Translation: We_DoNotWant_Sisi You're the one who said that you'd leave if the people didn't want you. Be man and keep your word.Canadian businesses need to seek the right partners and access investment capital to bring innovative products and services to the market. The GE Aviation Engine Testing, Research and Development Centre (TRDC) in Winnipeg represents a perfect storm of partnership and funding.
The $50-million TRDC opened in 2012 and was designed to handle cold weather testing of next-generation jet engines. Located on the grounds of Richardson International Airport, the project teamed GE Aviation, StandardAero, non-profit West Canitest R&D Inc., and the Canadian government. Owned and built by GE Aviation, the facility is managed by StandardAero’s Winnipeg office. In addition to private capital, the facility received $5-million in federal government funding through Western Economic Diversification Canada to purchase specialized testing equipment.
The project represents an effective combination of partnership and investment, both public and private — the same ingredients identified by Canadian business executives as essential to innovation in the 2013 GE Global innovation Barometer, a worldwide survey.
The facility covers more than 11,000 square metres and boasts a state-of-the art wind tunnel designed to test gas turbine jet engines up to 381 centimetres in diameter at up to 150,000 lbs. of thrust under temperatures as low as -22 C. Seven fans rated at 250 horsepower apiece can blow 2,800 pounds of cold air per second at 100 kilometres per hour at test engines, spraying thousands of litres of water that can freeze across engine parts on contact.
Initially taking advantage of Winnipeg’s naturally cold climate, GE subsequently invested an additional $2.5-million to allow the centre to operate year-round. The facility is booked solid for years and has since become a key asset for GE testing and development of a number of new jet engines, including the General Electric Next-generation (GEnx) series.
“GE Aviation is in the midst of record new engine product development programs,” says Kevin Kanter, engineering executive of GE Aviation’s Design & Integration Systems Engineering. “The new icing testing, research and development centre will expand GE’s testing capacity and allow us to meet our commitments to customers.”Republican presidential front runner Donald Trump celebrated his anticipated victory in the New York primary. with a brief press conference. Son Donald Trump, Jr. (Shutterstock)
Former career U.S. intelligence officer Malcolm Nance explained to MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes on Friday his prediction that Donald Trump, Jr. would eventually be revealed to be involved in all 2016 campaign dirty tricks.
“The stolen documents of the DNC, I think a lot of people forget, was an intelligence operation that began one year before Donald Trump’s nomination,” Nance reminded. “Which means that the Russians had this operation in play for a very long time.”
“That’s a good point,” Hayes replied.
“I think Donald Trump, Jr.’s going to turn out to be the nexus of all dirty tricks,” Nance predicted.
“He has now shown up in three separate data points that show he was his father’s executive officer and Flynn was most likely the intelligence and operations officer to get the multiple dirty-trick contacts done,” Nance explained.
Watch:Faced with a youth population who have little interest in gun ownership, the National Rifle Association is trying to seduce its next generation of supporters via a web-only show aimed at millennials.
Sadly, the show — called Noir after host Colion Noir — is something of a mess. Gawker’s Adam Weinstein called it “hilariously bad poser garbage.”
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes did a segment Friday night about the show in which he said, “The NRA would like you to know that they are not a bunch of militia-obsessed Cliven Bundy-loving, bunkered down weirdos obsessing over black helicopters while stockpiling hundreds of guns and spinning conspiracies about the ATF while listening to their Alex Jones Info-Wars podcast.”
He then cut to footage from Noir, in which the eponymous host said of gun ownership, “There’s a heritage, a heritage that had a swag that would put most rappers to shame. There’s no way you can look at a photo of Hemingway hunting in Africa without thinking there’s a reason that ‘the Most Interesting Man in the World’ is pro-gun.”
“So, maybe the NRA want you to think they’re more like Hemingway,” Hayes said, “who, by the way, killed himself with a gun.”
Hayes called Noir, “the greatest piece of unintentional comedy” since the 2014 Idaho Republican gubernatorial debate.
Watch the video, embedded below:Conan O’Brien will be sticking around TBS for at least two more years.
The late-night host and the cable network have signed a deal to keep O’Brien’s show, “Conan,” on the air through April 2014.
“I am excited to continue my run with TBS because they have been fantastic partners,” O’Brien said in a statement. “This means I’ll be taping episodes of ‘Conan’ well into the Ron Paul presidency.”
O’Brien landed at TBS in 2010 after an ugly end at NBC as host of “The Tonight Show.”
He’d been given the “Tonight” gig at the end of a five-year plan to have Jay Leno move on to something else.
Something else was a 10 p.m. show on weeknights that failed to generate an audience.
NBC executives then scrambled to fix the mess, which included a plan to put Leno back on “Tonight” or at least in its time slot and then move O’Brien an hour later. O’Brien chose to leave and signed a deal with TBS.
The new deal comes after three months of audience growth for “Conan,” according to TBS officials. They’re also tracking the show’s reach on Twitter, Facebook and the Internet.
So far this year, “Conan” is averaging 1.1 million viewers, according to Nielsen Company statistics provided by TBS.
“We are proud to be in business with Conan O’Brien for the long run,” Michael Wright, executive vice president and head of programming for TBS, TNT and Turner Classic Movies, said in a statement. “Night after night, Conan and his team have put together terrific shows that draw a young and fiercely loyal audience. As if that weren’t enough, they have also built a dynamic online presence that keeps fans engaged like no other show in late night.”
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Introduction: What is Bitcoin?
Bitcoin is the world’s first digitally traded open source currency. The use of Bitcoins have grown slowly and steadily since the program was first released in early 2009. The creator of Bitcoin uses the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto to avoid publicity and has allowed international project leaders to control the expansion and public image of the project. The official operational staff is small and the entire Bitcoin enterprise is currently valued at approximately $3 million dollars.
The concept of Bitcoins (BTC’s) is simple. Bitcoins are merely digital units of currency. Conceptually, they operate exactly the same as any physical form of money. Users can trade Bitcoins over the Internet for goods and services; some sites even exchange Bitcoins for their equivalent in various currencies (and vice versa). Bitcoins are owned completely by users and are stored on personal devices; this eliminates the need for banks or intermediary credit institutions. BTC’s are kept in “wallets” on the owner’s computer or personal electronic advice. These wallets keep track of transactions and facilitate the management and housing of Bitcoin assets. Newcomers to the Bitcoin program are given a small percentage of a Bitcoin as a welcome gift.
BTC’s operate on a micro-scale of distribution. Owners can trade BTC’s as whole parts (1.0 BTC) or as percentages of a whole (0.001 BTC). Bitcoin programming currently allows users to trade BTC’s that have been divided to the 8th decimal place. Users have labeled even the most miniscule BTC divisions to make references easier when discussing prices on a micro-scale (centibitcoin, millibitcoin, microbitcoin, and the smallest denomination – “satoshi”). The minute subdivision of BTC’s prevents aggressive deflation given the relatively small amount of BTC’s currently in existence.
There are several methods of acquiring more Bitcoins. Just like physical currencies, Bitcoins can be traded for legitimate products and services – there is a restaurant in New York City that accepts Bitcoins as payment. Bitcoins can also be “mined” by tech-savvy users with the computing power to handle complex functions. Mining is highly technical and requires an extensive knowledge of computers and the Bitcoin generation process. Similar to entering other currency markets, new users can easily trade physical monies (dollars, euros, yen) for their equivalent worth in Bitcoins; this is perhaps the easiest entry method for potential Bitcoin users.
No central issuing authority regulates the generation and dispersal of new Bitcoins. Bitcoins are created through users “mining” on a peer-to-peer network. Specific mining entities (nodes) solve mathematical problems on the network and are awarded with the creation BTC’s. The solving of a mathematical problem creates what is called a “block,” which functions practically as a proof of work for the mining node. Completing a block automatically creates a new one and this explains how the periodic generation of BTC’s is self-regulatory. The amount awarded to each node for solving a new block is adjusted based on the strength of the network. Additionally, the difficulty of solving blocks is automatically adjusted based on the frequency of their completion. Blocks will proportionately increase in difficulty to the strength of mining attempts. Block turnover frequency is estimated at about once every ten minutes.
Interestingly, the Bitcoin program is set to continually diminish the number of mined BTC’s at fifty-percent over every four-year period. So, in the first four years of existence, approximately 10, 500,000 BTC’s will be created. Over the subsequent four-year period only 5,250,000 BTC’s will be created. This process is repeated over four-year intervals until the total number of created BTC’s is capped at 20,000,000. It is important to note that the relative coin value for each block solved decreases at a rate exactly parallel to the number of BTC’s created over every four-year period. Essentially, the total value of each block solved will decrease by fifty-percent in conjunction with the number of BTC’s that can be created.
Bitcoin’s Purpose
Current project leaders like Gavin Andresen maintain that Bitcoin is intended to democratize currency and protect the consumer. Government meddling and predatory credit institutions have no power over the worth or distribution of BTC’s. Consumers maintain complete control over the purchasing power of BTC’s. BTC’s do not rely on the dollar for trade purposes and operate completely independently. Supposedly, this freedom of trade will emancipate BTC participants from unnecessary arbitrary financial constraints. Furthermore, consumers are the sole and complete owners of their BTC assets.
Removing the influence of banks and federal monetary institutions allows users to decide the trade value of BTC’s outside of any intermediary control. Without carefully controlled federal limits, BTC users control the flow of the digital currency and the total value of its purchasing power. The worth of BTC’s is entirely democratic and decided directly among users. BTC’s do not derive value from a physical substance like gold or silver. For many years, the value of the USD was tied directly to gold. Now, the USD is backed by the good faith and credit of the US government. Users trust the credit of the US government and this allows the USD to maintain its worth. BTC’s rely entirely on the good faith of its users in each other. BTC’s only maintain their value as long as users trust that other people will honor the democratically decided worth of one BTC.
The Good, The Bad, and The Bitcoin
BTC’s offer several advantages to the consumer. The controlled release and capped supply of BTC’s prevents a sudden and dramatic flooding of the market with devalued currency. The generation and dispersal of the currency is controlled by algorithmic gates that hedge against inflation. Accordingly, consumers can steadily predict the rate of output and total number of produced BTC’s in preparation for market adjustments. Dependability and stable value render BTC’s an advantageous solution over fickle currencies. Assuredly, algorithm protected networks cannot predict human emotions like fear, greed and anger. But, simple benefits like relative value predictability will affect and quell the more volatile influences on currency.
Digitalized currency is easy to trade and provides ample security measures to assure legitimacy. Unwieldy greenbacks and clunky change are slowly retiring under pressure from plastic. Credit cards and online banking are increasingly popular methods of payment because they are simple, economical, and environmentally friendly. BTC’s, which never materialize in the physical world, are perfect for users who are comfortable with online transactions and cyber currency storage. Additionally, each BTC is given a unique identifying address to ensure its authenticity. Personal wallets will check any received BTC’s for their addresses and this protects against counterfeiting. Although each BTC has an identifier, this does not eliminate the anonymity of BTC’s. A BTC’s authenticity can be checked, but is destination and origin can be hidden – just like cash.
Most of BTC’s major advantages stem from their avoidance of third-party transaction interference. BTC’s are not taxed. Furthermore, the foundational structure of the BTC network denies viable taxation methods. The peer-to-peer system setup by Satoshi makes it virtually impossible to tax holdings or transaction using BTC’s. Similarly, transactions cannot be charged. There is no cost for sharing BTC’s, nor could anyone intercept transactions and charge for their completion. This prevents unnecessary costs and protects the financial information of each party involved in the transaction. BTC’s are not subject to seizure by any outside intruder. All BTC assets are owned completely by each individual user and personalized security features disallow seizure of assets by any bank or government. These features are especially attractive users who have turned to BTC’s out of distrust of government regulated monetary systems or necessity due to criminal activity.
Unfortunately, most of Bitcoin’s pros are also cons. First, BTC’s are non-intuitive for many Internet users. The concept of non-physical money being transferred over the Internet and stored on computers is difficult for some users to grasp. Many are deflected from BTC’s on the simple premise that they are not backed by any larger body or physical material. There is no guarantee that money invested in BTC’s will not quickly lose value. BTC value depends on the democratic network of users; perhaps ironically, this turns many away from the cyber cash.
BTC’s instantly alienate a majority of Internet users who distrust the web or do not understand its basic structure and functions. Using BTC’s is a practice reserved for tech-savvy individuals who have the knowledge, time, and means to participate in this digital advent. This explains current approximations that only about 10,000 people currently use Bitcoin – a miniscule number of total Internet users. Some BTC users also have |
323F production series Me 323 V17 Prototype (unfinished), powered by six 1,600 PS (1,578 hp, 1,177 kW) Gnome-Rhône 14R engines, intended to serve as a master for the Me 323G
Surviving aircraft [ edit ]
No complete aircraft survives, but the Luftwaffenmuseum der Bundeswehr (Air Force Museum of the German Federal Armed Forces) near Berlin has a Me 323 main wing spar in its collection.[8]
A ruined but complete wreck was found in 2012, in the sea near La Maddalena, an island near Sardinia, Italy. The aircraft lies in around 60 m (200 ft) of water, around 8 nautical miles (15 km) from the coast. It was shot down by a British Bristol Beaufighter long–range fighter on 26 July 1943, while en route from Sardinia to Pistoia in Italy.[9][10]
Specifications (Me 323 D-6) [ edit ]
Data from Britannica Book Of The Year 1944;[11] German Aircraft of the Second World War[7]
General characteristics
Crew: 5
5 Capacity: 130 troops or 10–12 tonnes of equipment
130 troops or 10–12 tonnes of equipment Length: 28.2 m (92 ft 4 in)
28.2 m (92 ft 4 in) Wingspan: 55.2 m (181 ft 0 in)
55.2 m (181 ft 0 in) Height: 10.15 m (33 ft 3.5 in)
10.15 m (33 ft 3.5 in) Wing area: 300 m² (3,228 sq ft)
300 m² (3,228 sq ft) Empty weight: 27,330 kg (60,260 lb)
27,330 kg (60,260 lb) Loaded weight: 29,500 kg (65,000 lb)
29,500 kg (65,000 lb) Max. takeoff weight: 43,000 kg (94,815 lb)
43,000 kg (94,815 lb) Powerplant: 6 × Gnome-Rhône 14N-48/49, 1180 PS for take-off (868 kW) each
Performance
Armament
See also [ edit ]
Related development
Aircraft of comparable role, configuration and era
Junkers Ju 322 Mammut
Related lists
References [ edit ]
NotesHollywood blockbusters are still leading the way in China’s box office, but audiences living in the world’s second-largest film market have displayed signs of hunger for more diverse movie imports.
Indeed, foreign films from outside Hollywood have proved to be popular in China over the past year. The most recent example is Thai picture “Bad Genius.” The comedy drama about smart students making big bucks out of cheating at exams raked in 221 million yuan ($33.3 million) as of Oct. 23, 11 days after its opening in China, the highest-grossing Thai movie in the country.
But that has yet to beat Bollywood sports film “Dangal,” by Aamir Khan, which took nearly 1.3 billion yuan ($195.8 million) in China this year — the most popular non-Hollywood foreign film in China, currently ranking at 19th of the country’s list of all-time highest-grossing movies.
“Hollywood movies are still top choices for Chinese audiences, but now they want more,” says Gong Geer, a film producer in China.
While Hollywood blockbusters continue their status as mainstream entertainment, a look at box office receipts reveals the growing popularity of non-Hollywood foreign films.
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Prior to the success of “Dangal,”the Japanese fantasy animated film “Your Name,” which was released at the end of 2016, earned $84 million at the box office, the highest-grossing non-Hollywood feature at the time.
Spanish thriller “Contratiempo,” which was released in September, made $25.6 million in China, a box office surprise considering a lack of publicity prior to its theatrical release. It surpassed “Spider-Man: Homecoming” five days after its opening. The film has earned high ratings among the audience, with a score of 8.7 out of 10 on Chinese movie website Douban.
Luc Besson’s “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets,” a French action sci-fi pic that bombed in the U.S., earned $61.8 million when it was released in China this summer, according to China movie website Mtime.
And according to China movie website Yiyuguancha, as of Sept. 22, 33 import films totaled $723 million in the box office in 2017. The 19 non-Hollywood imports accounted for $519.7 million, 70% of the total box office in 2017 as of the time the report was released.
On the other hand, Hollywood films have not performed as well as expected. “Transformers: The Last Knight” earned $22.5 million, half of what it was predicted. “The Lost City of Z” pulled in just $1 million, an embarrassing flop.
Chinese critic Hong Shui wrote that audiences are growing tired of formulaic Hollywood blockbusters. Such movies are also losing out in public ratings on movie websites such as Douban and MTime.
More non-Hollywood fare will most likely make its way to China. Leomus Pictures CEO Qiu Jie told Chinese media that new films different from Hollywood blockbusters will be what audiences really want.
Gong adds that when audiences see Hollywood films the expected their money to be well-spent. But when it came to other foreign films, they’re more open-minded. “Audience respect quality films,” he says.The shop’s owners have been told to ‘Get out of China’ (Picture: AFP)
A Chinese clothes shop has sparked a racism row by banning Chinese customers from its premises.
The shop, which is located on the Yabao Road in Beijing, posted a sign saying ‘Chinese not admitted. Staff excluded’ on their front door, prompting a large number of complaints from nearby residents.
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But according to the Beijing Youth Daily, the shop owners are unapologetic about their ‘racism’, saying the wholesale store mainly caters to foreign customers.
‘We don’t want to hang up the sign in the first place and let people think we Chinese look down upon ourselves. But some Chinese customers are too annoying,’ one salesman told the paper.
Some media outlets have pointed to similarities with an infamous sign from the early 1900s (Picture: Getty Images)
‘Chinese women often try lots of clothes but end up buying nothing.’
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Most of the businesses on the road – which is located in the embassy district – cater to Russian traders, but many Chinese have taken to the internet to express their anger at the ‘Chinese not admitted’ sign.
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Some comments on the story, which was published on many mainland China media sites, told the shop owners to ‘Get out of China’ while others said the notice was reminiscent of the infamous ‘Dog and Chinese not Admitted’ warning rumoured to have existed in the Shanghai International Settlement during the early 1900s.In Monterey Bay lives the California sheephead fish.
All sheephead are born female and can transform into being male at various stages in their lifecycle, when the need arises. Each group of sheephead has one male for breeding and when it dies, a female transforms to take his place. The transformed male is more gorgeous than the females -- big, black and white, with a brilliant orange middle - fiercely beautiful.
While scientists have a different nomenclature for the sheephead, I see the sheephead as a gender transforming fish. Nature, instigated by God if you believe in God, created this transgender fish. If you are born a sheephead, you are born female, but nature will change you into a male if it needs to.
The sheephead fish helped me accept a person's decision to change their gender. Becoming transgender was a foreign concept to me, as I have always loved being female, although I have not always loved how others treat me as a female. The Christian tradition I was born into teaches me, as many religions do, to treat others how I want them to treat me. So I had to imagine: If I was born male and felt imprisoned by my body, how would I want the world to treat me? Would I want the world to give me the choice to transform?
The sheephead reminds me that nature creates transgender existence. While nature alone did not create it in humans, it created humans to make choices and discoveries. Our discoveries have given us the power to allow someone who feels imprisoned by gender to change it, as nature has created the sheephead to change its gender. Why would we hate a person for doing that? Perhaps human gender transformation has an environmental purpose we do not yet fully comprehend.10 SHARES Facebook Stumbleupon Twitter Pinterest Reddit Google
By Douglas J. Hagmann, Northeast Intelligence Network
I feel that this is one of the most important investigations I’ve ever done. If my findings are correct, each of us might soon experience a severe, if not crippling blow to our personal finances, the confiscation of any wealth some of us have been able to accumulate over our lifetimes, and the end of the financial world as we once knew it. The evidence to support my findings exists in the trail of dead bodies of financial executives across the globe and a missing Wall Street Journal Reporter who was working at the Dow Jones news room at the time of his disappearance.
See here: 8th Banker’s Death in a Month
If the bodies were dots on a piece of paper, connecting them results in a sinister picture being drawn that involves global criminal activity in the financial world the likes of which is almost without precedent. It should serve as a warning that we are at the precipice of something so big, it will shake the financial world as we know it to its core. It seems to illustrate the complicity of big banks and governments, the intelligence community, and the media.
Although the trail of mysterious and bizarre deaths detailed below begin in late January, 2014, there are others. Not only that, there will be more, according to sources within the financial world. Based on my findings, these are not mere random, tragic cases of suicide, but of the methodical silencing of individuals who had the ability to expose financial fraud at the highest levels, and the complicity of certain governmental agencies and individuals who are engaged in the greatest theft of wealth the world has ever seen.
In Reality The Global Financial Elite Are Cowering In Fear
It is often said that life imitates art. In the case of the dead financial executives, perhaps death imitates theater, or more specifically, the movie The International, which was coincidentally released in U.S. theaters exactly five years ago today.
We are told by the media that the untimely deaths of these young men and men in their prime are either suicides or tragic accidents. We are told what to believe by the captured and controlled media, regardless of how unusual or unlikely the circumstances, or how implausible the explanation. Such are the hallmarks of high level criminality and the involvement of a certain U.S. intelligence agency intent on keeping the lid on money laundering on a global scale.
Obviously, it is important that this topic is approached with the utmost respect for the families of those who died, that they be allowed to grieve for the loss of their loved ones in private. However, it is extremely important that the truth about what is happening in the global financial arena is not kept from us, as we will also be victims of a different nature.
The missing and the dead: a timeline
The following is provided as a chronological list of those who have gone missing or been found dead under mysterious circumstances. It is important to note that this list consists of names of the most recent incidents. There are more that extend back through 2012 and beyond.
January 11, 2014
MISSING: David Bird, 55, long-time reporter for the Wall Street Journal working at the Dow Jones news room, went for a walk on Saturday, January 11, 2014 near his New Jersey home and disappeared without a trace. Mr. Bird was a reporter of the oil and commodity markets which happened to be under investigation by the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations for price manipulation.
1
January 26, 2014
DECEASED: Tim Dickenson, a U.K.-based communications director at Swiss Re AG, was reportedly found dead under undisclosed circumstances.
2
DECEASED: William Broeksmit, 58, former senior manager for Deutsche Bank, was found hanging in his home from an apparent suicide. It is important to note that Deutsche Bank is under investigation for reportedly hiding $12 billion in losses during the financial crisis and for potentially rigging the foreign exchange markets. The allegations are similar to the claims the institution settled in 2013 over involvement in rigging the Libor interest rates.
3
January 27, 2014
DECEASED: Karl Slym, 51, Managing director of Tata Motors was found dead on the fourth floor of the Shangri-La hotel in Bangkok. Police said he “could” have committed suicide. He was staying on the 22nd floor with his wife, and was attending a board meeting in the Thai capital.
4
January 28, 2014
DECEASED: Gabriel Magee, 39, a JP Morgan employee, died after reportedly “falling” from the roof of its European headquarters in London in the Canary Wharf area. Magee was vice president at JPMorgan Chase & Co’s (JPM) London headquarters.
Gabriel Magee, a Vice President at JPMorgan in London, plunged to his death from the roof of the 33-story European headquarters of JPMorgan in Canary Wharf. Magee was involved in “Technical architecture oversight for planning, development, and operation of systems for fixed income securities and interest rate derivatives” based on his online Linkedin profile.
It’s important to note that JPMorgan, like Deutsche Bank, is under investigation for its potential involvement in rigging foreign exchange rates. JPMorgan is also reportedly under investigation by the same U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations for its alleged involvement in rigging the physical commodities markets in the U.S. and London.
Regarding the initial reports of his death, journalist Pam Martens of Wall Street on Paradeastutely exposed the controlled, scripted details of the media accounts surrounding Magee’s death in an article written on February 9, 2014. Ms. Martens writes:
“According to numerous sources close to the investigation of Gabriel Magee’s death, almost nothing thus far reported about his death has been accurate. This appears to stem from an initial poorly worded press release issued by the Metropolitan Police in London which may have been a result of bad communications between it and JPMorgan or something more deliberate on someone’s part.” [Emphasis added].
Ms. Martens also notes:
No solid evidence exists currently to suggest that the death was a suicide. In fact, there is a strong piece of evidence pointing in the opposite direction. Magee had emailed his girlfriend, Veronica, on the evening of January 27 to say that he was about to leave the office and would see her shortly. [Emphasis added].
Based on information she developed, it appears likely that Magee did not meet his fate on the morning his body was discovered, but hours earlier. Considering the possibility that Magee might now have died in the manner publicized, Ms. Martens offers speculation, and notes it as such:
If Magee became aware that incriminating emails, instant messages, or video teleconferences were not turned over in their entirety to Senate investigators or Justice Department prosecutors, that might be reason enough for his untimely death.
Looking at the death of Magee in the context of a larger conspiracy, it is difficult not to suspect foul play and media manipulation.
5
January 29, 2014
DECEASED: Mike Dueker, 50, who had worked for Russell Investment for five years, was found dead close to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington State. Dueker was reported missing on January 29, 2014. Police stated that he “could have” jumped over a fence and fallen 15 meters to his death, and are treating the case as a suicide.
Before joining Russell Investments, Dueker was an assistant vice president and research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis from 1991 to 2008. There he served as an associate editor of the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics and was editor ofMonetary Trends, a monthly publication of the St. Louis Federal Reserve.
In November 2013, the New York Times reported that Russell Investments was one of several investment companies that were under subpoena from New York State regulators investigating potential “pay-to-play” schemes involving New York pension funds.
6
February 3, 2014
DECEASED: Ryan Henry Crane, 37, was the Executive Director in JPMorgan’s Global Equities Group. Of particular relevance is that Crane oversaw all of the trade platforms and had close working ties with the now deceased Gabriel Magee of JPMorgan’s London desk. The ties between Mr. Crane and Mr. Magee are undeniable and outright troublesome. The cause of death has not yet been determined, pending the results of a toxicology report.
7
February 6, 2014
DECEASED: Richard Talley, 57, was the founder and CEO of American Title, a company he founded in 2001. Talley and his company were under investigation by state insurance regulators at the time of his death. He was found in the garage of his Colorado home by a family member who called authorities. Talley reportedly died from seven or eight “self-inflicted” wounds from a nail gun fired into his torso and head.
The enormity of the lie
One must look back far enough to understand the enormity of the lie and the criminality of bankers and governments alike. We must understand the legal restraints that were severed during the Clinton years and the congress that changed the rules regarding financial institutions.
We must understand that the criminal acts were bold and bipartisan, and were designed to consolidate wealth through the destruction of the middle class.
All of this is part of a much larger plan to establish a one world economy by “killing” the U.S. dollar and consequently, eradicating the middle class by a cabal of globalists that existed and continue to exist within all sectors of our government. The results will be crippling to not just the United States, but the entire Western world.
What began decades ago is now becoming more transparent under the Obama regime. Perhaps that’s the transparency Obama promised, for we’ve seen little else in terms of transparency with regard to the man known as Barack Hussein Obama.
For those not locked into the captured corporate media, we’re starting to see the truth emerging. The truth is that we’ve been living under a giant Ponzi scheme and we, the American citizens, are the suckers.
As illustrated by the list of dead bankers above, however, the power elite need a bit more time before the extent of their criminality is revealed.
The need a bit more time to transfer the remaining wealth from middle-class America to their private coffers. Timing is everything, and a magic act only works when all props are in place before the illusion is performed.
Only when their timing is right will the slumbering Americans realize the extent of the illusion by which they’ve been entranced, at which time they will be forced into submission to accept a financial reset that will ultimately subjugate them to a global economy.
See here: Iceland Jails Bankers, Erases Citizens’ Debt, Recovers Strongly: No More Banks!
I contend that this is the reason for the recent spate of deaths, for those who met their tragic and untimely end had the ability to expose this nefarious agenda by what they knew or discovered, or what they would reveal under subpoena and the damage they could cause to the globalist financial agenda.
It is an insult to the public intellect that the media so readily pushes the official line that the deaths were all suicides given the unusual circumstances surrounding nearly all of those listed.
This itself should be ringing alarm bells with anyone of reasonable sensibilities, or at last those who are paying the slightest bit of attention to the larger picture. The media is either complicit or completely inept. While incompetence is evident in many areas, even the most inept journalist or media company cannot possible deny what exists directly in front of them. They can only withhold the truth.
Connecting the dots
To understand what is taking place, I contacted a financial source who has accurately predicted many events that we are now seeing taking place, including the deaths of certain financial people for an explanation. In fact, he actually predicted that we would see a “clean-up” of individuals who posed a serious threat to certain too-big-to-fail-or-jail banks and “banksters” a full week before the events began to unfold.
Truth be told, I initially greeted his prediction with some skepticism, for such things don’t really happen in the real world, or so the obedient and well-managed media tells me.
“V, The Guerrilla Economist” as he is known in the alternative media, has provided numerous insider alerts for Steve Quayle‘s website and has appeared as a regular guest on The Hagmann & Hagmann Report. He has an undeniable track record for accuracy, which has earned my respect.
However, I thought that he had taken temporary leave of his senses when he twice suggested that there will be some house cleaning done of anyone posing a threat to the agenda of certain banks and the globalist agenda on our broadcasts of November 20, 2013 and again on January 10, 2014.
In a separate venue, he described what was about to take place by using the analogy of the movie The International. Several dead bodies and a missing journalist later, that analogy has been proven accurate.
The fact is that we are seeing a clean-up where JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank seems to appear at the epicenter of it all. In January, JPMorgan admitted facilitating the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme by turning its head to his activities.
Eric Holder: “We must Brainwash People To Be Against Guns” 18 Years Ago!
Despite this admission, the U.S. Department of Justice under Eric Holder declined to send anyone to jail under a deferred prosecution agreement. Yet this is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg.
In March, 2013, the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a heavily redacted 307-page report detailing the financial irregularities surrounding the actions of JPMorgan and the deliberate withholding of critical financial information by JPMorgan.
Prominent in the mix are the actions of Bruno Iksil, who earned the nickname the “London Whale,” for his “casino bets” of others money that caused billions of dollars in losses.
Yet, no cooperation was provided by Jamie Dimon’s foot soldiers as they failed to testify or otherwise cooperate with Senate investigators.
Remember the damage control and the deliberate downplaying by Jamie Dimon, who maintained that there was nothing to see here with regard to the “London Whale” criminal activities? What was originally described as a loss of perhaps $2 billion ultimately turned into many more times that, yet the actual numbers are still hidden from the public. Such events occurred under the noses of numerous financial executives who had knowledge that went undisclosed.
As we fast forward to today and the current spate of mysterious deaths, we begin to see that many of those who died existed on the periphery of events in the criminal actions of the financial industry.
Moreover, it is reasonable to conclude that they possessed knowledge that if disclosed, could have interrupted the magic act taking place for the awestruck audience, captivated by the carefully crafted words of Yellen, her predecessors and the operatives within government who’s duty it is to regulate whatever is left of our current financial system.
That regulation is now a thing of the past. What we have today is a system of facilitation and co-operation between the largest corporations and financial institutions and the U.S. and our intelligence agencies.
We now have the “too-big-to-fails” operating with impunity as a result of an incestuous, if not outright unconstitutional relationship where the banks are acting as operational assets for the CIA, the NYPD, and other intelligence and police agencies.
CIA, Banker’s Private Army Financed Secretly By Absconding U.S. Taxpayer Money.
U.S. Corporate CIA Is The Biggest Threat To U.S. Citizens Safety: Fomenting Nation State Takeover Through Misinformation Campaigns, Murders, Assassinations, & Greed.
The JP Morgan-CIA-NYPD connection
Perhaps one of the best kept secrets, at least from the majority of the American public, is the integration and overlap between the “too-big-to-fail-and-jail” banks and the most advanced system of surveillance in the U.S.
Would it surprise you to learn that the very banks that brought the United States to the brink of financial collapse in 2008, who looted the American public and continue to engage in what most perceive as criminal behavior in the financial venue not only have ties to the CIA, but are actually partnered with the CIA and NYPD surveillance of all of lower Manhattan?
That’s right, the big banks such as JPMorgan, Citigroup and others have their own desks and surveillance monitorsat a facility known as the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center, located at 55 Broadway, deep in the center of New York’s financial district.
The big banks—the very banks that have been the focus of fraud and corruption investigations have their own system of cameras, more than 2,000 in number, and operate them in tandem with NYPD surveillance cameras at a center that was funded with taxpayer money.
Every square inch of lower Manhattan is under surveillance 24/7, not just by NYPD, but by JP Morgan and other members of the so-called “one percent.” Carefully consider the implications of this pact.
JP Morgan Chase and others have had long and quite intimate ties with the CIA.
Today, however, the line between the banks that control our financial present and future and police and intelligence agencies no longer exist. This relationship of mutual benefit permits the CIA to use the financial institutions to “handle the money” for their various global initiatives, while it provides the banks a stable of “professional assistants” to handle their “security,” whether such security issues arise in the U.S., London, or elsewhere.
Highly trained and skilled CIA operatives now work within the system of interlocked financial institutions that have been at the epicenter of the most egregious crimes involving the theft from our bank accounts and retirement savings.
Please stop and consider this for a moment.
The very banks and their top executives who have not only brought the U.S. to the brink of financial collapse and Martial Law, engaged or facilitated in various criminal actions that resulted in fines (but no jail time) for the perpetrators, are working hand-in-hand with the CIA. Not only that, they are working in tandem with the NYPD at their surveillance centers, watching and videotaping every move made by anyone—including potential whistleblowers within their vast purview. By the way, this is no ordinary surveillance or surveillance cameras. You won’t find these cameras on the shelves of your local spy shop. These cameras can focus on the footnotes of a book you might be reading, or the words written on a piece of paper being held by an unwitting person. They employ facial recognition and other advanced visual and data aggregation capabilities, and the extent of their technological abilities is increasing every day.
Additionally, the data is collected and maintained, and files are created of people and groups who are merely going about their daily lives.
Equally important, files are created and maintained of problem children and groups, like the Occupy movement and others who lawfully exercise their constitutional rights to protest the actions of the one-percent.
Consider this in the context of the Occupy Wall Street protests. where the protesters were not only under police surveillance, but surveillance by the banks and their corporate officers against whom they were protesting. And it was all done with the approval and assistance of the police, in this case the NYPD, and U.S. intelligence agencies.
Now consider the plight of a whistleblower who wants to expose criminality within the ranks of a too-big-to-fail.
The institution who is engaged in purported criminality based on the findings of the whistleblower can observe the whistleblower’s every move. Where they go, who they meet and what they are carrying to such a meeting.
They can be tracked to a residence, a business, or even to their psychiatrist’s office, place of ill repute, or the residence of some significant other outside of their marriage, all of which would be invaluable for blackmail.
Perhaps the potential whistleblower is clean and free from anything that might dissuade them from revealing what they know, their case could be turned over to the in-house security of former CIA agents for proper disposition. It makes the movie The Firm look like child’s play by comparison.
This is not some fanciful delusion. There is proof of this that exists. The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) has documented the increasingly extensive surveillance being conducted in lower Manhattan and throughout the city. They have verified that not only are our constitutional rights being violated every minute of every day, but the fruits of surveillance by police and corporate entities are shared between the police, the intelligence agencies and private financial institutions, without restraint on the distribution on such findings.
Are you engaged in a protesting against the criminality of the one-percent? Well, they one-percent are watching you, and they are literally seated right next to the police. Are you a journalist following up on possible “bankster” corruption by meeting a potential whistleblower? You better understand that the bankster target of your investigation is watching you, in real-time, with the complete approval and cooperation of the police.
As documented by the NYCLU, you are likely now “on file,” and all data compiled is maintained and accessible not just to law enforcement, but to the very target of your investigation—in real time.
Such surveillance and integration between big banks, law enforcement and spy agencies is not just limited to lower Manhattan or even the United States. It is also most prevalent in London and other cities where international banking is conducted.
Real-time surveillance and the close working relationship between the “one-percenters,” police and the intelligence agencies gives the targets of criminal probes the ability to be pro-active when necessary. It’s all being done under the pretext of national security when it would appear that the real objective is to insulate the banksters from potential problems that exposure of their criminal actions might cause.
Oh, and don’t forget that it is us who are paying for this.
Perhaps we would be well advised to not only consider the capabilities of the surveillance apparatus that exists where the big banks and police are working at adjacent surveillance terminals at 55 Broadway and other locations, but the incestuous working relationship between the banks and the CIA when we read about banker suicides.
Do not expect to see any exclusive report on this in the corporate media, for they, as requested have dutifully maintained their code of silence by not showing pictures of the brass name plates that identify the bankster terminals situated adjacent to the police terminals during photo shoots of this super-secret surveillance complex a few years ago. As detailed by the tenacious and indefatigable Pam Martens, journalist for Wall Street on Parade in this article, the captured media took a pass on revealing the whole truth about what’s really going on at 55 Broadway.
What has been revealed here is merely the tip of the iceberg. The tentacles of the corporate elite, facilitated and empowered by the CIA, the NYPD top brass, and other agencies have now covertly and effectively succeeded in invading everything you do. The fruits of this operation are being used to advance their global financial agenda and silence the opposition.
Knowing this, is it possible that the dead bodies that are increasing in number are the results of this joint surveillance operation?
You will not find any answers in the mainstream media.
The big banks have chosen to remain silent, even in the face of subpoenas, and have yet to face any legal consequences for their contempt.
It’s not, however, merely contempt of congress or pseudo-investigative bodies. It’s their contempt of humanity, of you and me, and the victims that lie dead, leaving their families broken and wanting for the truth.news, latest-news
BALLARAT foodies have another reason to celebrate with the opening of what is possibly the city’s first Vietnamese restaurant. Ballarat Vietnamese Noodle Shop opened on July 11 in Lydiard Street. Anne Beggs-Sunter, an Australian history lecturer at University of Ballarat, said she didn't think there had ever been a Vietnamese restaurant in Ballarat before. “It is another landmark in the provision of food,” Dr Beggs-Sunter said. “I am fairly confident that this is the first Vietnamese restaurant in Ballarat, but if someone knows any different they are welcome to correct me.” Dr Beggs-Sunter said the first international cuisine restaurant opened in Ballarat in the 1850s. “It was called John Alloo’s Chinese Restaurant,” she said. “It is replicated in the street of Sovereign Hill.” Ballarat Vietnamese Noodle Shop co-manager Andy Nguyen said the venue offered home-made food with his mother, Van Le, in charge of the kitchen. The restaurant has 45 dishes on the menu. “This is our first venture in opening a restaurant,” Mr Nguyen said. “We live in Melbourne but saw that Ballarat didn't have any Vietnamese food so we decided to open here.” And the customers, he says, are very happy. “We have had a lot of customers,” Mr Nguyen said.
https://nnimgt-a.akamaihd.net/transform/v1/resize/frm/storypad-qtXAEZC67LbMeemRuC2bYX/123beeb5-6071-422a-827c-295d984415bc.jpg/w1200_h678_fcrop.jpgSuppose you received an e-mail this morning from an old school friend, who tells you that he and his wife have this huge mansion on some Greek island. They invite you and about twenty of their other friends to come over for a couple of days to check it out. And by the way, don’t bring too many clothes…
Well, Mark and Samantha, the owners of Vassaliki Naturist Club resort are not school friends of ours, in fact, until a couple of days ago we had no idea who they were. But they do live on a wonderful Greek island called Kefalonia nearby some wonderful nude beaches. And as soon as we entered the gate we were welcomed as if they had known us for years.
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Whenever we write a review of a place, we like to have a tag line, one sentence that describes our whole experience. For Vassaliki it wasn’t difficult to find one: “A holiday with friends who you haven’t met yet”. Pretty cool isn’t it?
How to get to Vassaliki Naturist Club
Kefalonia is the biggest of the Ionian islands, situated along the west coast of Greece. The island is accessible via ferry from several ports in Greece and Italy or you can fly directly into the capital Argostoli from many European airports. Once you arrive on the island it’s best to hire a car, if you haven’t brought your own, because the public traffic network isn’t particularly huge. When you’re coming in high season, make sure to rent your car way upfront in order to get a reasonable price, we speak from experience. If you’re not planning to explore the island on your own, but prefer to go on the many excursions that the resort offers, you might as well go for the pickup service. But when we were there, most of the guests did have a car.
The resort is located south of Argostoli, about 2 kilometers from the coast. Make sure to ask for directions if you don’t want to get lost in the many small streets.
Where to stay at Vassaliki Naturist Club
When we say the word “resort”, many of you might think of a huge 200 room block with 3 swimming pools and hordes of noisy guests. Vassaliki is nothing like that. It’s a pretty small place, catering for about 30 people at a time. They offer three types of accommodation: Two bedroom apartments, one bedroom apartments and studios. The difference between the apartments and the studios is that the latter doesn’t have a living room. In all three types you’ll get a separate bathroom and cooking facilities.
We had the opportunity to stay in the two bedroom apartment and we have to say, for the two of us it was certainly way too big. We can imagine that four persons can still live very comfortable in there. Next to the two rooms there were two bathrooms and a living room and kitchen reaching out to our private terrace. We had a chance to see one of the studios and that would’ve certainly been big enough for us as well. But of course we’re not complaining.
What to do at Vassaliki Naturist Club
The main attraction of the resort is of course the swimming pool right in the middle of the site. Here’s the place where you really feel that you’re on holiday. Especially once you’ve nested yourself in one of the surrounding deck chairs with a cold beer and good book. Some of the visitors never actually leave the place during their whole holiday. We can understand.
If you’re hungry or thirsty or in need of some social contact, the bar/restaurant is only a couple of steps away. They offer a small range of food options going from sandwiches and burgers to pastas to Greek specialities. Nick (the cook at Vassaliki, not the Naked Wanderer) is as English as can be but makes Pastitsios which would make many Greek cooks jealous.
If there are enough participants, the kitchen does a “speciality” every night such as Meze, steak or BBQ. Sometimes even on location.
Vassaliki Naturist Club offers several activities as well: Pilates or running sessions in the morning, art classes in the afternoon or massage or pedicure if that would make your holiday complete.
Do you understand why some guests never leave the place?
If you do like to get some action, there are some activities you can join like boat trips or beach visits and if what you were planning is not on their list they will be happy to help you get in touch with one of the local companies.
Around Vassaliki Naturist Club
If long mountain walks, old castles and typical villages are more your thing, Kefalonia will probably please you as well. Even though almost the whole island lives from tourism and every mini market provides the obligatory range of air |
I like third jerseys. I like the idea of them.
On one hand, of course, they're little more than a cash grab, an opportunity for a team to hang another merchandise option in their store, something that might catch the eye of the casual shopper, or suck in the collectors who can't help themselves from buying every jersey a team makes available.
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But on the other hand, they're an opportunity for teams to experiment with their look, to see if they can't find something else to either add to or improve upon the look of their franchise.
Occasionally, this goes horribly wrong. There are some truly terrible third jerseys in the NHL. The New York Islanders' third come to mind, which is unfortunate, because now I'm picturing it.
But when it works, it really works. There are some great third jerseys in the NHL. In fact, there are a few nice enough that, if I had my way, the teams would simply promote them into regular use.
Five, to be exact. And they are as follows:
Columbus Blue Jackets. I've never really cared for Columbus's regular get-up. I just don't like the way the red pants match up with the navy blue sweater.
That in mind, the thirds are right up my alley, because they discard the red from the uniform altogether. Instead, the accents come from a few well-placed deep blue and cream-coloured stripes that give the whole look a classier, more classic feel. The jersey on the left looks like a team that entered the league in the 90s. The jersey on the right looks like a team that's always been here.
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I know some people aren't into the circular logo, since that was a sweater trend that's come and gone somewhat, and advocating a third jersey that doesn't sport a team's usual logo is a little abnormal. So fine, tinker with the crest, if you must. But the colour scheme and design of the third should be what Columbus's look is based around.
Minnesota Wild. Speaking of outdated sweaters, it's time for the Wild to retire the red-and-green look. Apart from the month of December, they simply look out of time. Plus, I hate to say it, but, as cool and innovative as Minnesota's logo is -- and it really, really is -- it doesn't stand out in any meaningful way. Maybe it's because it's buried in a circle. Maybe it's because I've never cared for the colour scheme. I'm not sure. But it's never really worked for me.
Like the Columbus's third, Minny's third just has a cleaner, more classic, less 90s look. I know some people find the Christmas tree jersey a little off-putting, but the all forest green look really works for me, especially in how it works with the move from white piping to cream.
I'm not 100% sold on the "Minnesota" script on the crest, though. It's a little funky and, frankly, I'd be fine if they lost all the little bits of red, both there and on the gloves. But again, the look of the jersey is just vastly superior to their regular duds. It's clear the organization knows it, too, otherwise they wouldn't have introduced Zach Parise and Ryan Suter in the thirds. So just make it official already.
Calgary Flames. Just in case you thought from my first two choices that I simply hate the colour red, here's one where I think the red isn't prominent enough.
With the exception of the Albertan and Canadian flag patches, which may honour the Flames' heritage but don't honour the sweater's colour scheme or the eyes in any way, I don't hate the Flames' regular jersey. Or at least I didn't until they went retro with their thirds a few years back.
As soon as I saw the Flames in the red, yellow and white sweater, I realized how much I preferred the look without the black. As soon as you remove it from the picture, the yellow looks like it glows and the red looks more vibrant. On HDTV, the entire team just pops in these thirds and it's glorious. More please.
Vancouver Canucks. Now, I like both of these jerseys, which makes sense since they look pretty similar. Heck, from the back you can't even tell the difference.
But when the two sweaters are held up side-by-side from the front, it's hard not to notice how cluttered the home sweater is by comparison. I know there's some historical significance to the "Vancouver" in wrap text above the whale, but it really just makes the whole thing look busy.
I'm also not a huge fan of the orca logo. It's not terrible, and the Canucks did well to adapt it when they changed up the blues a few years back, but, to me, it's still looked photoshopped on ever since. The stick-in-rink, on the other hand, fits in a lot more seamlessly. Let's go with that.
St. Louis Blues. I'm probably going to catch a lot of flak for this one, since the Blues haven't changed their jerseys in quite awhile (apart from the slight updates that came with the changeover to Reebok Edge), but I really, really like their thirds. I like the uniformity of the design. I think the all-navy blue look goes better with the yellow piping, and I think the circular logo design really works with the colour scheme and with the note and the faded arch behind it.
The bright red thumbs down probably isn't fair in this case, since I don't dislike the Blues' regular look at all. I just prefer the alternate and I'd be completely okay if they decided to promote it from alternate to regular use.
Follow Harrison Mooney on Twitter at @HarrisonMooney
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Calls to 'fill your cars with gas' with images of explosive-laden trucks
Islamic State called for the use of cars and trucks in terror attacks in Australia just weeks before the Nice atrocity.
A sophisticated propaganda video released by the terror group's media centre called for followers to carry out attacks with chilling depictions of massacres in Europe, the US and Australia.
The footage, examined by the International Centre for the Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE), shows an ISIS militant preparing to run over a crowd in Australia, with instructions to 'fill your cars with gas.'
A truck laden with explosives is shown in an Islamic State propaganda video issued weeks before the Nice attack
The terror group's media centre called for followers to carry out attacks with chilling depictions of massacres in Europe, the US and Australia
The video, released during Ramadan, calls on IS followers to 'Fill your cars with gas'
''Fill your cars with gas' … the video instructs as it shows an ISIS soldier readying to run civilians down,' the ICSVE report on the video says.
'Realistic depictions of attacks are illustrated on the film: a suicide vest attack in New York City, a sniper attack in London, activating a German sleeper cell, and a driver of an SUV preparing to run over crowds in Australia.'
Footage shows a truck laden with explosives, alongside images of US soldiers being beheaded by IS militants.
The video, released during Ramadan, was issued online just weeks before Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel crushed scores of people underneath the wheels of his 25 tonne truck on the Nice seafront.
In a 2014 IS propaganda video, the group's official spokesperson Mohammed al-Adani oredred disbelievers to be slaughtered by any means possible - 'run him over with your car'.
'Kill them in any manner or way however it may be. Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife or run him over with your car or throw him down from a high place or choke him or poison him,' al-Adani said in the speech..
The videowas issued online just weeks before Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel crushed scores of people underneath the wheels of his 25 tonne truck on the Nice seafront.
In a 2014 IS propaganda video, the group's official spokesperson Mohammed al-Adani oredred disbelievers to be slaughtered by any means possible - 'run him over with your car'
The video also showed a truck laden with explosives, alongside images of US soldiers being beheaded by IS militants
The video was issued online just weeks before Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel crushed scores of people underneath the wheels of his 25 tonne truck on the Nice seafront× Expand Correctional services' attitude toward consensual gay sex in prison is different from the one promoted at the Duke March July 2.
Black Lives Matter stopped Toronto’s Pride parade partly to draw attention to the contentious relationship between the Black community and Toronto police.
But another set of uniformed participants at the parade went unnoticed in the uproar. Their institution’s policies also discriminate against people of colour and queers in a systemic way.
Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services (MCSCS) handed out rainbow flags from a booth during Pride’s Dyke March on July 2. The flags bore MCSCS’s emblem in what looked like an attempt to put a rainbow gloss on the prejudice inherent in the agency’s relationship with those incarcerated in this country’s prisons.
As the Office of the Correctional Investigator noted in its report earlier this year, people of colour are drastically over-represented in our prisons. The Black inmate population has grown by 69 per cent and the Indigenous inmate population by about 50 per cent over the last decade.
Furthermore, people of colour are more often incarcerated in higher-security facilities and find it much harder both to cascade down through the system and to be awarded parole.
Correctional services in Canada can be lauded for its attempts at the federal level to be more inclusive in its hiring practices and its efforts to make the mostly white (over 80 per cent), mostly male (67 per cent) front-line staff better reflect the ethnicity of their wards.
However, federal policies regarding how LGBTQ2S prisoners are treated reflect quite a different attitude.
Sexual relations between prisoners remain forbidden, although you’d find it hard to locate exactly where this policy is officially enshrined. “Buggery” was decriminalized in Canada in 1988 in part because of the gay rights movement. The prohibition against consensual sexual activity among prisoners is not written in the Corrections And Conditional Release Act (CCRA), nor does it appear in the Correctional Service Canada's (CSC) internal Commissioner’s Directives.
Under the Standing Orders available only through the Access to Information Act, inmates who are caught in loving liaisons can be charged with a disciplinary offence since, according to CSC, such liaisons “are likely to jeopardize the security of the penitentiary.”
The CSC claims that it is difficult to distinguish between consensual sexual activity and rape and that the order prohibiting sexual contact among inmates is for the inmates’ protection.
The CSC fails to recognize the research, both empirical and anecdotal, showing that rape is a non-problem in Canadian prisons: sex offenders are not much tolerated among the prison population, and to commit an act of sexual assault against another inmate is considered a mortal sin. Prisoners don’t like rapists, especially if one of their own is the victim.
Canadian corrections officials even stated in a Columbia University study on rape in prison that they “did not believe that prisoner rape was a significant problem in their facilities.”
Rape in Canadian jails is much less common than in the U.S., according to the Prisoners’ HIV/AIDS Support and Action Network (PASAN) because Canadian prisons are smaller, sentences are shorter, and sex offenders are kept segregated.
A 1994 CSC report, HIV/AIDS In Prisons, revealed infection rates of up to 2 per cent compared to 0.2 per cent in the general population. Internal CSC data shows that 4 per cent of releasees are infected today.
A panel of academics from McGill University concluded that the prohibition on inmate liaisons contributes to the risk of HIV/AIDS transmission, since participants fear discovery and do not have time to be safe and use condoms in their clandestine encounters.
PASAN says, “The need to be furtive while engaging in sexual activity is more a source of disorder than the sex itself.” The CSC’s policy, it argues, contributes to the disease’s transmission rather than preventing it.
As for the rainbow flags handed out at the Dyke March, it seems that while it takes one step forward in hiring practices, corrections in Canada is simultaneously entrenched in a bygone age when difference, diversity, ethnicity and queerness were criminalized.
In terms of its treatment of people of colour and queers alike, correctional services should not be allowed to hide behind Pride’s flag.
Chester Abbotsbury is the pseudonym of a former federal prisoner currently on day parole. He has written extensively about the experience of prison.
news@nowtoronto.com | @nowtoronto
Updated Thursday July 21, 12:59 pm: An earlier version of this story erroneously stated that Correctional Service Canada was among the participants at Pride.Fat tyre bikes have been enjoying a renaissance recently. While more road cyclists discover the joys of upping a tire size and grinding some gravel, adventure cyclists, fat bikers and ‘bike packers’ astound us with epic overland journeys through sand and snow. Not to mention the onslaught of cyclocross season in the northern hemisphere. Here’s a genre-defying knobbly newcomer from Scotland’s Shand Cycles: their Fat Tyre Stoater.
Steven Shand stablished his workshop in 2003 and Russell Stout came on board in 2011 to help further build the business. They’ve been well received, too: one of their Stoater models won the 2013 Bespoked Bristol Award for Best Off Road Bicycle.
The Urban Dictionary definition of ‘Stoater’ reveals much about this bike’s character: a bigger, better version of the award-winning model, in that it can now accept up to 2.2″ 29er tyres for more versatility, comfort and traction over challenging terrain.
‘Liquid Frog’ is the nickname Russell gave to this Fat Tyre Stoater — an easy call — which he matched with Brooks‘ new vegan-friendly saddle, the Cambium. So far, reports have testified to the Cambium’s straight-out-of-the-box comfort and waterproof qualities.
Middleburn is a British manufacturer of high-quality components, established in the 90s, and is a familiar name to any old-school mountainbiker. The indestructible Rohloff hub sits at the other end of the chain, activated by a Co-Motion shifter — the preferred choice thanks to a wider diameter which offers improved grip in cold or wet weather.
Both Russell and Steven are passionate adventure cyclists, regularly riding the rugged Scottish hills that surround Livingston, experience which they then feed back into their frames. Considering the current surge of two-wheeled off-road adventuring, it’ll be interesting to watch what comes forth from the Shand Cycles workshop this year.Leeds fan Kyle Hulme is excited by his club’s new lease of life as it emerges from the shadows of Ken Bates’ reign…
It can be difficult to write about your own club. Constantly fearing your own bias you can quickly fall the other way completely, find yourself typing out controversies in a rather scathing tone. Before you know it you’re calling Neil Warnock words that could get you arrested, or worse, blocked by Caitlin Moran.
I say usually, because today that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Leeds fans find themselves in quite an unusual position – optimism surrounding our club is at a ten year high, yet the expectations for this season are, dare I say it, rather realistic.
This seemingly substantiated optimism is born of all the work that’s been done by the club of late off the pitch. When GFH Capital purchased the club from Leeds fans it saw us embark on a typically rollercoaster-like ride; first we were rich, then we were poor, then Bates looked set to remain as President and supporters no longer knew where they stood.
But since the end of last season, the situation has begun to change.
For the first time in years, the owners of the club have listened to the fans. They’ve introduced a dynamic ticket pricing system, with new prices for students and young adults making games much more affordable. The highest opening day crowd for ten years shows just how receptive Leeds fans are to the changes.
As well as this, they’ve also started stocking replica shirts in the city centre, both in JD Sports and the new pop-up store in the Trinity Shopping Centre, in an effort to stop that vomit-inducing sight of a child in a Manchester United top. Further to these developments, they’ve also abolished Bates’ misconceived brainchild, Yorkshire Radio, instead making all games available to listen to on free-to-air BBC Radio Leeds FM.
There’s also be a welcome refocus on improving the little things; advertisements in the city, refraining from calling loyal, long-suffering fans “morons” in the programme ala Bates, and the sight of the owners walking across the pitch and up through the East Stand to take their seats for the game against Brighton, greeting fans as they climbed the steps. Bates would have needed to hire the Popemobile to make such a journey through the public spaces of Elland Road.
Lingering on that theme, perhaps the most impressive change in direction made in recent weeks is the way the new owners have decisively severed all ties with Master Bates from the club; stripping him of his presidency and banishing his spectre that has loomed over Leeds for 8 miserable years. Hearing the chant, “That Chelsea Bastard, He’s Out Of Our Club”, reverberate around the stadium at the weekend, followed by a thunderous applause minutes after kick-off, was the closure fans needed to finally look forward to the future. Brick by brick you can see our club being rebuilt and put back together again, both in its sense of a united spirit of community and a returning self-confidence.
On the pitch, things don’t look half bad either. Brighton are no mugs, and are incredibly effective when it comes to keeping the ball and passing through teams, yet Leeds showed enough character to come back from a goal down and win in the final minute. The Kop end effectively assisted the million-pound man Luke Murphy’s goal through a form of groupthink telekinesis, willing the play into the back of the net. The strike itself was a big fuck off to Ken Bates, showing that if you spend money to bring in quality, not only will the team become stronger, but it’ll get people in the ground and create an atmosphere that the players can thrive off.
I haven’t felt as good leaving Elland Road in years, and Leeds go into their next game with the suspended Rudy Austin and El Hadji Diouf once again available for selection. Boy wonder Sam Byram will also hopefully return back from his hip injury to add to the positivity and keep the momentum of the season opener going.
Speaking of Elland Road, Friday brought news of potential investors buying the stadium back, another positive sign that club has turned a corner. Sold in 2004 in a desperate bid to raise cash, Leeds are currently leasing the stadium yet have a buy-back option of £15m. Should the investors go ahead with their purchase of the stadium, it will save Leeds between £1.5m and £2m in loaning the ground itself, and a further £3.3m in payments to Ticketus – freeing up money to sign the central defender and winger the squad is crying out for.
In terms of expectations this season, I don’t really expect us to go up. I think we’re capable of it, but as the new Chairman Salah Nooruddin (or Salad Noodleman, as the Google suggestions once offered) understands, success doesn’t come overnight and it’s something that has to be built towards over a number of years. With McDermott at the helm, we seem to have a manager who understands not only football, but what Leeds United are all about, and a man who isn’t afraid to use our talented, young academy players at the right time – an option I see as much more preferable than signing them from affiliated clubs *cough* Watford *cough*.
It’s a refreshing state of affairs. Bates’ autocratic tenure is over, and a future whereby the owners work alongside the Leeds United Supporter’s Trust to listen to the wishes of fans, is a brighter one all round.
We’ve always been Leeds, but for once we’re United.
@kohulme; @The_False_Nine
You can read more pieces by Kyle over on his blog: kyleinkrakow.wordpress.com.
Like this: Like Loading...We’re incredibly happy to announce that Season 14 – Emergence will be coming to Star Trek Online on PC October 3 and will follow soon on Xbox One and PlayStation®4! In Emergence, players will reunite with Captain Geordi La Forge, voiced by LeVar Burton from Star Trek: The Next Generation, for a brand-new featured episode, “Melting Pot.” You’ll accompany La Forge and Captain Kuumaarke (voiced by Kipleigh Brown) to a new colony world on Dranuur, established by the Lukari and their long-lost sister species, the recently rediscovered Kentari. How will these two long-separated species learn to interact and coexist? You’ll find out, in “Melting Pot.”
In addition, the update brings a brand-new, five-tier Fleet Holding held on the colony itself. Players and their fleets will help the two races build a new world together and unlock great rewards for their fleets. There will also be a brand-new Tzenkethi Red Alert, two new Fleet Holding defense queues and a new Primary Specialization called the “Miracle Worker,” bringing your captain the engineering wonders of our favorite Chief Engineers of the past, like Montgomery Scott, Geordi La Forge and B’elanna Torres.
We can’t wait for you to explore all of the new content that lies ahead, captains. And don’t forget! The new Star Trek: The Next Generation- themed episode “Beyond the Nexus,” is now available on PC. Log into the game now to meet legendary Starfleet Captain Geordi La Forge!Advances in exponential technology happen fast—too fast for SingularityHub to cover them all. We’re trying out this bulletin format to point readers to significant developments that may not have warranted a full story. Let us know in the comments or in the membership forum if you find it useful.
Mind-blowing results in cancer study
Many new cancer protocols are being explored for glioblastoma, a brain cancer that currently has no effective treatment and kills patients within two years. Swedish researchers studying the cancer have come across a chemical compound that causes glioblastoma cells to explode and die. When mice with the brain cancer were dosed with the compound, called Vacquinol-1, they lived nearly three times as long. The researchers hope to move to human trials.
Plan for bad weather
Climate change continues, and continues to pose a major challenge to humans’ continued survival on the planet. The AAAS, the largest science society in the world, launched an effort this week to try to build consensus around climate science. It’s called What We Know. A recent British meta-analysis of agricultural studies from around the world suggests that relatively modest temperature increases of 2 degrees Celsius could shrink crop yields by as much as 25 percent by 2050. Of course, as those findings are consolidated, other researchers are already exploring how to use improved natural resource management and genetic engineering to maintain agricultural productivity.
Just a dab’ll do ya
Stem cells are getting easier to produce. Although a recent paper suggesting that any cell, subjected to an acid bath, could be turned into a malleable cell has since been withdrawn by the author pending further research, another project shows that stem cells can be produced from a single drop of a patient’s blood, meaning that more people will be able to bank their own cells in case they need advanced medical treatment. Cheaper and more abundant stem cell supplies would also speed research that depends on the cells.
Images: Karolinska Institutet, Peter Zvonar / Shutterstock.com, withGod / Shutterstock.comDrones are, largely, military tools—hardened, efficient machines of war. They're sturdy, not fuzzy. Strong, not brittle. And they should definitely not start breaking down upon impact.
But breaking down is exactly what the bio-drone is supposed to do. Created—or rather, grown—by a team of 15 students from Stanford University, Brown University, and Spelman College for the 2014 iGEM competition, the biodegradable drone is made mostly of fibrous mycelium, a root-like material found in fungi. The lightweight and sustainable substance is then coated with a sheet of sticky bacteria-grown cellulose, while the circuits inside the drone are printed using silver nanoparticle ink.
These biodegradable parts together help the drone naturally decompose—a feature that struck me (and others) as useful for the military: If a drone doing surveillance or spying crashes, for example, it could decompose before an enemy could find it. But for all the military applications people sprang to, it turns out that this drone wasn't designed with the military in mind. And making it work as a secretive, trace-free drone would be difficult.
For the biodegradable nature of the bio-drone to be useful to the military, the vehicle would need to decompose fairly quickly and leave little behind. According to Joseph Shih, a Stanford bioengineering lecturer and an advisor to the team, the current prototype would decompose slowly over a few months, though he says the team is working on developing an "active biodegradation system" that would make it do so in about four days.
But focusing on the speed of decomposing is beside the point, Lynn Rothschild, the lead scientist in synthetic biology at NASA's Ames Research Center and another team advisor, tells me, because that's not what they designed it for. "It had nothing to do with military implications," she says. "Once you say the word 'drone,' people do think of sinister connotations. But this is not why we're doing this."For the Braves' recent struggles, Frank Wren must fire manager Fredi Gonzalez and hitting coach Greg Walker.
Let me say that again.
The Atlanta Braves must fire Fredi Gonzalez and Greg Walker.
When assessing what went wrong in a season that started with such high expectations, there is plenty of blame to go around. There have been failures compounded by failures that have ultimately led us to this point. This column is not meant to place all the blame on Atlanta's coaching staff. But they certainly deserve a healthy share. From his curious bullpen usage, to his maddening lineup construction, to the regression of almost every Braves hitter, Fredi Gonzalez is front and center when it comes to assessing responsibility for this season's failings. Greg Walker is not far behind.
As I write this, the Nationals are currently celebrating reclaiming the NL East crown from Atlanta in the bowels of Turner Field. The Braves sit a game under.500 for the first time in September since 2008. And they now sit 5.5 games out of the second Wild Card with 11 left to play. It's no longer a race; it's a victory lap for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
The most glaring difference - to me - between this year and last year is the almost universal regression of Atlanta hitters. Let's take a look at the wOBA of all Atlanta hitters who had >90 plate appearances each of the last two years. For those of you who aren't familiar with wOBA (weighted on-base average), it is one of the most popular and well respected "catch all" offensive statistics. At the risk of oversimplifying it, consider it a version of OPS that properly weights different at-bat outcomes in terms of run values. You can read more about it here.
That's almost painful to look at. Of the 11 hitters who have had significant plate appearances with the Braves over the last two years, only three saw their wOBA increase from last year to this year. An additional two (Freeman and Heyward) stayed around the same level. The rest...woof.
So, is this all random noise? Did many of these guys just simply have career years last year? That's certainly a possibility, but fortunately we have statistics to help us out! We can use a paired sample t-test to determine if the difference between 2013 and 2014 is statistically significant. This examines the observed differences between each batter to determine what the likelihood is that the differences are just due to random chance. (After all, everyone in baseball has up years and down years.) After calculating the test statistic, we find that our test has a p-value of ~0.03.
This means that the probability of obtaining a difference as extreme as the one we saw between 2013 and 2014 is roughly 3%. This value is small enough to be considered statistically significant. In other words, we can be reasonably sure that the drop off in offense from 2013 to 2014 was not the result of random chance.
Because this is an observational and not a controlled study, we can't say for certain what the cause was of the decline. But we can make some educated guesses. And if I had to guess, I'd say the coaching had something to do with it. Under Greg Walker, the Braves had not made any secret that they are trying to strike out less. (One wonders how much of this was spurned by the ridiculous narrative that strikeouts are awful, but that's a thought for another day.) So, instead of waiting for their pitch and driving it like they did in 2013, the Braves are instead expanding their zone in an attempt to make contact.
But here's the problem: if you're reaching to make contact, chances are the contact you do make won't be very authoritative. And the numbers bear that out. From 2013 to 2014, the Braves groundball percentage increased from 43.5% to 45.5%. And that's not a good thing. After popups, groundballs are the least desirable type of contact. Opposing defenses turn ground balls into outs at a roughly 80% clip. Plus, groundballs are more likely to make multiple outs. Fly balls go for hits about as often as groundballs, but they have a chance to go over the wall. So, basically, the Braves have sacrificed power to try and make more contact. And they've sacrificed a ton of it. A year ago, the team's ISO (Isolated power, which is slugging percentage - batting average) was.153. This year, it sits at.122. And they're walking less too: 7.9% of plate appearances down from 8.8% last year. And here's the kicker: strikeouts have not changed. In fact, they've actually gone up a bit! (22.4%->22.6%) How anyone believes this is a model for success is beyond me.
This, to me, is the biggest reason that Fredi Gonzalez and Greg Walker must go. They abandoned what was a successful offensive ideology because of a fabricated narrative, and the team has suffered dearly for it. A year ago, Andrelton Simmons's bat made him look like a potential MVP. Now he's totally lost at the plate. Atlanta's recently-extended third baseman can't seem to do anything but helplessly roll over pitches to second base (if he even makes contact with them.) Not only has such a damaging philosophy cost Atlanta wins this year, but it could (continue to) significantly hinder the development of the organization's young talent.
Atlanta's management has bought in to a model of hitting that encourages batters to make weak contact over striking out, and the team's offense has paid the price.
This is the most egregious of Fredi Gonzalez's sins, but it is far from the only one. I could talk about his vapid lineup construction, which has seen BJ Upton receive more at-bats in the #2 spot than any other hitter. (For those of you who are unaware, the statistical consensus is that the team's best hitter should hit #2.) I could talk about his excruciating use of the bullpen, which has seemingly no grasp on the concept of leverage. I could talk about his patterns of substitution, which fetishize a Quad-A outfielder who does nothing well over several legitimate prospects.
Some people will tell you that lineup construction doesn't make that much of a difference. They're correct, in the grand scheme of things. But given that his bone-headed hitting philosophy has already neutered Atlanta's offense, doesn't it make sense to try and maximize your advantage in any way possible?
Some people will point to his win total with the team, but that is a clever sidestep of the issue. Dusty Baker could have won roughly the same number of games with a team so talented.
None of these problems are that terrible in a vacuum. But taken together, they paint a picture of someone who is woefully overmatched at best and willfully ignorant at worst.
Again, the failings of Atlanta's 2014 season do not rest solely with Fredi Gonzalez. The construction of Atlanta's bench was not well done, and that falls on the front office. Freak pitching injuries happen. But at the end of the day, Fredi Gonzalez's failings are just too much to ignore.
It's time for the front office to tip their caps and send Gonzalez and Walker on their ways.When the brick crashed through her bathroom window and somebody began kicking in her front door, the 19-year-old single mother of two in Milwaukee dialed what are supposed to be the most trustworthy three numbers.
“I called 911 for help,” she later said in court. “I didn’t call 911 to be the victim.”
Within minutes, two police officers responded. One took her 15-year-old brother outside to speak to him. The other cop, Police Officer Ladmarald Cates, gave her boyfriend $10 and told him to go the store and get some water. She told him that he was welcome to chilled water from her refrigerator.
“I only drink bottled water,” Cates said.
Her boyfriend has a pronounced limp and set off with no promise of returning soon. Cates asked to see the broken window and she led him down a narrow hallway to a bathroom in the back. She felt sure that jealous neighbors had attacked her happy home because she dared to defy what seemed surely to be her fate as an inner-city teenage single mom.
“I wanted to be a good example to my kids,” she would later say. “I wanted to learn something, be somebody.”
She had returned to high school as a mother of two and after graduation she had continued on to the University of Wisconsin, where she was studying criminal justice with the thought of becoming police officer or a lawyer.
“I thought I was going pretty good,” she would recall.
She now stood on a floor littered with broken glass and pointed to the brick. The cop she had summoned to protect her instead chose this moment to grab the back of her head by her hair and sodomize her. Then he raped her.
Her revulsion in the aftermath was so visceral that she vomited as she ran outside. The cop’s partner had become concerned when he did not immediately see Cates and called for back-up. Other cops began arriving and saw a woman screaming incoherently about being raped.
Cates appeared and grabbed her by the waist, spinning her around. Her swinging feet may or may not have struck the partner. She was handcuffed and taken in, told at the stationhouse that she was being charged with assaulting a police officer.
She became more coherent but no less outraged and vocal as she continued cry out from a holding cell that she had been raped. She also continued to vomit. The other cops dismissed her as a liar.
After 12 hours, she was interviewed by internal affairs and taken to a hospital, where a rape kit was used to collect evidence. She was then taken to the county jail and held for four days before being released without actually being charged.
She took her story to the Milwaukee District Attorney’s office. A prosecutor subsequently wrote, “While I did find the victim’s version of events credible, I did not believe that her testimony would be strong enough to successfully prosecute Officer Cates.”
In other words, Cates was still a cop and she was still an inner-city teenage single mom. She stopped going to school as she fell into a deep depression, making two serious suicide attempts.
“It was killing my soul,” she says.
She who had so desperately wanted to be a good example for her 3-year-old boy and 2-year-old girl began to wonder if they should even be with her.
“Sad and crying all the time,” she says. “I didn’t know if I wanted my kids around, me being upset like that about something that happened to me.”
Meanwhile, internal affairs confronted Cates with DNA evidence linking him and the victim. He told three different stories, finally saying there had been a voluntary sexual encounter. His victim read in the newspaper that he had been fired for lying and for “idling and loafing” on duty, words that mocked what had been done to her.
“That really pissed me off,” she says.
She took some comfort in knowing Cates was not going to be answering any more 911 calls. But he still had not been held accountable for what he did to her.
“It wasn’t really justice,” she says. “It didn’t say he hurt me.”
She was sinking only deeper into despair when she went on the Internet and chanced up a photo of an eminent Milwaukee defense lawyer named Robin Shellow.
“She had a beautiful smile,” the victim recalls. “It was just her smile and the look in her eyes…She’s not mean and she’s a woman … She looked like she could understand me...She looked like she would help.”
She went to Shellow’s office.
“I just was giving it a shot. I didn’t think nothing was going to come of it.” Shellow proved to be everything her photo suggested. Shellow also happened to have just finished a case in federal court and she had the number handy for the prosecutor who had been her opponent. Asst. U.S. Attorney Mel Johnson came to her office with an FBI agent to interview her new client. He not only found her credible, he was willing to prosecute.
“He was a very nice guy,” the victim says. “He kind of made me not afraid.”
As the case headed for trial, Gina Barton of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Cates had been investigated for illegal behavior on five previous occasions, three of them involving sexual misconduct. Two of those were with prisoners. The third was with a 16 year-old and that case had been referred to the Milwaukee district attorney |
is difficult to truly analyze and interpret the data as a whole in its current form. Although the recent data are stored in csv format, older data are stored in html, or even scanned pdfs.
Illinois has one of the largest international student populations in the US, and attracts over a third of its students from out of state. We thought it would be interesting to see the gender, race, and college breakdown at different geographical levels, and visualize where our classmates are coming from.
In order to do this, we break down the data into world, state, county and college levels and allows the users to interact with the data. Users can also explore the detailed view at each level, which provide visualizations of the aforementioned gender, race, college, and also yearly growth for the selected level.
This project was created by Clay Gregory, John Lee, and LJ Wong in Apr 2013 as part of CS467: Social Visualization, instructed by Karrie Karahalios at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.
Important Notes
Some values presented in the visualization are estimates due data suppression in the provided records, preserving the privacy of individuals. For these instances, we have noted when data has been estimated.
Due to the scale of presented maps, several geographically small countries/regions have been merged. For example, Singapore and Malaysia are displayed as a single entity, as is Hong Kong, Macau, and China.
Data sources
Data was compiled from the following sources:
Acknowledgements
We especially want to thank Chris Lehman and the Division of Management Information at the University of Illinois for working with us in providing specific datasets used in this project.The United States and Britain says they are determined to track down billions of dollars of Ukrainian assets allegedly looted under the regime of deposed president Viktor Yanukovych.
US Attorney General Eric Holder and British Home Secretary Theresa May told an international conference on asset recovery that those responsible would be held accountable.
"There should be no mistake, we are determined in our efforts to be successful," Holder told a press conference in London at the start of the two-day forum.
"We are determined to hold accountable those who were responsible for the theft of these Ukrainian assets and we are also determined to ensure that those assets are returned to the Ukrainian people."
Ukraine's general prosecutor Oleh Makhnitskyi told the forum that Kiev has already identified stolen assets totalling at least 35 billion Ukrainian hryvnias ($A3.25 billion).
He expected the eventual total to amount to tens of billions of dollars.
Makhnitskyi described the Yanukovych regime as an "organised criminal group" whose tentacles reached throughout the administration.
"The new government was set up and we found that our treasury was empty and the funds were misappropriated," he said.
Yanukovych was ousted in February following a series of massive protests after he decided to scrap an agreement with the European Union in favour of closer ties with Russia.
He fled Ukraine for Russia.
Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, senior government officials, prosecutors and representatives from financial centres and international organisations around the world are also attending the conference, Britain's Home Office said.
Britain's Serious Fraud Office announced on the eve of the conference that it had launched a money-laundering investigation into possible corruption in Ukraine and frozen $US23 million in assets.
May said officials from Britain's National Crime Agency and Crown Prosecution Service have already travelled to Ukraine to offer their assistance.
"I think this event will help to set a new benchmark for the international community," she said.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague said on Monday he will visit Ukraine next week in a show of support for Kiev.For the second straight week, the Buffalo Bills offense was stymied and restrained in a meaningful game.
In the team’s Week 9 affair with the New York Jets, sacks were an issue and kept quarterback Tyrod Taylor in a box that forced him against his Achilles heel – the pocket. Against the Saints, Taylor and running back LeSean McCoy had a highlight reel that could end after the first drive of the game. Beyond that point, frustration and embarrassment set in at New Era Field.
Related Sean McDermott commits to Tyrod Taylor as starter after Week 10 benching
198 yards – the yardage Buffalo contributed on Sunday that was dwarfed by the 482 of the New Orleans Saints. If you don’t count Nathan Peterman’s statistics, Tyrod Taylor contributed a whopping 83 yards of offense through over three-quarters of football.
In consecutive weeks, the Bills were out-coached and were at the mercy of the opposing team early on. A major component of the back-to-back losses was the offensive game plan. Buffalo offensive coordinator Rick Dennison struggled to even sleep after the pathetic output in Week 10 and called the Bills offensive line coach, Juan Castillo, to try and formulate a new plan.
“We’re still trying to iron out the detail and the whole thing, to make sure we know what we do best,” Dennison said while speaking to the media on Monday. “That’s what we’re trying to work on right now; that’s why I called Juan [Castillo] last night after the game. We need to iron out what we do best and then we’ll go from there.”
What Buffalo did best the past two seasons was run the football. The Bills finished first in rushing offense in both 2015 and 2016, but have struggled in Dennison’s zone blocking scheme. The team is currently 16th in rushing offense.
Sunday’s game came to a point where Buffalo was forced to abandon the run as the game became out of reach.
Dennison spoke with the media on why he called offensive line coach Juan Castillo and if this is normal for him to do.
“I may not call him after a game, but I wasn’t going to sleep anyway, so it didn’t matter. I just had it in my mind that I wanted to talk to him, took a break and talked to him about it. Just make sure we’re focused on it today, and, we met, we’re going to continue to work on that.”
For Bills fans, the morale is at its lowest point of the season. The team has taken the Bills Mafia on the worst roller coaster ride imaginable and incredibly somehow, someway, Buffalo is still squarely in the playoff race. At 5-4, the Bills own 6th place in the AFC and would make the playoffs if the season ended after Week 10.
The road ahead for Buffalo is tricky and may require more and more of these meetings of the minds between Dennison and Castillo in order for the Bills to pull themselves up. Next week the team will face the Los Angeles Chargers in a game that is no guarantee. The Chargers are already a favorite to win after Buffalo fell flat on their face in the last two weeks. One can only hope that whatever Dennison and Castillo talked about will fix the mess that is the Bills’ offense.Miami Marlins Release Pitcher Troy Patton
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As spring training opens up, hope springs eternal for many players throughout Florida and Arizona. Rookies are looking to make an impression on their coaches, newcomers are trying to prove they are worth their big contracts and veterans are trying to be just impressive enough to break camp with the big club. On Sunday, however, that dream ended quickly for left-handed reliever Troy Patton.
Patton is a 30-year-old pitcher who was in camp with the Miami Marlins after signing a minor league contract with the club in late December. He holds a career 3.25 ERA and a 1.17 WHIP, and was effective in Triple A in 2015, pitching to a 2.37 ERA in the hitter-friendly Pacific Coast League. Patton was in camp with the Marlins, trying to earn a spot in the bullpen. With the Marlins potentially in need of a second lefty in the ‘pen, Patton certainly had a chance to earn a spot.
Before Grapefruit League play even came close to beginning, however, Patton was released by the Fish. It is unclear what led the team to release the lefty, but he was coming off a season in which he served a PED suspension, so of course that comes to mind. Another potential reason for his release may have been that he was given an opportunity to play for a Japanese, Korean, or Taiwanese professional team and simply asked the Marlins for his release. Surely, more details will emerge soon and the truth of Patton’s release will be made known, but it is an interesting development early in spring training that could mean something, or could mean absolutely nothing at all. Let’s keep our eyes and ears open, Marlins fans. Never a dull moment.An unknown number of staff have been laid off from Sony-owned studio Sucker Punch, according to a report. The studio is known for the Sly Cooper and Infamous series, with its last full release this year’s Infamous Second Son.
The news comes by way of IGN, which shares a statement from Sony Computer Entertainment America confirming the news. Sony did not share details other than to confirm that layoffs have taken place.
Sony announced at Gamescom that 10 million PlayStation 4 units have been sold. Infamous Second Son, which was released in March, quickly sold 1 million units.
DLC for that title, Infamous First Light, will be released on August 26.
Update: Sony has provided us with a statement on the layoffs. "SCEA can confirm a reduction in workforce has taken place at Sucker Punch Productions," a representative told us vial email. "Sucker Punch is appreciative of the tremendous work team members contributed to the inFAMOUS and Sly Cooper series, and wishes them the best in their next endeavors." No further details are available.
Our Take
Sony posted over $1 billion in losses for its most recently completed fiscal year. While the gaming unit has been profitable, cuts are inevitable when the overarching organization is hurting.
Our thoughts are with those affected by these layoffs.Most people have multiple ways of judging themselves, and often that involves comparing themselves to others. Maybe you have a role-model in mind, a person you think has it all together. Maybe you choose the best of several other people to compare yourself to–the role model for your professional life is different than the person you look up to in your personal life, and the person you admire for her mothering skills may not be the same person you want to look like in a swimsuit.
Most people don’t consider themselves good enough. We’re not good enough at work, as a parent, or as a spouse. Our bodies don’t look good enough at a pool party and we aren’t pretty enough or successful enough at the high school reunion. We don’t have enough friends and we don’t have the right car.
Emotionally sensitive people are more likely to judge themselves harshly. We live life as if it were a competition.
Self-acceptance is difficult. Instead of accepting ourselves and others as we are, we search for criteria as to who is the best and who is better than average and who is not, as if there are rules in the universe about how to be valuable. In fact, most of the so-called criteria we use to judge ourselves are invalid, and in some cases, harmful.
The Purpose of Judging
Judging may be about figuring out how well we fit in. We all want to belong. Eons ago being a part of the tribe or clan was critical to survival and perhaps competition played a role in being valued by the group. But what we judge ourselves on now is likely not to be what really helps us belong.
Belonging is more about offering acceptance and caring to others than being the fastest runner or the skinniest or the smartest or the most successful. While many years ago we needed physical strength and speed to survive, in today’s world we often need emotional support and comfort.
Invalidating Environments
While judging may come from the need to assure survival by fitting in, some people judge themselves so harshly it gets in the way of living their life. How does this happen? When you grow up being judged, you may internalize the judgements made of you. Linehan (1993) calls this the internalizing the invalidating environment.
When you live in an invalidating environment, you are told the way you feel is not right. Less desirable emotions such as sadness and anger are often not acceptable. You “shouldn’t” feel angry or sad and the reasons you believe led to those feelings are not accurate.
You might be told that you aren’t sad because you lost the election to student council, you’re just feeling sorry for yourself because you didn’t get what you wanted. Usually the reason for any difficult emotion or any problem is blamed on a character flaw. That flaw might be that you are selfish, lazy, crazy, bossy, or stupid. Or maybe that you are just like your no-good father who left the family years ago.
In addition, problems are seen as easy to solve. You should just get over whatever happened or move on or try harder. Grieving for losses is often not allowed. You don’t learn problem-solving skills or perhaps even the concept that issues can be resolved.
Internalizing Invalidations
As an adult, you may internalize the judgments you heard as a child. You may believe that you have character flaws that cause the problems you experience and call yourself names when you are upset. You may believe that problem-solving is easy for everyone else and something is wrong with you that you can’t just be different than you are.
You may not even try to solve problems because you believe that you cannot or you haven’t learned the skills.
Perhaps you may make every effort to cut off your feelings because you see them as unacceptable. You may also cut off your feelings because you fear they will never go away. You may judge yourself for having feelings and may be afraid of your feelings as well.
When you judge yourself, you add to the difficult emotions you are experiencing and likely build thoughts of hopelessness and helplessness. Judgments often increase anxiety and depression.
In a future post, I’ll discuss letting go of judgments.
Note to Readers: I’ll be closing our second survey soon. Thanks to more than 1000 people who have responded.
References
Linehan, M. Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder. New York: The Guilford Press, 1993.
photo credit: s_falkowTestosterone makes you think about virility.
About Alzheimer’s Disease, not so much.
But this isn’t typically taken as a clue to combatting the disease, despite the fact that (much like Superman and Clark Kent) Alzheimer’s and healthy levels of testosterone are almost never seen together in the same place at the same time.
Maybe, just maybe, there’s something going on here?
30 Years in the Alzheimer’s Trenches
Dr. Ralph Martins has been working in Alzheimer’s research for just about a third of a century. At the time he began his career, it still required a posthumous dissection of the brain to say with certainty, “Yes, this person definitively had Alzheimer’s.” How far things have come. Current research involves work on “triple transgenic” mice genetically engineered to mimic human Alzheimer’s in the three most crucial ways: impaired memory, neurons snarled with neurofibrillary tangles and brains overflowing with gunk called amyloid-beta plaque. Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans are used to identify Alzheimer’s (and even pre-Alzheimer’s) in living — but not exactly healthy — human brains.
Despite the scientific advances, Alzheimer’s remains an undefeated foe — and one of the more feared medical prognoses of the modern era. It’s not a quick death sentence, and that is part of what makes it nasty: its slow stripping of a person’s mind and identity long before the victim’s body finally gives way.
Like most diseases that still have medical science on the defensive, Alzheimer’s seems to be multi-faceted, not the product of any one problem or susceptible to any particular silver bullet that will cure (or prevent) it in all cases. Genes, environmental factors, and bad luck seem to all be at play. And, of course, advancing age — the single greatest risk factor, and one affecting ever more of the longer-lived population in developed nations.
What’s Love Hormones Got to Do With It?
Early in his career, Dr. Martins saw the link between the crashing levels of estrogen in menopausal women and increasing frequency of Alzheimer’s. Especially considering what we now know — that the accumulation of amyloid-beta plaque begins twenty or more years before Alzheimer’s cognitive symptoms emerge — it seemed increasingly clear that healthy (i.e. youth-like) levels of estrogen might have a protective affect against the amyloid-beta build-up that is critical to future Alzheimer’s.
Martins wondered: If sex hormones are an important clue in women, might the same be true in men?
(Another piece of circumstantial evidence: “Andropause” in men is a more gradual process than menopause. Could the more abrupt downshift in hormones be related to the greater prevalence of Alzheimer’s in women vs. men?)
TestoTrax TestoTrax by VitaMonk is a proprietary testosterone support stack contains premium, natural herbs like FenuTrax™ fenugreek extract, fadogia agrestis, premium Peruvian maca and tongkat ali — each of which have been shown to promote healthy testosterone levels.
Much of his subsequent research has been spent chasing down this line of inquiry. The resulting findings — both in mice, who can be sacrificed to examine their brains, and human subjects (whose brains are spared by science, if not by Alzheimer’s) — seem to confirm the hunch. Testosterone levels may indeed be protective against amyloid-beta, the harbinger of Alzheimer’s.
In Episode #192, Dr. Martins explains decades of research, focusing on the most current work, including ongoing studies that are in the works at the time of publication, and the right lifestyle choices men can make now to protect against the risk incurred from lowering testosterone levels.
Note: You don’t need to look like Wolverine to keep your brain healthy. You just want to do what you can to encourage healthy testosterone levels for your age group.
Coming Soon: In October of 2017, Maggie’s Recipe for Life, a diet book coauthored by Dr. Martins and Maggie Beer will be released. In October of 2017,, a diet book coauthored by Dr. Martins and Maggie Beer will be released. Pre-orders are available here.LOS ANGELES -- A crowd of supporters, some dressed in Los Angeles Dodgers attire, held a candlelight prayer vigil Wednesday night outside the hospital where a San Francisco Giants fan was taken after he was savagely beaten in a Dodger Stadium parking lot.
Faith leaders, community activists and residents joined the family of Bryan Stow for an emotional vigil that included prayers and moments of silence.
Stow, a 42-year-old paramedic and father of two from Santa Cruz, was punched in the back of the head by two assailants wearing Dodgers gear and fell to the pavement after the Dodgers' 2-1 victory over the Giants in the March 31 season opener.
Stow remained in a medically induced coma at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center. He suffered a severe skull fracture and bad bruising to his brain's frontal lobes. Doctors removed the left side of his skull to relieve pressure on his swollen brain.
Dodgers fan Jennifer Hernandez attended the season opener, but did not witness the attack. Hernandez said she wanted to show her support for Stow and to counter perceptions raging on Internet message boards about Dodgers fans.
"It's disgusting what happened," said the 33-year-old Los Angeles resident. "It only takes a couple of bad apples to ruin the whole scene."
Stow's family cried and held on to one another when the John Lennon song "Imagine" blasted out of loudspeakers. Sniffles were heard in the crowd.
Police have been following up on dozens of leads since releasing composite sketches of the two suspects and urged witnesses to come forward. A $100,000 reward including contributions from the Dodgers and Giants is offered for information leading to the arrests of the attackers.
"If you're man enough to attack someone from behind, at least you should be man enough to face the consequences of your actions," first cousin John Stow said after the vigil.
The incident prompted the Dodgers to hire former Los Angeles police chief William Bratton to assess the team's security policies. Bratton, who quit the police chief job in 2009 to go work for a security consulting firm, will help the club develop a security blueprint that extends to both the stadium and its parking lots.
"There's no question that people ought to be able to go to a game, a Dodger game or any game, with their families and not be terrorized in the way this individual was," Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said earlier in the day.
The vigil was organized by The Wall-Las Memorias Project, which helps Latinos with HIV and AIDS. The group is urging the public to combat violence and alcohol abuse among young adults.
"It's only a baseball game," said Richard Zaldivar, the project's executive director.
The Giants will dedicate Friday's home opener at AT&T Park to Stow and pay tribute to the injured man in a special ceremony before the game.Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn leaves his home in north London, before attending the Prime Minister's Questions. (John Stillwell/PA Wire/PA Images)
The idea of a general election at this point fills most British left wingers with horror. The prospect of it: the Conservatives with a 20 percent lead heading to a parliamentary supermajority, Labour on 25 percent of the vote, reduced to 166 seats on a uniform swing. This would be 1997 in reverse.
You'd think this was the end for Jeremy Corbyn. Surely, after a mauling like that, Labour's old guard, led by Tom Watson, would finally make good their various botched attempts to get rid of him. They must, surely, be welcoming this gift from Theresa May. They must be readying a string of resignations and public calls not to vote Labour.
If they are, they're wrong to be. Labour will certainly be broken as an effective opposition by defeat, but getting rid of Corbyn will be a lot harder than they think, and it won't solve their problem. Their problem, in short, is that they have no answers. It isn't even clear that they understand the question.
Before getting to that, it is important to recognise just how bad Labour's electoral situation is. Some of Corbyn's supporters might be tempted to say they distrust the polls – that polls are an imperfect snapshot of raw material in flux. However, they're rarely so wrong as to erroneously award a 20 percent lead to the party in government.
WATCH: Jeremy Corbyn – The Outsider
Many will point out that public support for many of Corbyn's ideas is there. This is no surprise. The social-democratic reflexes of the British public remain strong despite the Thatcher and Blair years. But Corbyn's difficulties have never been about his policies, and the conversation in the media will not be about those policies. In Labour's modern history, any leader trying to change the balance of wealth and power even slightly, from Neil Kinnock to Ed Miliband, has been ritually slaughtered. It will be hard to get the policies heard over the 24-hour blare of hate.
Some will point out that even good polling cannot anticipate the work that half a million Labour members can do. Sure, this is the biggest campaigning force Labour has had since the late 70s. It might even be a larger membership than Labour has ever had, since prior to 1978 the figures were systematically inflated. But even if the totality of this mass is mobilised – in a way that so far it mostly has not been – it would do well to keep most of Labour's existing seats. Ed Miliband bragged that "four million conversations" would change the political landscape: it didn't shift Labour's vote a jot. This is because the minute-long doorstep conversations on an election campaign aren't remotely sufficient to shift opinions formed over months or years.
It's also true that the current political situation is unusually volatile. The breakdown of established verities in parliamentary democracies is why Corbyn became Labour leader in the first place. The fact that the odds are stacked against him, again, is not the guarantee that it once was. In any case, most caveats about Labour's poor situation accentuate what might change: affirming, in other words, that the situation is awful.
"What are Corbyn's Labour critics actually expecting will happen?"
With all due caveats – allowing that Corbyn might defy the odds, that Britain is not the predictable place it used to be – let's assume that Labour loses badly. What are Corbyn's Labour critics actually expecting will happen? That the membership which has largely joined to support Corbyn will thank them for having enthusiastically, and with grave-dancing anticipation, helped bring this disaster about? That it will be forgotten that a huge part of Labour's current electoral woes derive from the catastrophic self-injury inflicted on the party by its putschists in the Brexit aftermath? Even if the attacks on Corbyn – some coming from figures on the left – persuaded Labour members, how will that make Yvette Cooper suddenly loveable to them?
Let me put it like this: Corbyn was elected for one primary reason – because every possible alternative had been tried, failed and was exhausted. It wasn't that this or that leader had failed. It wasn't that this or that policy had failed. It was that social democracy was visibly in crisis – not just in Britain, but everywhere across Europe. If you think Labour's polling is bad, look to the continent: Pasok, Dutch Labour, the French Socialists, one devastation after another. To which one would have to add Scottish Labour, now a moribund force if ever there was one.
The Labour Party that elected Corbyn in 2015, and again in 2016, was not just a party with a poor vote. It was a party whose purpose was in question. It was no longer clear what social democracy could offer in an age of austerity and low growth. Corbyn's answer was that it should shift modestly left, support investment and redistribution, and try to build social movements. His opponents may not like his answer, but at least he has one; they don't. What's more, he won, they lost. That's why, in the last coup, they didn't even dare articulate a major policy disagreement with him. What will they have this time round? A bad election defeat will hurt Corbyn and damage Labour, but it won't necessarily help them.
Short of a more effectual coup, Corbyn and his enemies are stuck with each other – neither being about to leave Labour. The first question, then, is do Corbyn's would-be gravediggers want to be locked in a spiral of self-destructive war that, even if successful, would destroy the party they want to win? The second question is: if not just the status quo with red rosettes, what are you actually for?
@leninologyI am delighted that Ed Miliband and Iain Duncan Smith will be presenting the Jeremy Vine Show. Both have held crucial roles in political life and will bring unique perspectives and insight to the programme
For five days each in the weeks beginning 19 and 26 June from midday - 2pm, Ed and Iain will front the programme, which attracts a weekly audience of 7.07m. Ed will host the show the week commencing 19 June and Iain the week commencing 26 June.
Head of Radio Two Lewis Carnie says: “I am delighted that Ed Miliband and Iain Duncan Smith will be presenting the Jeremy Vine Show. Both have held crucial roles in political life and will bring unique perspectives and insight to the programme, in the heart of the daytime schedule.”
Editor of the Jeremy Vine Show Phil Jones says: “This follows a tradition of Radio 2’s popular current affairs show, being occasionally guest-presented by prominent politicians which began with figures such as Neil Kinnock and the late Charles Kennedy in the early 1990s.
"Political coverage is the bedrock of the programme and this is a sign of how important politics is to Radio 2, especially at such a key time in the nation’s history. Each day we will cover the big stories that affect our listeners and continue to inform, educate and entertain the Radio 2 audience.”
LDSIt was early March, not yet two months into the Trump administration, and the new Not-Normal was setting in: It continued to be the administration’s position, as enunciated by Sean Spicer, that the inauguration had attracted the “largest audience ever”; barely a month had passed since Kellyanne Conway brought the fictitious “Bowling Green massacre” to national attention; and just for kicks, on March 4, the president alerted the nation by tweet, “Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower.”
If the administration had tossed the customs and niceties of American politics to the wind, there was one clearly identifiable constant: mendacity. “Fake news” accusations flew back and forth every day, like so many spitballs in a third-grade classroom.
Feeling depressed about the conflation of fiction and fact in the first few months of 2017, I steered a car into the hills of Calabasas to meet with one person whom many rely on to set things straight. This is an area near Los Angeles best known for its production of Kardashians, but there were no McMansions on the street where I was headed, only old, gnarled trees and a few modest houses. I spotted the one I was looking for—a ramshackle bungalow—because the car in the driveway gave it away. Its license plate read SNOPES.
David Mikkelson, the publisher of the fact-checking site Snopes.com, answered the door himself. He was wearing khakis and a polo shirt, his hair at an awkward length, somewhere between late-career Robert Redford and early-career Steve Carell. He had been working alone at the kitchen table, with just a laptop, a mouse, and the internet. The house, which he was getting ready to sell, was sparsely furnished, the most prominent feature being built-in bookcases filled with ancient hardcovers—“there’s a whole shelf devoted to the Titanic and other maritime disasters,” Mikkelson told me—and board games, his primary hobby.
Since about 2010, this house has passed for a headquarters, as Snopes has no formal offices, just 16 people sitting at their laptops in different rooms across the country, trying to swim against the tide of spin, memes, and outright lies in the American public sphere. Just that morning Mikkelson and his staff had been digging into a new presidential tweet of dubious facticity: “122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!” Trump had the correct total, but the overwhelming number of those detainees had been released during the George W. Bush administration. “There’s a whole lot of missing context to just that 122 number,” Mikkelson said.
There are other fact-checking outfits, like PolitiFact, which is operated by the Tampa Bay Times, or FactCheck.org at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. But Snopes has kicked around the internet since 1994—which makes it almost as old as what we once called the World Wide Web. In this age of untruth, it has become an indispensable resource. Should your friend’s sister start a conspiracy trash fire in a Facebook comment thread, Snopes is a reliable form of extinguisher. Because of this reputation, Snopes was listed as a partner in a Facebook fact-checking effort announced last fall after the social media giant acknowledged it had become a conduit for fake news. Potentially false stories could be flagged by users and an algorithm, and then organizations like Snopes, ABC News, and the Associated Press would be tasked with investigating them.
As pretty much anyone knows, the truth can be a slippery bastard. Getting to the bottom of something requires what you might generously call a fussy personality. Mikkelson possesses that trait. He spends hours writing a detailed analysis of a claim and feels frustrated when readers just want a “true” or “false” answer. He’s got the worldview of Eeyore, had Eeyore been obsessed with cataloging the precise history, variety, and growing seasons of thistles in the Hundred Acre Wood. He can even get pessimistic about whether his work makes a difference. “Since a lot of this stuff is really complicated, nuanced stuff with areas of gray, it requires lengthy and complex explanations,” he said. “But a lot of the audience, their eyes just tend to glaze over, and it’s just, they don’t want to have to follow all of that. So they just fall back on their preconceptions.”
Among those preconceptions is the right-wing view that Snopes is anti-Trump, its efforts to separate fact from fiction merely a cover for liberal bias. Mikkelson disputes this, saying that if you look at the totality of the posts Snopes has written on the subject of the president, “the vast majority of them are debunking false claims made about him, not affirming negative things said about him or disproving positive things said about him.” But nobody is looking at the totality; if that sort of intellectual honesty ever existed in the public sphere, it’s gone now. And sure enough, the week before I went to Calabasas, Tucker Carlson on Fox News had been jeering at “those holy men at Snopes, those gods of objectivity.”
“Do you ever get sick of the stupidity of all this?” I asked Mikkelson in his kitchen, a couple of days after Carlson’s rant.
“Yes,” he said. His eyes rolled heavenward, and he gave a weary little laugh. But what I didn’t know then was that more chaos was coming, and it was chaos that threatened the very existence of Snopes. Just days later, Mikkelson would start a fight with the new co-owners of the business, which led them to freeze the distribution of the site’s ad revenues, making Snopes so cash-poor that by July it had to resort to a “Save Snopes” GoFundMe campaign to keep operations afloat. The appeal worked. It had raised, as of late August, more than $690,000.
The groundswell of support was a satisfying, even humbling, ratification of the work Mikkelson and his staff had put into Snopes. But amid the good feelings were some questions. Articles mentioned a messy divorce; they mentioned “embezzling claims.” And just as it’s hard for Snopes to nail down, absolutely, definitively, certain truths about the toxicity of a copper mug or the meaning of the president’s words, it can be trickier than expected to nail down the truth about Snopes.
David Mikkelson has been debunking myths on Snopes.com for more than 20 years. “It’s kind of like the site is my baby,” he says. Holly Andres
Mikkelson first adopted his “nom de net,” snopes—lowercase, at first—in the early 1990s in a Usenet group called alt.folklore.urban. The name comes from a lesser-known William Faulkner trilogy, but Mikkelson just shrugged when I asked if he was a big Faulkner fan. The attraction was the sound—“short and catchy and distinctive.”
Alt.folklore.urban was a place for people who enjoyed collecting, sorting, and organizing facts. These were people who might spend hours trying to figure out if hot water froze faster than cold water or whether “Puff the Magic Dragon” was actually about drugs.
Barbara Hamel was in her thirties, married, and living in Ottawa, Canada, when she first found alt.folklore.urban, via the Ottawa FreeNet. She’d worked as a secretary and a bookkeeper, but it wasn’t really what she’d imagined for herself. “Under different circumstances, I would have gone on to become a journalist,” she wrote in an email to me recently, “but after applying to Ryerson University in Toronto, I was felled by Crohn’s disease and thus had to abandon that plan and find another way in life.” She posted several times a day, a funny, wry, and engaging presence.
David and Barbara began flirting in the Usenet group, and by the fall of 1994, Barbara had moved to California to be with David. They wed in 1996. It was in the early days of their romance, David says, when he had the idea that would become Snopes. The graphical web had just been born, and he saw an opportunity to rescue his careful research from the relentless chronological stream of the Usenet group.
The page grew. It was a joint effort, though at first David kept his day job as a computer tech and coder at an HMO. His income paid for their expenses and the cost of running the site. David and Barbara lived frugally in a rented condo in Agoura Hills, and their stories about these salad days sound like tales from an endearingly dorky public-access television show. Barbara remembers the tests they would conduct to prove a fact or a falsehood. “One had me sitting for half an hour with my mouth full of marshmallows; another had me sequestering plants in our glass-enclosed fireplace lest the cats gnaw on them before the conclusion of a multiweek experiment on the effects of microwaved water on their growth.”
For the first seven years or so, the site stayed firmly in the realm of what you might call Weird America: Was Walt Disney cryogenically frozen after death? (No, he wasn’t.) Google was not yet officially a verb, and the internet was still in some ways the domain of nerds whose web pages were read by other nerds. The site got attention from local media when reporters wrote up the dangers of believing your email forwards—the closest thing to fake news the early internet could come up with—but it remained, mostly, a hobby for the Mikkelsons.
Then, on September 11, 2001, out of the clear blue sky, everything changed. The planes flew into the Twin Towers and crashed at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania, and America turned, panicked, to the internet to try to explain those events to itself. “I posted the first of the September 11 articles just after midnight on September 12,” Barbara wrote to me. It was a post debunking the rumor that the 16th century astrologer Nostradamus had predicted the attacks. “I researched and wrote that first article only because I needed to do something other than just cry and feel helpless.” The tenor of their site was about to change.
Where once they had been conducting tests with marshmallows and houseplants, now they were debunking claims that there were 4,000 Israelis who worked in the World Trade Center who stayed home that fateful day. Traffic spiked. Suddenly the press, which had treated Snopes mostly as a curiosity, took real interest. The Mikkelsons found themselves doing newspaper interviews, appearing on television, talking about the lies Americans were telling themselves in the aftermath of |
But, it certainly contained enough detail to shatter the mystery and open my eyes up to the possibilities.
The book is a fairly quick read, as most books in the Book Apart series are. I spent a few hours reading it the first time, drinking from the firehose of new information. Then, I went back and skimmed it again, re-reading some of the implementation details, this time with a better mental model.
At this point, I'm certainly no SVG expert; but, as Garrison Keillor might say, this book "gives shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done." So, taking what I learned from "Practical SVG," I wanted to try and implement some SVG-based solutions in an Angular 2 context.
Run this demo in my JavaScript Demos project on GitHub.
To experiment with SVG, I tried to create a "mood rating" component in which the user can select one of five emoticons that most closely represents their current mood. I designed the emoticons in Adobe Fireworks (one of the best graphics programs of all time); and, included each emoticon as an individual, inline SVG document in the component template.
// Import the core angular services.
import { Component } from "@angular/core";
import { EventEmitter } from "@angular/core";
@Component({
selector: "mood-rating",
inputs: [ "value", "size" ],
outputs: [ "valueChange" ],
styles: [
`
:host {
display: table ;
}
.items {
list-style-type: none ;
margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px ;
padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px ;
}
.items:after {
clear: both ;
content: "" ;
display: table ;
height: 0px ;
}
.item {
color: #CCCCCC ;
cursor: pointer ;
float: left ;
margin: 0px 15px 0px 0px ;
padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px ;
}
.item:hover {
color: #333333 ;
}
.item--on,
.item--on:hover {
color: inherit ; /* Pull in color from parent, for stroke + fill. */
}
.item-icon {
height: 100% ;
width: 100% ;
}
`
],
template:
`
<ul class="items">
<li
(click)="selectRating( 1 )"
class="item"
[class.item--on]="( value === 1 )"
[style.width.px]="size"
[style.height.px]="size">
<svg viewBox="0 0 80 80" preserveAspectRatio="xMidYMid meet" class="item-icon">
<title>Rating 1</title>
<path id="Ellipse" d="M 3 40 C 3 19.5652 19.5652 3 40 3 C 60.4348 3 77 19.5652 77 40 C 77 60.4348 60.4348 77 40 77 C 19.5652 77 3 60.4348 3 40 Z" stroke="currentColor" stroke-width="5" fill="none"/>
<path id="Ellipse2" d="M 16 30.5 C 16 27.4624 18.4624 25 21.5 25 C 24.5376 25 27 27.4624 27 30.5 C 27 33.5376 24.5376 36 21.5 36 C 18.4624 36 16 33.5376 16 30.5 Z" fill="currentColor"/>
<path id="Ellipse3" d="M 50 30.5 C 50 27.4624 52.4624 25 55.5 25 C 58.5376 25 61 27.4624 61 30.5 C 61 33.5376 58.5376 36 55.5 36 C 52.4624 36 50 33.5376 50 30.5 Z" fill="currentColor"/>
<path d="M 23.5373 61.4204 C 13.4968 34.4894 66.6081 37.7737 55 61.2328 C 36.966 65.2732 37.1067 58.8905 23.5373 61.4204 Z" fill="currentColor"/>
</svg>
</li>
<li
(click)="selectRating( 2 )"
class="item"
[class.item--on]="( value === 2 )"
[style.width.px]="size"
[style.height.px]="size">
<svg viewBox="0 0 80 80" preserveAspectRatio="xMidYMid meet" class="item-icon">
<title>Rating 2</title>
<path id="Ellipse4" d="M 3 40 C 3 19.5652 19.5652 3 40 3 C 60.4348 3 77 19.5652 77 40 C 77 60.4348 60.4348 77 40 77 C 19.5652 77 3 60.4348 3 40 Z" stroke="currentColor" stroke-width="5" fill="none"/>
<path id="Ellipse5" d="M 16 30.5 C 16 27.4624 18.4624 25 21.5 25 C 24.5376 25 27 27.4624 27 30.5 C 27 33.5376 24.5376 36 21.5 36 C 18.4624 36 16 33.5376 16 30.5 Z" fill="currentColor"/>
<path id="Ellipse6" d="M 50 30.5 C 50 27.4624 52.4624 25 55.5 25 C 58.5376 25 61 27.4624 61 30.5 C 61 33.5376 58.5376 36 55.5 36 C 52.4624 36 50 33.5376 50 30.5 Z" fill="currentColor"/>
<path d="M 22.0009 57.5198 C 34.0064 42.2024 46.012 44.6863 57.3965 57.5198 C 43.942 53.38 35.5704 54.9899 22.0009 57.5198 Z" fill="currentColor"/>
</svg>
</li>
<li
(click)="selectRating( 3 )"
class="item"
[class.item--on]="( value === 3 )"
[style.width.px]="size"
[style.height.px]="size">
<svg viewBox="0 0 80 80" preserveAspectRatio="xMidYMid meet" class="item-icon">
<title>Rating 3</title>
<path id="Ellipse7" d="M 3 40 C 3 19.5652 19.5652 3 40 3 C 60.4348 3 77 19.5652 77 40 C 77 60.4348 60.4348 77 40 77 C 19.5652 77 3 60.4348 3 40 Z" stroke="currentColor" stroke-width="5" fill="none"/>
<path id="Ellipse8" d="M 16 30.5 C 16 27.4624 18.4624 25 21.5 25 C 24.5376 25 27 27.4624 27 30.5 C 27 33.5376 24.5376 36 21.5 36 C 18.4624 36 16 33.5376 16 30.5 Z" fill="currentColor"/>
<path id="Ellipse9" d="M 50 30.5 C 50 27.4624 52.4624 25 55.5 25 C 58.5376 25 61 27.4624 61 30.5 C 61 33.5376 58.5376 36 55.5 36 C 52.4624 36 50 33.5376 50 30.5 Z" fill="currentColor"/>
<path d="M 16.8629 53.8169 C 36.6421 46.6872 47.632 54.287 59.5915 52 C 54.7617 61.8767 30.4324 51.287 16.8629 53.8169 Z" fill="currentColor"/>
</svg>
</li>
<li
(click)="selectRating( 4 )"
class="item"
[class.item--on]="( value === 4 )"
[style.width.px]="size"
[style.height.px]="size">
<svg viewBox="0 0 80 80" preserveAspectRatio="xMidYMid meet" class="item-icon">
<title>Rating 4</title>
<path id="Ellipse10" d="M 3 40 C 3 19.5652 19.5652 3 40 3 C 60.4348 3 77 19.5652 77 40 C 77 60.4348 60.4348 77 40 77 C 19.5652 77 3 60.4348 3 40 Z" stroke="currentColor" stroke-width="5" fill="none"/>
<path id="Ellipse11" d="M 16 30.5 C 16 27.4624 18.4624 25 21.5 25 C 24.5376 25 27 27.4624 27 30.5 C 27 33.5376 24.5376 36 21.5 36 C 18.4624 36 16 33.5376 16 30.5 Z" fill="currentColor"/>
<path id="Ellipse12" d="M 50 30.5 C 50 27.4624 52.4624 25 55.5 25 C 58.5376 25 61 27.4624 61 30.5 C 61 33.5376 58.5376 36 55.5 36 C 52.4624 36 50 33.5376 50 30.5 Z" fill="currentColor"/>
<path d="M 18 47 C 24.1407 53.1407 52.4296 54.5704 60 47 C 50.4149 64.1178 34.805 79.8822 18 47 Z" fill="currentColor"/>
</svg>
</li>
<li
(click)="selectRating( 5 )"
class="item"
[class.item--on]="( value === 5 )"
[style.width.px]="size"
[style.height.px]="size">
<svg viewBox="0 0 80 80" preserveAspectRatio="xMidYMid meet" class="item-icon">
<title>Rating 5</title>
<path id="Ellipse13" d="M 3 40 C 3 19.5652 19.5652 3 40 3 C 60.4348 3 77 19.5652 77 40 C 77 60.4348 60.4348 77 40 77 C 19.5652 77 3 60.4348 3 40 Z" stroke="currentColor" stroke-width="5" fill="none"/>
<path id="Ellipse14" d="M 16 30.5 C 16 27.4624 18.4624 25 21.5 25 C 24.5376 25 27 27.4624 27 30.5 C 27 33.5376 24.5376 36 21.5 36 C 18.4624 36 16 33.5376 16 30.5 Z" fill="currentColor"/>
<path id="Ellipse15" d="M 50 30.5 C 50 27.4624 52.4624 25 55.5 25 C 58.5376 25 61 27.4624 61 30.5 C 61 33.5376 58.5376 36 55.5 36 C 52.4624 36 50 33.5376 50 30.5 Z" fill="currentColor"/>
<path d="M 20 48 C 26.1407 54.1407 42.0368 34.4738 59.2953 51 C 49.7102 68.1178 36.805 80.8822 20 48 Z" fill="currentColor"/>
</svg>
</li>
</ul>
`
})
export class MoodRatingComponent {
// I hold the dimensions of the emoticons. This value gets applied to both the height
// and width of each emoticon.
public size: number ;
// I hold the current rating.
public value: number ;
// I emit a rating selection.
public valueChange: EventEmitter<number> ;
// I initialize the component.
constructor() {
this.size = 40;
this.value = 0;
this.valueChange = new EventEmitter();
}
// ---
// PUBLIC METHODS.
// ---
// I emit the selected rating (upholding a one-way data flow).
public selectRating( newRating: number ) : void {
( newRating === this.value )
? this.valueChange.emit( 0 )
: this.valueChange.emit( newRating )
;
}
}
Two powerful features of SVG are that it can scale infinitely and that it can be styled using CSS (Cascading Stylesheets). In this case, I'm exposing a [size] input property that will allow me to render the component at different sizes. I'm also using the "currentColor" as the "fill" and "stroke" properties so that the color of the emoticons can be defined by the calling context (driven by the CSS text color).
In my root component, I'm then rendering the mood-rating component three times, each with a different size and rendering color:
// Import the core angular services.
import { Component } from "@angular/core";
// Import the application components and services.
import { MoodRatingComponent } from "./mood-rating.component";
@Component({
selector: "my-app",
directives: [ MoodRatingComponent ],
template:
`
<h3>
How are you feeling today?
</h3>
<p>
[size]="30"
</p>
<mood-rating [(value)]="rating" [size]="30" style="color: #FFC125 ;"></mood-rating>
<p>
[size]="75"
</p>
<mood-rating [(value)]="rating" [size]="75" style="color: #1C86EE ;"></mood-rating>
<p>
[size]="150"
</p>
<mood-rating [(value)]="rating" [size]="150" style="color: #FF0099 ;"></mood-rating>
`
})
export class AppComponent {
// I hold the current rating.
// --
// CAUTION: This value is being used to drive all three mood-rating widget instances.
public rating: number;
// I initialize the component.
constructor() {
this.rating = 0;
}
}
And, when we run this in the browser, we get the following output:
As you can see, the SVG emoticons look nice a crisp at all three sizes. And, the color styling of the component cascades down into the fill and stroke color of the embedded SVG documents. Super cool stuff! And, the nice thing about an Angular 2 component is that you only pay the price of the payload once. Meaning, I only transfer the SVG content down to the browser as part of the JavaScript payload; then, each instance of the component is nothing but a client-side clone, so to speak, of the original HTML and SVG.
I'm sure that my SVG demo leaves much to be desired in the eyes of SVG experts. But, the point is, a few days ago, I didn't know anything about SVG at all. And now, after having read "Practical SVG" by Chris Coyier, I'm feel empowered. There's still so much to learn; but, I'm headed in the right direction and I have a sense of where I need to go next.
Tweet This Groovy post by @BenNadel - Practical SVG By Chris Coyier Woot woot — you rock the party that rocks the body!Terrorists use terrorism because it works, although not against everybody. The Soviet Union’s flaws were without number, but the effete, obsequious squeamishness that characterizes the current American approach to Islam was not among them. From 1986:
The Jerusalem Post said the Soviet secret police last year secured the release of three kidnaped Soviet diplomats in Beirut by castrating a relative of a radical Lebanese Shia Muslim leader, sending him the severed organs and then shooting the relative in the head.
The incident began when four Soviet diplomats were kidnaped last September by Muslim extremists who demanded that Moscow pressure the Syrian government to stop pro-Syrian militiamen from shelling rival Muslim positions in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli.
The militiamen, the Jerusalem paper said, did not cease their attacks, and the body of one of the Soviet diplomats, Arkady Katkov, was found a few days later in a field in Beirut.
The KGB then apparently kidnaped and killed a relative of an unnamed leader of the Shias’ Hezbollah (Party of God) group, a radical, pro-Iranian group that has been suspected of various terrorist activities against Western targets in Lebanon.
Parts of the man’s body, the paper said, were then sent to the Hezbollah leader with a warning that he would lose other relatives in a similar fashion if the three remaining Soviet diplomats were not immediately released. They were quickly freed.
The newspaper quoted “observers in Jerusalem” as saying: “This is the way the Soviets operate. They do things–they don’t talk. And this is the language Hezbollah understands.”PACIFIC BEACH, Calif. (KGTV) - A Pacific Beach resident is frustrated with the increased numbers and frequency of vagrants pouring through their alley.
“We just bought a house and we’re starting to regret it,” said Jordan who didn’t want to share his last name. He feared retaliation.
Monday night, two people were sitting in front of Jordan’s driveway. The man and woman ripped apart a makeshift fence Jordan uses to keep people out of the driveway. They then threatened to bring more people back to damage his home. The woman used a pole from the fence to dent Jordan’s rain gutter drain. The exchange was caught on Jordan’s home security camera.
“It’s super traumatizing. My wife is traumatized,” said Jordan.
Jordan’s wife called 911 at 7:00 PM Monday night and no one responded. She called again 30 minutes later and no one from San Diego Police arrived.
“There’s a guy out here threatening me and he’s damaging my house and they don’t come,” exclaimed Jordan. “I’m really angry and really frustrated.”
Jordan said they’ve been burglarized and vandalized three times since moving in three months ago. He blamed the vagrants and homeless who patrol his alley. Jordan said a homeless man recently kicked his Chihuahua while on a walk.
“They’re not afraid,” Jordan explained.
Jordan’s wife called San Diego Police’s non-emergency number 13 hours after her first 911 call. An officer finally responded.
A San Diego Police spokesman told 10News it was human error and an officer should have responded Monday night.[TRANS] http://bit.ly/18HksvU Girls' Generation's Hyoyeon has been garnering attention after revealing how she was a talented person who received recognition in the dancing world.
On Mnet 'Beatles Code' airing on the 8th, the masters of Korea's first dance survival 'Dancing9', Hyoyeon, Lee Yongwoo, Park Jieun, Woo Hyunyoung, Popinjay, and Ducky, guest starred and showed off their dance skills, as well as their witty talks.
On this day, Hyoyeon was the center of attention after revealing how she was well-known in the dancing world with her outstanding dancing skills before her debut. Hyoyeon stated, "I took the stage as a guest at a large popping competition 6~7 years ago, and also got to the semi-finals in a battle competition," letting it become known that she has unique dancing skills.
To this, Popinjay testified, "At the time, the debut stage of the team Hyoyeon and miss A's Min created, the 'Little Winners', was the focus for many street dancers." MC Shindong added, "Even at her young age, Hyoyeon really left an impression with her range of popping, locking, as well doing K-POP dances."
In this episode, Hyoyeon also confessed of having an unusual trouble regarding dancing after debuting in Girls' Generation. Hyoyeon stated, "The dances I learned before debuting had large gestures and were powerful, but there were many difficulties dancing dances that suited the one-piece outfit that went with the young girl concept after debuting."
However, she showed her affection for Girls' Generation by revealing, "Thinking about how the 9 members need to harmonize, I tried really hard to become one group, rather than trying to stand out with dancing."
Reply · Report PostAh, the dog days of summer. It’s that lazy time of year when it’s perfectly acceptable to live in a fabulous bathing suit and relax by the water all day long.
But lounging in wet swimwear isn’t as glamorous as the Kardashians make it out to be. And while we’ve heard time and time again that staying in wet swimsuits for too long can cause problems ranging from yeast infections to UTIs, we’re all a little guilty of breaking this rule.
“Yeast and bacteria really thrive in moist, dark places, like a wet bathing suit or wet workout clothes,” Alyssa Dweck, an assistant clinical professor and OB/GYN at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, told The Huffington Post. “So if you’re really prone to those types of infections [yeast or bacterial], you’re going to want to change out of a wet bathing suit and just put on a dry one.”
While you likely won’t get an infection from a wet bathing suit, according to Dweck, it remains a risk nonetheless and may be related to your overall health. Women with weakened immune systems, such as those who have diabetes or who take certain medications are more likely to be affected by prolonged wear of a damp swimsuit.
So, here’s a much-needed wake up call to motivate you. Below are a few reasons to never, ever stay in a wet swimsuit for too long:
1. It’s the perfect combo for bacteria.
Let’s face it: The inside of a wet swimsuit is both warm and moist, so it’s basically a breeding ground for bacteria.
When in the water, swimsuit material tends to absorb the various chemicals and bacteria that exist in pools or the ocean. But once you’re out of the water, your private parts are cradled inside of your suit, along with all of those gross substances. This can throw off the balance of healthy bacteria in the vagina or introduce harmful bacteria into the urethra, leading to a number of maladies, including vaginitis and urinary tract infections.
Signs you might have a problem: Changes in vaginal discharge, including foul smell or grayish coloring, and itching, swelling or soreness can signal bacterial vaginitis. Symptoms of UTIs include strong and persistent urges to urinate, burning sensations while urinating, pelvic pain and cloudy urine.
What you can do about it: If you are experiencing symptoms of bacterial vaginitis, see your healthcare provider for proper medication. If you sense a UTI coming on, Dweck suggests alerting your primary physician as soon as possible, drinking plenty of fluids, consuming cranberry juice or supplements and using over-the-counter medications for temporary pain relief.
2. It can lead to yeast infections.
Since yeast thrives in warm and wet environments, wet bathing suit bottoms can cause yeast infections in women, especially those who suffer from recurring yeast infections.
The bacteria that festers in wet bathing suits can cause an overgrowth of yeast cells in the vagina or vulva, according to University Hospitals. This can lead to some pretty uncomfortable symptoms, including burning, soreness and clumpy discharge.
Signs you might have a problem: The hallmark signs of a yeast infection include extreme itchiness (external or internal), white “cottage cheese-like” discharge and typically no foul order. Women who have diabetes or who are on certain medications that suppresses the immune system are more prone to yeast infections, according to Dweck.
What you can do about it: Dweck suggests purchasing over-the-counter remedies and anti-fungal vaginal creams, including Monistat or store-brand medications. If the yeast infection does not clear up with those remedies, contact your doctor.
3. It may result in an itchy rash.
You’ve heard of athlete’s foot, right? Well, sitting in a wet swimsuit can cause a very similar infection around your genitals known as “jock itch.”
If you’re wearing a wet suit and happen to come in contact with a type of mold-like fungi known as dermatophytes, it can spread to the skin of your genitals, inner thighs and butt, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians and the Mayo Clinic. This growth leads to red, itchy rashes that may grow in the shape of a ring.
“It’s very similar to a yeast infection in the vagina because they’re both caused by fungus, although it is a slightly different strain of fungus,” Dweck said.
Even if there is no fungal infection involved, people with sensitive skin may experience skin irritation from wearing wet material. “Some women just get irritation from constant moisture,” Dweck said, “so they may just feel better in being in something dry.”
Signs you might have a problem: Symptoms of jock itch include rashes around the creases of the upper thigh and crevices of the genital area, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Red, raised and scaly patches that may sometimes ooze with liquid and cause itchiness. Rashes appear redder on the outside and skin-toned toward the middle.
What you can do about it: Dweck recommends using over-the-counter anti-fungal cream or powder made especially for the genital area. For stronger medication, contact your primary physician and ask about prescription-strength anti-fungal products.Groestlcoin has been blowing up with exposure and the community has yet to hear the voice of a developer. Communication via discord has been nice, but hearing some written responses from developers over an “Ask Me Anything” would be reassuring to those having trouble establishing weather or not this coin is a pump and dump. The openness of the developers also allow for supporters to get a better grasp on what the goals are for the coin.
There have been a lot of questions lately, regarding the coin and it’s ASIC resilience. Thankfully this AMA helped clear things up, and even inspire some people who were considering getting in on this gem, to buy the dip.
My Top Picked Q&A’s
GRS has recently been promoted as ASIC resistant, but FPGA and ASIC implementations (Grøstl-256, Grøstl-512) have existed for the Groestl algorithm prior to GRS’s launch in 2014 ( source ). Is that not a concern and/or disingenuous marketing? Perhaps the community marketing has taken off on its own too much, thus spreading somewhat false info? – Metasophocles
Being ASIC resistant is about having fair and decentralised mining. Being ASIC resistant isn’t helpful if 1 pool controls over 51% of hashrate. That is not fair and decentralised at all and is subject to a 51% attack. There is no benefit being ASIC resistant if 1 pool/person controls over 51% hashrate. We would be worried if a pool would have over 51% hashrate on 1 pool than if there are ASICS for groestl. It is correct that Groestl algo is not asic resistant by itself. An ASIC can be made for any POW. The resistance comes from the threat and promise of changing the algorithm if one gets produced and marketed and if the community decides that we should hardfork. We will not hardfork if the community decides against it. If an ASIC is produced for the Grostl512 mining algorithm and the community decides to change POW, a new POW algorithm will be chosen and a hard-fork triggered. The Groestlcoin name can still be used due to the Groestl algorithm still being used for other parts of the currency (i.e. address creation) or we vote for a rebrand. – gruve_p
Are you guys open to changing the name? – exadude
A rebranding vote will take place in 2018. If there is enough support, a rebrand will take place. For now let the people adapt to the name, not the name to the people. – jackielove4u
What is your view on the development team remaining anonymous and how it will either go on to positively or negatively effect the coin? – IDGAFOS
This is an established coin with a reputable history of accomplishments, not some coin where I would want some arguable degree of comfort by looking at someone’s face. The point of blockchain is to have an open-source trustless privacy oriented system. Don’t trust anybody with your money. Trust the code. Faces dont give any trust to a coin. In fact it gives a security issue. – gruve_pAs of Nov 27, 2013, I suspended sales of items that contain digital bitcoins. Current items for sale do not contain bitcoins.
Casascius Bitcoins are physical coins you can hold - and each one is worth real digital bitcoins.
Bitcoin is the most widely used open-source peer-to-peer "cryptocurrency" that you can send over the Internet without a bank or a middleman.
Each Casascius Bitcoin is a collectible coin backed by real Bitcoins embedded inside. Each piece has its own Bitcoin address and a redeemable "private key" on the inside, underneath the hologram.
Some of my past products have included:
฿1 Casascius Coin: This is a solid brass coin. Each 1-bitcoin coin is about 1.125inch (28.6mm) in diameter (just bigger than a US quarter but smaller than a half-dollar) and weighs a quarter ounce. Perfect as a small gift to introduce someone to Bitcoin. Also available in a ฿0.5 version which is slightly smaller at 1 inch (25.4mm).
฿1 Gold-Plated Fine Silver Casascius Round. This is a 39mm 1oz silver round accented with gold electroplating on the rim and on the Bitcoin logo, loaded with one digital bitcoin.
฿0.5 and ฿0.1 Fine Silver Casascius Rounds These are a half-ounce and quarter-ounce rounds (respectively) of fine silver. Diameters are 30mm and 25mm.
Casascius 2-Factor Gold-Plated Savings Bar: Dress your Bitcoins for tomorrow, make them look their best in your vault today. Would weigh about 12 ounces if it were solid gold, this is a 4.2-ounce metal alloy bar with gold plating. A neat-looking novelty that looks unmistakably valuable. Available as a pre-loaded 100 BTC bar, as well as a non-denominated savings bar. Two-factor encryption is available at no charge. Bar is 80mm x 40mm x 6mm.
How they work: The "private key" is on a card embedded inside the coin and is protected by a tamper-evident hologram. The hologram leaves behind a honeycomb pattern if it is peeled. If the hologram is intact, the bitcoin is good. If you have purchased a 2-factor item, the private key is encrypted and will need to be decrypted using your original preselected passphrase before you can redeem the funds.
The 8-character code you see on the outside of the coin is the first eight characters of the Bitcoin address assigned specifically to that coin. You can verify the coin's balance on Block Explorer. There is a mathematical relationship between the Bitcoin address and the private key inside the coin. The digital bitcoin is actually located on the public "block chain" stored on the internet, but it is completely inaccessible to anyone unless the private key from the coin is loaded into a Bitcoin wallet.
To recover the digital bitcoins, there are several ways to convert the embedded code back into a digital bitcoin so it can be spent over the internet. Most importantly, none of the methods relies on me or any other central issuer, due to Bitcoin's completely decentralized design. The embedded private key code is everything a Bitcoin client needs to find and claim the digital Bitcoins from the peer-to-peer network. For example, you can enter (or "import") your coin's private key code directly into Bitcoin clients such as Armory, Blockchain.info, or directly into Mt. Gox as a deposit method. (Casascius coins use the "minikey" private key format, and the main Bitcoin.org client does not yet support redeeming minikeys.)
Of course, since the face value of the coins depends on the integrity of the embedded key code, you should only accept Casascius Bitcoins bearing an undamaged Casascius hologram from others.
E-mail is casascius at mc2cs.com.
Links:West Brom chairman Jeremy Peace "would be willing to step aside" and sell the Premier League club.
Peace, who owns 77% of the club, has been chairman for 13 years, and said in 2008 he was open to proposals regarding investment in the club.
His stance has not changed and in light of the new TV deal he "feels it right and prudent to present the club to the investment market".
The club reported pre-tax profits of £14.7m on an income of £86.8m.
"I have been at the helm for 13 years and I am proud of what has been achieved in that time," he said in a statement.
"I do not need to remind supporters about the journey we have shared to this point.
Top tier West Brom have spent nine of Peace's 13 years in the Premier League
"I believe it is a sound company - an extremely solid football club with no debt, significant assets, a developing infrastructure and reasons to be confident about the future."
The Baggies currently sit 14th in the Premier League table, four points above the bottom three.
Peace appointed new head coach Tony Pulis on 1 January and the club has lost just one of their nine games since, picking up nine league points and reaching the FA Cup quarter-finals.
"I am happy to continue as we strive to deliver Premier League football whilst growing the club within our means.
"But equally if there was someone out there willing and capable of taking the club further forward, I would be willing to step aside and negotiate a change of ownership providing it was an investment that was right for the club."FOXBORO — Like a lot of retirees, former Texas Christian University offensive line coach Eddie Williamson likes to spend much of his free time on the golf course.
But on Sundays in the fall and winter, his wife Patty keeps another pastime going: Watching the Patriots and former Horned Frogs offensive lineman Marcus Cannon.
“That’s the way my wife has it,” Williamson said. “She is an ardent Patriot fan and the only time I’ve ever seen her be quiet was when we had the kids that we had worked with on both teams. And she would just sit there quietly. If it’s the Patriots playing anybody that we haven’t been around, she’s a diehard, diehard Patriots fan. So we watch them any chance we get.”
And this season, Patty and the man who coached Cannon throughout his career in Fort Worth have seen the right tackle make enormous strides. In 15 starts, Cannon has allowed just three sacks, and none since quarterback Tom Brady returned from his four-game Deflategate suspension.
For perspective, Cannon allowed 2.5 sacks alone in last year’s AFC Championship Game loss to the Denver Broncos.
That transformation has been no less important to the offense’s success as any singular aspect, and it has coincided with this season’s return from retirement of Dante Scarnecchia, the longtime Patriots offensive line coach. Scarnecchia, 68, who held that role when the Pats selected Cannon in the fifth round of the 2011 draft. Cannon was projected to go much higher if not for the fact that pre-draft physicals revealed he had non-Hodgkin lymphoma, which kept him off the active roster six-plus months before the cancer went into remission.
While Scarnecchia’s presence deserves a major chunk of the credit for Cannon’s revival this season, other factors have played into it. After all, a coach can’t simply snap his fingers and make a player better. The grunt work takes place on both ends.
Cannon leans toward reticence in general, and didn’t say much on how well he has played this season when asked about it on Wednesday.
“I just do what I can to help the team,” he said. “Just work hard, try to help the team as best I can.”
He’s done plenty of both.
Self-motivated
Williamson knows Cannon well enough to realize the 6-foot-5, 335-pounder can sometimes work against himself, and coaching him may require a different tack.
“It hurt him when he didn’t play well,” Williamson said. “Honestly, at times, there’s a time you get after him pretty good, but there’s also a time you have to pull and tug on him and hug him up a little bit to bring him through that. He is his own worst critic.”
That mental aspect can make one mistake compound itself and create another. At times, it appeared that may have been the case with Cannon in Foxboro. Williamson likens the phenomenon to his own golf game.
“Sometimes you get so disgruntled with yourself in the effort to work through something you maybe make the matter even worse,” he said. “I play golf. I’m not a very good player, but I know that when I have my worst days, I go back to try and fix it, sometimes I get in a bigger |
game with the Mavs was a promising and winning effort. Glenn James/NBAE/Getty Images
Stoudemire played only 11 minutes, but he scored 14 points and grabbed three rebounds while looking like a perfect fit in coach Rick Carlisle’s offense. Stoudemire gave this team of slashers and 3-point shooters a consistent, low-post offense that we haven’t seen since Roy Tarpley and Mark Aguirre ruled the paint in the 1980s.
Dallas 92, Charlotte 81.
On a cold, gloomy night, the anticipation of Stoudemire’s Dallas debut had the crowd amped for what would’ve normally been a nondescript, regular-season game against a run-of-the-mill opponent.
Stoudemire, a six-time All-Star acquired Wednesday after the New York Knicks bought out his contract and he passed through waivers, didn’t disappoint.
Admittedly a tad anxious, Stoudemire missed his first two shots after he entered the game with 5:26 left in the first quarter. He was too concerned with getting to the free throw line and not enough with actually making the shot -- his thoughts, not mine.
The crowd gave Stoudemire a rousing ovation. The 13-year veteran figured the easiest way to get rid of the excitement pulsing through his body was to make a couple free throws and ease into the flow of the game.
“The fans were very joyful tonight, and they gave me a lot of energy,” he said. “I was ready to get going and set the tone from the start.”
Stoudemire finally powered in a layup. Then he threw down his first dunk, and a minute later, he slammed down a lob from J.J. Barea.
In the second half, Barea and Stoudemire worked the pick-and-roll for a couple of buckets. Once he rolled to the basket, and another time, he hit a short jumper. He finished with three dunks and made each of his four free throws.
Pretty good for a dude who still has quite a bit to learn about the Mavs’ free-flowing offense. And Stoudemire should only get better as he gets more acclimated.
After all, this team is built to play pick-and-roll and shoot 3-pointers. A player such as Stoudemire, who is capable of scoring in the low post with a variety of moves, gives the second unit a completely different look.
Oh, and he can still run the floor. A good offense just became more versatile, functional and efficient.
“It’s pretty clear the guy knows how to play the game. He has a lot of skill, and he has a lot of juice,” Carlisle said. “I see his minutes increasing, but for the first game with a new team, 14 points in 12 minutes was pretty strong."
With the Knicks, Stoudemire averaged 12 points and 6.8 rebounds in 24 minutes a game. The Mavs would like to keep him to about 20 minutes a game until the playoffs start, which should allow Tyson Chandler’s minutes to shrink from 31 to 29.
Yes, a couple minutes a game over the rest of the season does make a difference. Stoudemire, like a number of players on this team, is only interested in winning.
He has made a bunch of money and earned a litany of awards and accolades, but he doesn’t own a championship ring.
“Obviously, playing for a championship [team], you find the motivation in that,” he said. “Playing for a team that’s not going to make the playoffs, you find the motivation in competing against whoever you’re playing against.
“There are always ways to find challenges in the game of basketball. That’s what makes it such a beautiful game, but competing for a championship is the ultimate goal.”The bipartisan Open Debate Coalition announced that Republican Congressman David Jolly (FL-13) and Democratic Congressman Alan Grayson (FL-9) will participate in a first-ever Open Debate for U.S. Senate, where regular people submit and vote on questions in advance – and moderators must choose from the Top 30 vote-getters. This in-person studio debate will take place in Orlando at 7pm EDT on Monday, April 25.
Question submission and voting is now open at FloridaOpenDebate.com and lasts through 12pm EDT on Monday, April 25.
Anyone across the nation can submit and vote on questions. Only Florida votes will be counted when selecting questions, but others can cast votes to impact which questions are trending on the site – influencing which questions Florida voters see and vote on most.
The debate is hosted by the Open Debate Coalition, which was started in 2008 and includes Republican, Democratic, and Silicon Valley leaders. (See a list of coalition members and the Open Debate Coalition statement below.) Early leaders in the coalition include Progressive Change Institute co-founders Adam Green and Stephanie Taylor and Americans For Tax Reform President Grover Norquist.
The Commission On Presidential Debates indicated they are looking to this Florida debate and similar Open Debates as they seek innovative formats for the 2016 general election. (See statement below.)
“At a time when a corrupt campaign finance system and rigged voting laws are damaging our democracy, Open Debates are a bright spot for our democracy – empowering regular people in an unprecedented way. We hope this historic event helps makes Open Debates the norm in the future, from state and local races to Congress and all the way up to President,” said coalition leaders Adam Green and Stephanie Taylor, Co-Founders of the Progressive Change Institute. Another coalition leader, Americans For Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, added, “Hopefully, numerous Open Debates happen this 2016 cycle – including in the race for President.”
Debate moderators will include The Young Turks, which is the #1 news channel on YouTube with over 3 billion views, and Independent Journal Review, which is the #1 news channel on vine and has 30-40 million monthly unique viewers. Other distribution channels will be announced in coming days.An unprecedented “open video feed” will allow any website or TV station to broadcast top-quality debate footage live or re-broadcast later without violating copyright. The coalition hopes this leads to millions of new debate viewers online this cycle, especially younger viewers. The coalition’s logo was designed by artist Shep Fairey, who designed the iconic Obama “Hope” image.
An unprecedented “open video feed” will allow any website or TV station to broadcast top-quality debate footage live or re-broadcast later without violating copyright. The coalition hopes this leads to millions of new debate viewers online this cycle, especially younger viewers. The coalition’s logo was designed by artist Shep Fairey, who designed the iconic Obama “Hope” image.
Grayson and Jolly announced they would hold debates together on March 1, 2016. The Open Debate Coalition reached out about participating in an Open Debate, and both candidates agreed.
The Open Debate Coalition used the invitation criteria of the Commission on Presidential Debates. Every candidate in the Democratic and Republican Senate primary was invited if they averaged 15% or more support in publicly released polls taken in 2016. Grayson and Jolly accepted the invitation, and Congressman Patrick Murphy (D-18) declined.JOEY CARBERY WILL start his first match in more than two months when Leinster host Edinburgh in the Guinness Pro12 at the RDS tomorrow night [7.35pm, TG4].
The Ireland international will start at fly-half having made his return from an ankle injury as a replacement in last weekend’s 40-14 win at Treviso.
Carbery scored a try on his return against the Italian side and will be keen to impress Ireland head coach Joe Schmidt tomorrow night, the ankle injury he suffered against Northampton in a Champions Cup tie in December having ruled him out of the opening two rounds of the Six Nations.
Leinster head coach Leo Cullen makes eight changes altogether with openside flanker Josh van der Flier and hooker James Tracy to start just six days after featuring in Ireland’s Six Nations rout of the Azzurri.
Mike Ross is another who finds himself back in the starting team for the first time in a number of months, the tighthead prop having made his return from the bench against Treviso after being sidelined for three months with a hamstring problem.
Dave Kearney retains his spot in the side after he bagged a brace of tries on his return from injury last weekend, although he does shift to the right wing for tomorrow’s game due to a backline reshuffle that sees Barry Daly handed the No 11 shirt.
South African Zane Kirchner completes the back three at fullback while Rory O’Loughlin and Noel Reid continue their partnership in midfield.
Luke McGrath skippers the side from scrum-half — in the absence of Isa Nacewa who underwent a small procedure on his knee this week — as Kiwi Jamison Gibson-Park drops to the bench along with Ross Byrne, his halfback partner last week.
Van der Flier’s inclusion is the sole change to the back row where he will join Dominic Ryan and Jack Conan. Dan Leavy drops to the bench.
Ross Molony and Mike McCarthy will start in the second row as Mick Kearney drops to the bench and Ian Nagle out of the match-day 23.
Peter Dooley retains his spot at loosehead, where he will be packing down alongside Tracy and Ross.
Leinster are currently in third spot on the table after 14 games, three points behind Ospreys and four behind Munster. Edinburgh are sitting in ninth position of the 12 teams having only managed four victories so far this season, only one of which came on the road, a 24-19 win at Zebre on New Year’s Eve.
Leinster prevailed 33-20 in an entertaining contest when the sides met at Murrayfield last September.
Leinster
15. Zane Kirchner
14. Dave Kearney
13. Rory O’Loughlin
12. Noel Reid
11. Barry Daly
10. Joey Carbery
9. Luke McGrath (c)
1. Peter Dooley
2. James Tracy
3. Mike Ross
4. Ross Molony
5. Mike McCarthy
6. Dominic Ryan
7. Josh van der Flier
8. Jack Conan
Replacements:
16. Bryan Byrne
17. Andrew Porter
18. Michael Bent
19. Mick Kearney
20. Dan Leavy
21. Jamison Gibson-Park
22. Ross Byrne
23. Adam Byrne
Edinburgh
15. Glenn Bryce
14. Damien Hoyland
13. Chris Dean
12. Phil Burleigh
11. Tom Brown
10. Duncan Weir
9. Sam Hidalgo-Clyne
1. Jack Cosgrove
2. Neil Cochrane (c)
3. Murray McCullum
4. Fraser McKenzie
5. Ben Toolis
6. Madnus Bradbury
7. Jamie Ritchie
8. Cornell Du Preez
Replacements:
16. George Turner
17. Derrick Appiah
18. Nick Beavon
19. Grant Gilchrist
20. Lewis Carmichael
21. Nathan Fowles
22. Jason Tovey
23. Blair Kinghorn
Source: The42 Rugby Show/SoundCloud
The42 is on Instagram! Tap the button below on your phone to follow us!Ebola outbreak claims another 25 lives as the World Health Organisation warns the virus continues to spread
Posted
Fifty new cases of Ebola and 25 deaths have been reported in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea as the deadly virus continues to spread in families, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said.
In a statement, the United Nations agency said the latest figures from health ministries in the three countries showed a total of 844 cases including 518 deaths in the epidemic that began in February.
Guinea's ministry reported two deaths since July 3 but no new cases in the past week, the WHO said, calling the situation in the affected region of West Africa a "mixed picture".
Sierra Leone accounted for 34 of the new cases and 14 deaths, while Liberia reported 16 new cases and nine deaths, it said, adding: "These numbers indicate that active viral transmission continues in the community."
"This means the two main modes of transmission are home care, people who care for their relative at home, and during funerals, are still ongoing," WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib said.
"If we don't stop the transmission in the several hotspots in the three countries, we will not be able to say that we control the outbreak," she said.
A US citizen who was suspected of having Ebola because he fell ill after travelling to Sierra Leone and Guinea died on Monday in Ghana.
The man, who has not been named, was in quarantine at a clinic in the capital Accra.
A senior official at the Ghana Health Service said the man did not have Ebola but that further tests were being done.
If confirmed, it would be the first case of Ebola in Ghana.
West African countries and international health organisations adopted a fresh strategy last week to fight the world's deadliest Ebola epidemic to date.
Measures include better surveillance to detect the virus and enhancing cross-border cooperation.
Reuters
Topics: diseases-and-disorders, epidemics-and-pandemics, health, sierra-leone, liberia, guinea, ghanaOne of the ways in which climate scientists evaluate the role of anthropogenic greenhouse emissions in the recent warming of Earth’s climate is to run climate models both with and without human activities. By comparing the results of each to the observed temperature trend, these “fingerprinting” studies can show how much of the temperature record can be explained by natural factors (such as solar activity and volcanic eruptions). This has commonly been applied to trends in atmospheric temperatures (as shown in the 2007 IPCC report), where it’s clear that the observed warming wouldn’t have happened without rising greenhouse gases.
Increasingly reliable records of ocean temperatures have now allowed some of these same researchers to confidently apply the technique to Earth’s seas. This is important because some 90 percent of all the energy trapped by human greenhouse emissions has ended up in the ocean, not the atmosphere. The trend with ocean heat content is clear—it’s rising. The question is whether that rise could be caused by natural variations.
Researchers averaged the results from a number of climate models, and compared that to global temperature records for the upper 700 meters of the ocean from 1960 to 1999. The temperature record is less complete for the deep ocean, and its massive volume and separation from the surface subdues its response to climatic changes. In addition to the global average, they also analyzed each of the major ocean basins (North and South Atlantic, North and South Pacific, North and South Indian) separately.
They found that the anthropogenic “fingerprint” was apparent in the observed temperature record at the 99 percent confidence level. That means the observed warming is beyond the variability seen in model simulations where greenhouse gases are kept constant, but is exactly what the models predict for a world in which humans change the composition of the atmosphere.
That result should hardly be a surprise at this point (though it is important). Perhaps it's more interesting to look at the differences between ocean basins. The Atlantic Ocean is warming considerably faster than the others—especially the North Atlantic, which is warming at about double the global average rate. This behavior, too, was simulated by the models.
This actually isn’t the first study to find an anthropogenic ”fingerprint” in ocean temperatures. However, previous work was limited to individual ocean basins and comparisons with just a couple of climate models. By utilizing multiple global data sets of ocean temperature (in which researchers have carefully accounted for the various measurement methods that have been used) and a larger number of the models that were used for the last IPCC report, this study has generated the strongest analysis to date.
Nature Climate Change, 2012. DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE1553 (About DOIs).Some have debated whether we should view the groundswell of support for Donald Trump through the lens of white supremacy or fascism, but we can also understand it through the framework of nativism, the doctrine of prioritizing the interests of the native-born over those of immigrants. Nativism has a long and ugly history in the United States, in which the ascendency of Donald Trump and his supporters is just the latest chapter. Here, to counter the jingoism of the 4th of July, we study nativism from its origins to the current day, tracing the common threads that connect all the ways the rich have preyed on the fears and prejudices of the exploited to turn them against those worse off than themselves.
(Listen to an audio version of this article here.)
Early US nativism was characterized by three elements. First, hostility towards immigrants for the ways they were perceived to be different, culturally or otherwise, and anxiety that they would take “American” jobs. Second, fear of radicals who were not content with American democracy, who did not recognize America as the supreme source of freedom. Finally, anti-Catholic bigotry: Catholics had allegiance to institutions outside the US that were seen as fundamentally anti-American.
We can see all of these elements emerging again today in updated forms. The first is deployed against Latino and Latina immigrants. All three apply to Muslim-perceived immigrants, as Islam is denigrated as both a radical threat and a mysterious, un-American religion that generates loyalties to foreign institutions and beliefs. There are other, slightly more obscure twists: the re-emergence of patrician nativism, this time the domain of Silicon Valley tech lords who dream of a meritocracy that remains largely Aryan.
The America First Committee, organized in the 1940s to keep the U.S. out of the Second World War, was known for its anti-Semitic membership; Trump uses the same slogan today.
The Structure of US Nativism
Nativism flourishes when the class gaps widen that divide the poorest from the rest of society and the richest from the rest of society. Both the poor and the rich become protective of their positions, and cast suspicious eyes on any who seem likely to take what little they have or threaten their place at the very top. Nativism broke out in the economic crashes of the 1880s, particularly in response to the “end of the frontier,” a natural resource that had previously seemed infinite. Immigrants seemed “both symbols and agents of the widening gulf between capital and labor,” in the words of John Higham, the author of all the quotes in this text not otherwise attributed. In fact, many foreign workers brought to Pennsylvania during the 1880s were brought specifically to scab. This hardly endeared them to local workers, and several were killed during riots.
Federal oversight of immigration only began in 1882; until then, the states receiving immigrants set their own regulations and collected fees from the ships that brought them over. Federal regulators shifted the burden of payment onto the individuals themselves and denied admission to “convicts, lunatics, idiots, and persons likely to become a public charge.” In 1891, when the first legal provisions for deportation were established, nativists immediately began organizing to make a literacy test part of the immigration process with the explicit aim of excluding Southern Europeans. Federal control of immigration introduced unprecedented border surveillance. At the same time, it created the illegal alien as a new political and legal subject.
In rhetoric that is familiar again today, the general manager of the American Iron and Steel Association insisted that the depression of the 1880s was aggravated “by the presence among us of thousands of idle and vicious foreigners who do not come here to work for a living but to stir up strife and commit crime.” This predecessor of Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen is hardly unique in capitalizing on economic failure to divide the working class—Hitler did the same a few decades later. Nativism is always present among the xenophobic and privileged; it becomes most vicious when a large number of people are swayed to look for someone weaker than themselves to blame.
The US economy has been recovering over the last seven years; unauthorized immigration is not increasing; Obama deported 2.5 million people, far more than any previous president. None of these facts matter. Nativists can appeal to those disenfranchised even in the face of market growth—the real problem they are capitalizing on is not the limits of the economy, but the economic inequalities that result when the rich profit on the poor. It is no coincidence that we find dramatic economic inequality in every country that is experiencing a turn towards nativism and fascism.
American Identity Crisis
It was a Jewish-American poet “aroused by Russian pogroms to a consciousness of America’s mission” who wrote the passage now displayed on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” This stands as one pole of America’s historical attitude towards immigrants. The other is an anxiety produced by precarity and the loss of homogeneity that gives rise to xenophobia. We can identify two narratives here: America as refuge and America as fortress.
When US capitalists feel threatened, the country retreats into fortress mode: immigrant labor is described as a threat to “American” labor, just as Muslims as a whole are blamed for the September 11 attacks. This strategy doesn’t necessarily serve the interests of individual capitalists:
In conversations with nearly a dozen farmers, most of whom voted for Mr. Trump, each acknowledged that they relied on workers who provided false documents. And if the administration were to weed out illegal workers, farmers say their businesses would be crippled… Farmers here have faced a persistent labor shortage for years, in part because of increased policing at the border and the rising prices charged by smugglers who help people sneak across. The once-steady stream of people coming from rural towns in southern Mexico has nearly stopped entirely. The existing field workers are aging, and many of their children find higher-paying jobs outside agriculture.
But what is at stake here is not a matter of mere material interests. Nativists have long described the US as an Anglo-Saxon nation, portraying that ethnicity as fundamentally freedom-loving. In the first phase of the development of racism in the United States, there was a long process of clarifying what whiteness was in the first place.
Racism and xenophobia are necessary to stabilize capitalism by dividing the exploited, but they can also become obstacles when the market needs to expand. During eras of capitalist confidence, capitalists may represent immigrants as sources of potential profit, as in the case of Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs’ father was an immigrant meme.
The most apparently affirmative version of US isolationism preaches that the US represents the greatest realization of freedom in the world to date. A century ago, nationalists could claim that the US offered “the free, rational life of which Europe dreamed but which Europe denied. To fulfill their cosmopolitan task it behooved them to provide for others a haven from Europe’s oppressions. Thus Americans could enlist in the cause of general human liberty without actively intervening anywhere.” This myth “shores up the national narrative of liberal consensual citizenship, allowing a disaffected citizenry to experience its regime as choiceworthy, to see it through the eyes of still-enchanted newcomers whose choice to come here reenacts liberalism’s fictive foundation in individual acts of uncoerced consent,” in the words of Bonnie Honig. The needs of pluralistic liberal democracy make this position appear to be the middle ground, with open borders to the left and closed borders to the right.
Religion and Radicalism
At times, Christianity has reduced xenophobia by emphasizing the common brotherhood of man. It has also served to promote xenophobia, fomenting hatred and violence against those who are not Christian or not the right sort of Christian. A century ago, nativists framed Catholicism as evidence of disloyalty, a refusal to assimilate. This has given way to a hatred and fear of Muslims, which is justified on both moral and practical grounds by many Christians—and by nativists who are not particularly religious but understand Christianity as the religion of white America. By constantly asserting that Muslims are engaged in a holy war against Christians, the West, and American culture in particular—and sometimes women and gay people, as well—nativists engage all the emotional attachments of the chauvinist white American against Muslims.
Catholic war scare newspaper.
Earlier anti-Semites tended to depict Jews as mysterious, unassimilable, objectionably dirty people, “the very personification of avarice and cunning.” Communism, socialism, and anarchism were all derided as fundamentally Semitic politics, unfit for white Americans; black and Asian Americans were not even part of the discussion at that point. The history of state controls on immigration reflects this view: the Alien and Sedition Acts grew out of fear of the French Revolution. The Paris Commune of 1871 helped U.S. conservatives to “associate working-class aspirations with revolutionary violence”; a few years later, in 1886, the Haymarket Massacre deepened that association. In 1903, immigration law explicitly targeted anarchists for exclusion and deportation; this was the first time political opinion had been made a legal basis of discrimination in immigration since 1798. A daily newspaper reacting to Haymarket declared, “There is no such thing as an American anarchist… The American character has in it no element which can under any circumstances be won to uses so mistaken and pernicious.”
Radicalism undermines the claim that the American Revolution was all the revolution anyone could ever need. This is why nativists are forced to mobilize against it, to pretend it is something foreign.
Racism
The founding of the United States upon the mass genocide of indigenous people and the enslavement of Africans meant that, for years, nativism debated only the immigration of Southern and Western Europeans. That people from other parts of the world were not humans worthy of consideration went without saying; rather, the battle was over who could be incorporated into whiteness, the fundamental condition of being American. Among other Afropessimists, Frank Wilderson has written at length about the impossibility of black assimilation into US civil society. Perceived “failure” to assimilate sparks fears of disloyalty; assimilation has often meant cultural death.
Higham, our primary source in this text, distinguishes between sentiment against various immigrants of European descent—now almost entirely assimilated into the umbrella term of privilege, “whiteness”—and sentiment against immigrants of African or Asian descent and Native Americans:
No variety of anti-European sentiment has ever approached the violent extremes to which anti-Chinese agitation went in the 1870s and 1880s. Lynchings, boycotts, and mass expulsions still harassed the Chinese after the federal government yielded to the clamor for their exclusion in 1882. At a time when the Chinese question had virtually disappeared as a political issue, a labor union could still refer to that patient people [sic] as “more slavish and brutish than the beasts that roam the fields. They are groveling worms.” Americans have never maintained that every European endangers American civilization; attacks have centered on the “scum” or “dregs” of Europe, thereby allowing for at least some implicit exceptions. But opponents of Oriental [sic] folk have tended to reject them one and all.
Racism was still evolving throughout this time. Some cited the Bible to justify it; the emergence of social Darwinism on the coattails of its scientific cousin gave others a more contemporary excuse. In this narrative, Anglo-Saxon success in the “New World” was not the result of luck and privilege, nor of the slave labor and genocide that made it possible; it was an expression of natural justice. Nativist intellectuals began spreading fear about “unassimilated” communities in cities; this was particularly convincing to those who had the least experience with new immigrants. Today, we might think of Trump voters who claimed to be concerned about the southern border… yet have no immigrant or Latino communities anywhere near them. This is an old story: “The Catholic war scare had greatest impact,” Higham explains, “in Midwestern rural areas where ‘flesh-and-blood’ Catholics were virtually non-existent and the enemy lay far away in the cities. Illinois farmers feared to leave home lest Romanists burn their barns and houses. A rural schoolteacher in Minnesota went about heavily armed for weeks to defend himself against the anticipated massacre.”
By the beginning of the 20th century, nativism had coalesced as an intersection of racist and nationalistic atttitudes. Social disorder caused by class division and mechanization was assigned firmly as the fault of blacks, Asians, and fresh European immigrants. These people were described as fundamentally disorderly, in contrast with the supposed order of the Anglo-Saxon American past. Said one writer, “[A]narchy is a blood disease from which the English have never suffered.”
Apart from the lower-class nativists, a group of “patrician” traditionalist nativists, mainly from New England, began to theorize race. Frances Walker, a president of MIT, summarized their ideology thus: the new immigrants “are beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence… they have none of the ideas and aptitudes which… belong to those who are descended from the tribes that met under the oak trees of old Germany to make laws and choose chieftains.” Whereas European immigrants had previously been seen as the best of the best, destined to biologically improve the country they arrived in, Walker argued that the dwindling birthrate of Anglo-Saxon US citizens was a deliberate and practical response to being underbid, in terms of labor, by European immigrants. This meant, according to Walker, that American Anglo-Saxons were effectively committing race suicide. Sound familiar? Today, the burden of guilt has been shifted—white nationalists refer to roughly the same concept as “white genocide.”
The origins of federal oversight of immigration in the United States bear witness to its fundamental racism. In 1917, immigrants from Afghanistan to the Pacific were banned; in 1924, Asian immigrants were legally described as “racially ineligible” for citizenship by federal law. Meanwhile, southern border enforcement defined people of Mexican descent as illegal immigrants or alien citizens. Here we see racism working hand in hand with capitalism: cheap agricultural labor has been needed for several decades, so Latino immigrants were allowed in by lax enforcement, but kept in a state of rightlessness. After the Bracero agreement, which simultaneously allowed workers to come from Mexico between 1942 and 1964 as agricultural laborers and provided the terrain for the infamous “Operation Wetback” deportation efforts, immigration continued on an informal basis that kept immigrant workers precarious in order to discourage labor organizing among the poorest sectors of the workforce.
Now that agricultural labor is less necessary, protecting “white jobs” from the brown menace is suddenly a public concern again—although the latest statistics show that, while Latinos hold 50% of farm laborer jobs, very few Latinos hold management positions. White citizens simply don’t want low-paying agricultural work.
Field workers picking strawberries in California.
Meanwhile, the door has opened to Asian immigrants, who are now portrayed as highly-skilled contributors to American society. This is not to say that they do not face racism, particularly if they are Muslim. Still, the economy drives the stakes of the conversation. Park MacDougald’s devastating overview of Nick Lan’s contribution to the neo-reactionist movement in the tech industry, “The Darkness Before The Right”, describes how “race realism” is establishing Asian and Indian tech workers as the worthiest in the modern tech racial hierarchy in a way reminiscent of Hitler’s obsession with the supposed Aryan race. This form of “positive” racialization is only the corollary of the harassment and disenfranchisement less technologically skilled or situationally advantaged members of the same ethnicities experience in the United States. It is reminiscent of the “patrician” nativism theorized in New England in the early 1900s: mystically-minded, privileged race theorists, seeking isolated feudal states comprised of the “best and brightest.” Everyone else will be left to starve—but this is simply pragmatism, they assert, as the deserving members of humanity accelerate towards their final ascension.
Mae Ngai introduces the concept of “alien citizens” in her 2005 text Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Within the framework of white supremacy, citizens who are members of ethnic or religious groups seen as suspect—Italians and Chinese in the early 1900s, Latinos and Muslims today—are presumed foreign and dangerous, unassimilable. In Europe and the United Kingdom as well as in the United States, the majority of immigrants come from places colonized by these decaying powers, at once displaced and given conditional access. The ripples of colonial acts of invasion and coercive governance wash up on our shores from Laos, India, and Mexico, and the same racism that justified that colonization makes it possible to regard immigrants with fear and disdain. Before people of Japanese descent—two-thirds of them citizens—were interned in camps during World War II, 400,000 people of Mexican descent, half of them US citizens, were “repatriated” to Mexico during the Great Depression. If borders exist only to sift human lives into the fragmented forms most suitable for exploitation, then colonialism is the grinding agent—be it the sort of military colonialism carried out by formal state power or the economic colonization orchestrated via NAFTA, IMF, and other agencies.
As Hannah Arendt has described, the shift from the Enlightenment recognition of (European) human beings as those inherently possessed of rights to citizens as those inherently possessed of rights began with the end of WWI and the creation of the first large-scale refugee crisis in the modern era. The majority of human beings have never actually experienced the recognition of their supposed “inherent rights,” but the liberal myth that they were was revealed to be a lie at the beginning of the refugee crisis.
Resistance
Unfortunately, portions of older waves of immigrants often adopt xenophobic attitudes towards new immigrants, perhaps as an unconscious way of consolidating the grudging acceptance they are beginning to receive. This was evident even in the 1890s. But new immigrants from a variety of places and backgrounds were able to make common cause and demonstrate solidarity in the face of repression—and some second- and third-generation immigrant communities joined them. “The German-American Alliance, representing more than a million and a half members, signed an agreement with the Ancient Order of Hiberians in 1907 to oppose all immigration restriction. The Irish leaders who dominated the Catholic Church and in some sections bossed the Democratic party championed the interests of their southern and eastern European followers. But the main effort had to come from the Slavic nationalities, the Maygars, the Italians, and the Jews.” This effort was cultural: these immigrant rights activists celebrated the embattled dream of America as a cosmopolitan melting pot, perhaps cynically—not necessarily because they desired assimilation more than anything, but because they were fighting for their lives. Still, there is something to the cosmopolitan joy of delight in difference, something that does not serve any power beyond that of human freedom.
Unfortunately, the solidarity expressed by most of these European immigrants did not extend to immigrants from other parts of the world. In 1907, Japanese immigrants were thrown under the bus to placate restrictionists in exchange for not instituting literacy tests that would have impeded European immigration. The pro-immigrant—but anti-labor—business interests who made this deal with the Senate did so cynically, with President Roosevelt’s support. Xenophobia was shunted out of one arena and into another for capitalist interests, not humanitarian ones. Meanwhile, the melting pot idea was itself racialized by theorists like Franz Boas (himself an immigrant, democrat, and Jew), who claimed that hybridization of culture and biological forces produced a distinctly “American” face and manner. Divergences from this “American” way could then, therefore, be policed: immigrants were once again coded as treacherous, as were US-born Anglo-Saxons whose political beliefs differed from the mainstream.
Gathering of national socialists in Madison Square Gardens in the US during Hitler’s reign.
Jasbir Puar’s text Terrorist Assemblages clearly explains the ways in which citizenship—synonymous with whiteness in the American context—is extended or denied to various groups as a means of conquering through division. Muslims were excluded from membership in American civil society just as (white, wealthy) homosexuals and transgender people began to be included. She argues that this is no coincidence: it frames the stakes of tolerance and safety as repression and fear. Luckily, there are countless stories of people refusing this offering, biting the hand that feeds them, and turning to share with those excluded from society.
People deserve to be able move freely wherever they wish to if it harms no one, to be treated with hospitality, to be neither bound by geography nor allowed to invade the homes of others. Just as busing black children to wealthy white schools is not the same as white parents driving their children to wealthy white schools, so creating open borders for the United States is not the same as the murder and forced displacement of Native American people during its history. For a refugee, crossing the border can mean survival itself—what parent would not do a similar act for the sake of her children? If we, too, have felt the call of adventure, of care and responsibility for others, let us turn ourselves to solidarity, towards openness and acceptance that is not founded in the old oppressive myths, but in something new we can create together.
Further Reading
As mentioned above, all the quotes in this text not otherwise attributed can be found in John Higham’s Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925.The Invisible Autistic Adult
Lately I've been thinking a lot about the Old H.G. Welles tale of the invisible man and the short-lived television show of the late 1950s that it inspired. I remember the man completely wrapped in bandages. When the bandages were removed there was no man that you could see only an invisible man.
I've been thinking about this because sometimes I feel like the invisible man. I am 47 years old and mildly autistic. Much is written about autism in the news media and there are a variety of books and academic literature written on the subject. Almost all of this deals with small children. Very little of it deals with adults. Autism is seen as a problem of childhood, not of adulthood or adolescence.
People talk about special schooling, services and treatments for autistic children. Most of these seemed to be aimed at children and not adults. ABA (applied behavior analysis) is one of the most popular treatments for autism. The cost of this treatment is quite high, often paid for at taxpayer expense. One of the arguments in favor of this treatment and the justification of the expense is that the cost of an untreated autistic who will have to receive welfare benefits or live in a group home will cost the taxpayers far more money over their lifetime than what ABA costs.
Yet, this pattern of rarely, if ever, hearing about adults is just as true specifically in the realm of ABA as it is for all of the autism establishment in general. Ivar Lovaas published a well-known study in 1987 that suggested that autistic children who had undergone the most |
HD restore
background
Since 0.13 newly created wallets will use hierarchical deterministic key generation according to BIP32. Wallet dumps will contain the HD seed, however it’s not yet possible to import this seed.
Jonasschnelli thinks it should be a separate tool to restore HD seeds. The tool would create a new wallet.dat and run a rescan after that. The tool could interact with RPC and the UTXO set to detect the gap limits.
Wumpus proposes to first review and get the current wallet PRs merged before doing additional work. PR #9143 (Refactor ZapWalletTxes to avoid layer violations), #9256 (Fix more CWallet/CWalletDB layer violations) and #8723 (Add support for flexible BIP32/HD keypath-scheme) could use some review.
Gmaxwell thinks we should avoid adding more complexity to the HD support until the path split issue is fixed. The issue being the change output which is on the same chain as receiving keys, so you can end up giving out change keys as addresses for people to pay (hiding their payments from you) or have change show up as payments if you have wallets recovered from hd data.
Low hanging fruit is probably adding a ‘used’ marking in the keypool and increasing the default keypool for HD wallets to 1000, as the current 100 is really small.
meeting conclusion
Review #9143 (Refactor ZapWalletTxes to avoid layer violations), #9256 (Fix more CWallet/CWalletDB layer violations) and #8723 (Add support for flexible BIP32/HD keypath-scheme)
Focus on splitting the keypath
Comic relief
gmaxwell I just noticed #9188 isn't merged. gmaxwell looks to see if he's the delay on that one gmaxwell is not the delay
Participants
Disclaimer
This summary was compiled without input from any of the participants in the discussion, so any errors are the fault of the summary author and not the discussion participants.Paramount has hired several new executives to bolster its nascent television division, which it launched last year under the stewardship of Amy Powell.
Powell has tapped Jason Fisher as her head of production. Fisher comes from AMC, where he oversaw the production of shows such as “Walking Dead,” “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad.”
She has also hired David Goldman as the head of business affairs, Jennifer Howell as the head of comedy development, Annette Savitch as the head of drama development and Stephanie Love as head of finance.
Also read: Paramount’s New TV Chief Amy Powell: We’ll Be More Like a Start-Up Than a TV Studio
Howell hails form Fox, where she worked on shows such as “Bob’s Burgers” and “Allen Gregory,” while Savitch recently co-ran Handsomecharlie Films, Natalie Portman‘s production company.
“We want people with excellent experience, great taste and a skill set that speaks to the quality of content we’re looking to create – premium quality, unique storytelling,” Powell told TheWrap. “From Jason and his experience producing shows at AMC, some of the best show on TV, to Annette’s amazing taste and experience working with great writers. We want people who share my taste and Brad [Grey’s] taste.”
See photos: 19 TV Shows on the Bubble – From ‘Community’ to ‘Crazy Ones’
Paramount TV will develop and produce shows for all mediums – broadcast, cable, premium cable and online. Though it has not entered production on any shows, it is developing a drama series inspired by Caleb Carr’s novel “The Alienist,” a limited series based on A. Scott Berg‘s biography of Charles Lindbergh, as well as series inspired by “Terminator” and “The Truman Show.”
“We have three buckets of content we’re looking at, and one of them is intellectual property the studio, which has been around for over 100 years, owns,” Powell told TheWrap. “These are not just movies we’ve produced and released, but screenplays and articles and novels we have. “The Alienist” is an incredible piece of writing. When I was looking through our library, I thought this is something we have to do. I felt the same way about the Lindbergh biography. These are two examples of material that this studio has in its library that we can make amazing TV out of.”Switzerland has entertained formal relations with Libya's National Transitional Council since 12 June 2011, dispatching an official envoy to Benghazi to "intensify its political relations with the Libyan National Transitional Council" and "signal its intent to strengthen its presence there".[1]
Switzerland did not explicitly recognise the NTC, however it did state that "until the establishment of a legally elected government, the Transitional Council in Benghazi is the only legitimate partner of Switzerland in Libya".[2] Previously, relations with Gaddafi had already been cut long before, and there had been humanitarian aid coordinated with the NTC for four months.[2] On 22 August, while addressing a conference in Lucerne, Swiss Federal President Micheline Calmy-Rey confirmed that Switzerland has not recognised the NTC because the Swiss government's policy is to recognise states and not governments, but it will continue to deal exclusively with the NTC as its partner in Libya until the election of a new government.[3]
Historically, there was a Swiss embassy in Tripoli,[4] while Libya maintained an embassy in Bern.[5] Switzerland has entertained friendly relations with Libya under Gaddafi before the 2000s, Libyan businessmen established bank accounts in Switzerland and trade increased. Libya supplied oil to Switzerland despite the 1982 embargo on Libyan petrol.[6] There was a diplomatic dispute between Switzerland and the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya during 2008 to 2010, arising from the arrest of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's son and daughter-in-law while in Switzerland.
Diplomatic crisis of 2008–2010 [ edit ]
Relations between the states began to sour in July 2008 when Switzerland arrested the Libyan leader's son, Hannibal Gaddafi, and daughter-in-law for allegedly beating their servants at a hotel. The two were detained for two days and released.[7]
Muammar al-Gaddafi retaliated against Switzerland "by shutting down local subsidiaries of Swiss companies Nestlé and ABB in Libya, arresting two Swiss businessmen for supposed visa irregularities, canceling most commercial flights between the two countries and withdrawing about $5 billion from his Swiss bank accounts".[8]
To attempt to ease the tension between the countries and get the release of the two Swiss businessmen, Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz went to Tripoli in August 2009 to apologize for the arrests. This was criticized by the Swiss press and public, with numerous calls for his resignation.[8]
At the 35th G8 summit, Gaddafi publicly called for the dissolution of Switzerland, its territory to be divided among France, Italy and Germany.[8]
In August 2009, Hannibal Gaddafi stated that if he had nuclear weapons, he would "wipe Switzerland off the map".[9]
In February 2010, Gaddafi called for an all-out Jihad against Switzerland in a speech held in Benghazi on the occasion of Mawlid. Gaddafi in reference to the Swiss ban on minarets described Switzerland as an "infidel harlot" (كافرة فاجرة[10]) and apostate. He called for a "jihad by all means", defining jihad as "a right to armed struggle", which he claimed should not be considered terrorism.[11]
On 18 September 2009, the Libyan authorities moved the two Swiss businessmen, Max Göldi and Rachid Hamdani (the latter holding Tunisian-Swiss dual citizenship), from the Swiss embassy in Tripoli to an undisclosed location.[citation needed] In response, on 4 November Switzerland said it was suspending an agreement to normalize relations with Libya and five days later the Libyan government handed the men back to the embassy.
On 12 November 2009, Libyan prosecutors charged them with visa irregularities, tax evasion and failing to respect rules governing companies working in Libya. On 30 November, a Libyan court sentenced each of them to 16-month jail terms. The two men were also fined 2,000 Libyan dinars (USD 1,671) each. The Libyan government said the business men's case and that of Hannibal Gaddafi are not linked.[12]
In February 2010, Hamdani's sentence was overturned by a Libyan appeal court, while Göldi's sentence was reduced to four months.[13] On 22 February, Libyan authorities demanded the surrender of Göldi. Police surrounded the Swiss embassy and threatened to raid the building. A number of EU ambassadors entered the Swiss embassy to demonstrate solidarity with Switzerland. Göldi ultimately surrendered to the Libyan police and was taken into custody. Hamdani was allowed to leave Libya and returned to Switzerland on 24 February.[14] Göldi served his four-month prison sentence and was allowed to return home on 13 June 2010.
The Swiss military drew up plans for a rescue operation to free the two hostages. Under the plan, Swiss commandos would infiltrate into Libya and break the men out of prison, possibly clashing with Libyan security forces in the process, and would then smuggle them out of the country. Multiple options for smuggling were considered. One idea was to smuggle them out of Libya aboard the ambassador's plane. Smuggling them across the border into Algeria was also considered, but the plan was dropped after the Algerian government demanded the extradition of Algerian dissidents living in Switzerland in exchange for its cooperation. Other plans called for exfiltrating them by sea on board a submarine, although it is unknown from where the Swiss government would procure a submarine, smuggle them south into Niger, and Tuareg guides were recruited, or fly them out aboard a small airplane. The option of hiring a private British security company to free the men was also considered. Swiss security forces reportedly came close twice to carrying out the operation. According to Swiss MP Jakob Buechler, head of the Swiss Parliament's Defense Committee the operation was imminent, and could have ended in a "total disaster".[15][16][17]
In February 2010, the dispute with Switzerland spread, with Libya refusing to issue entry visas to nationals of any of the countries within the Schengen agreement, of which Switzerland is a part.[18] This action was apparently taken in retaliation for Switzerland blacklisting 188 high-ranking officials from Libya by adding them to the Schengen Area visa blacklist, a move supported by some Schengen countries, but criticised by Italy as an abuse of the system. Italy is concerned about the effect this could have on its own diplomatic relationship with Libya, and especially on their combined efforts to stop illegal immigration from Africa into Europe.[19][20][21] There was no official confirmation from Libya itself as to why they have taken this action.[22] As a result of the ban foreign nationals from certain countries were not permitted entry into Libya at Tripoli airport,[21] including eight Maltese citizens, one of whom was forced to wait for 20 hours before he was able to return home.[20] In response, the European Commission criticised the actions, describing them as 'disproportionate', although no immediate 'tit-for-tat' response was announced.[23]
Trade between the two nations suffered as a result of the diplomatic dispute, dropping nearly 40% during the first eight months of 2009. Traditionally, Switzerland ships pharmaceuticals, industrial equipment, and watches to Libya in return for petroleum. Following the Swiss ban on Minarets, Libyan government spokesperson Mohammed Baayou stated that Libya had imposed a "total" economic embargo on Switzerland, stating that the country would adopt alternative sources for products originally imported from Switzerland.[24][25]
Economic ties [ edit ]
Libyan exports to Switzerland
Swiss exports to LibyaOn a recent trip to Seattle for Microsoft's annual shareholders meeting, Reverend Jesse Jackson, for the second year in a row, was speaking about the terrible lack of diversity at the company. Because he's a giver, he took a little time away from shaming those racist whities elsewhere, appearing on public radio to shame the racist whities running all universities. Jackson made sure to call out the biggest racist whitey of all, George Washington.
In an interview with KUOW, Jackson implied black college athletes were slaves, asserting, "We're being cherry picked to generate resources and generate imagery. But we are as capable if given the same scholarship support. We've gone from picking cotton balls to picking footballs."
When the subject of America's first president came up, Jackson was adamant that Washington's only attribute worthy of remembrance was that he owned slaves.
KUOW reports,
"A large statue of George Washington, the first U.S. president, looms large over the University of Washington’s main campus. Should the statue’s inscription read “slave owner”? Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. believes so. “The writing does not mention slave master; it does not mention support for a crime against humanity,” Jackson told KUOW’s Bill Radke on Tuesday. Jackson was in Seattle to attend Microsoft’s annual meeting. “That's a big piece of it,” he said. “At least educate people as to who this guy was.”
The NAACP will have to agree with Jackson's logic and design a statue in his honor which will inevitably "loom large" over Microsoft's headquarters to reflect fully the man that he is.
"We've gone from picking cotton ball to picking footballs." Jesse Jackson
The plaque on the statue must now include references to The Honorable Right Reverend's profiteering as a race-baiting, Jew hating, adulterer, who makes his real money through corporate shakedowns. The plaque's font will have to be small to include Judicial Watch's findings:Knowledge = Power
It’s an old saying that will always hold true. You hold power over people by keeping them out of the loop and not allowing them to get educated.
Well my financial freedom seeker, you are educated and you have more knowledge than you think you do.
You may not be a genius about spaceships, but if a spaceship builder tried to paint, write a poem, run a business, clean or paint a house, cut hair, invest in the stock market, or even sell something on eBay, or whatever your passion is; They couldn’t do it as well as you. Why? Because they haven’t done it as long as you or care about it enough to try and be as good as you. Just like you don’t care enough or have the passion to build spaceships.
That’s what it’s all about…passion. If you have passion about something you will soak up as much knowledge as you can and become the best at it, because you love it.
Spaceship builders love building spaceships, you love your passion, therefore you 2 are equally geniuses.
True?
Damn right it’s true.
This is a fake image….but it still helps my point
Her passion isn’t large things so obviously this isn’t her forte. So if you have a passion for elephants, the moon, or large things, then you could help teach her a thing or 2.
The point is that you know something she doesn’t and I’m sure she knows something that you don’t.
You can help each other if you decide that you want to know what the other person know.
So let’s find out what power that gives you:
You can charge her for your knowledge
her for your knowledge You can give your knowledge to her
your knowledge to her You can keep her from knowing
All of the options are possible but the first 2 are going to allow you to Live Your Passion.
Giving away some knowledge and making money off of more detailed knowledge will allow you to Do What You Want and have a lot of power.
Everyone knows something that other people don’t.
EVERYONE!
No ifs, ands, or buts about it.
You do. And it may be as simple as how to make a baby quite, or how to juice an orange.
There are people out there that don’t know how and are beginning to learn those things.
So who’s going to teach them?
You!
The world needs to know what you know. So leverage it for your benefit as well. That way everyone wins.
They get knowledge and power and you can Do What You Want and make a living, but you will always have more power because you started before them. So in fact you have more power than you did keeping it for yourself because now they look to you for help instead of someone else.
So, like I said, you have more power than you think.
Use it wisely.
What do you have power in? Let me know in the comments and then maybe someone will want some of your power.
Tweet this post or Facebook share it to let others know that they have the power!!Mayor Enrique Serrano says that the film’s depiction of drug-war violence is out of date and will damage the reputation of a city on the road to recovery
The mayor of the Mexican city Ciudad Júarez has called for a boycott of the Hollywood thriller Sicario, saying that the film’s depiction of drug-war violence is out of date and will damage the reputation of a city on the road to recovery.
With images of bodies hanging from bridges and heavily armed police convoys cruising the streets, the film “speaks badly of the city”, said mayor Enrique Serrano.
“Without us denying what’s happened, we have no reason to speak badly of our family when there’s an internal problem,” he told news site Nortedigital.mx.
Serrano had initially threatened to sue the producers for its negative protrayal of the city, which sits across the US border from El Paso, “because there is an effective damage against the community”, he told Forbes. Serrano said he dropped that plan because of high legal costs.
The Ciudad Juárez municipal government did not respond to a request for comment.
Once the homicide capital of the world, with more than 10,000 murders committed between 2008 and 2012, Ciudad Juarez has calmed considerably in recent years.
The city, part of a coveted drug-trafficking corridor into the United States, erupted after the Sinaloa cartel – led by once-again-fugitive Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman – moved in on the territory of the incumbent Juarez cartel, observers say.
Murder convictions lift lid on seamy network preying on women of Juárez Read more
The city has also been the setting for the disappearance and murder of hundreds of women – violence which continued even as thousands of federal police and soldiers were deployed to the city to confront the cartels.
In September, Chihuahua state, which includes Juárez, recorded its lowest levels of homicide since 2007, reported InSight Crime, a foundation studying security in Latin America.
Juárez registered just 17 homicides last month.
Pope Francis revealed in September he had wanted to cross from Ciudad Juárez into El Paso, in an act meant to highlight the plight of migrants. He travelled to Cuba instead after the island country and the United States ended their estrangement.
Sicario – “hit man” in Spanish – wasn’t filmed in Juárez, but stars Emily Blunt and Benecio del Toro as FBI agents working the borderlands as drug violence heats up. The film doesn’t open in Mexico until December, though many in Ciudad Juárez have seen the trailers.
“It’s only a movie” and “an image that’s rather exaggerated”, says Dr Arturo Valenzuela, a local surgeon, who organized physicians and civil society in an attempt to rescue the city.
He previously performed up to four emergency gunshot surgeries in public hospitals during the worst of Juárez’s violence. Now he operates “once every two weeks” on such patients.
El Paso residents have showed some sympathy for Juárez’s cinematic portrayal, though Howard Campbell, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at El Paso, suggested that Serrano’s outrage was misplaced. “Where were the protesters when thousands were being killed in Juárez?”
“The public reaction in Juárez seems to have been orchestrated by the mayor for political ends,” he adds. “I am sure most Juarenses care more about actual violence that has been done to them by drug traffickers and cops than about how that might be depicted in a movie.”Sure, a dunce cap looks dumb now, but that wasn’t always the case. (Photo: Alan Levine/Flickr)
The dunce cap has long been a visual symbol of idiocy and punishment, but was once seen as something closer to a wizard’s hat. While today we understand the goofy-looking cone hat as denoting some kind of intellectual failing, it actually began as a symbol of respected scholars.
The origin of the dunce cap all begins with one man, John Duns Scotus. His incredible tri-part name, signaling his Scottish heritage (Scotus), and the village where he was born (Duns), is what would eventually lead to the very concept of a “dunce.”
Scotus was a renaissance man centuries before the Renaissance even took place. His exact birthdate is unknown, but he became a Franciscan priest in March of 1291, when he was probably in his twenties. He later went on to become a master philosopher, linguist, theologian, and metaphysical thinker.
Scotus’ life’s work was all about the study of this world and the next. After reading theology and philosophy at Oxford, Scotus went on to teach at the University of Paris. He was later expelled from the country after siding with the pope during a dispute between the Catholic Church and the King of France. He was eventually permitted to return, and continued to teach in France until he was granted the title of Doctor of Theology and made a Franciscan Master, after which he moved to a Franciscan school in Cologne, where he would spend the rest of his days.
John Duns Scotus (Photo: Wikipedia/Public Domain)
During his studies and teachings, Scotus devised, among other theories, a convoluted philosophical explanation for the existence of a metaphysical God, as opposed to a material “Man in the Sky.” Perhaps more famously, he also envisioned a defense of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary herself. Due to the intricacy and complexity of his theories, Scotus was given the terrific papal title, “Doctor Subtilis,” or “The Subtle Doctor.” His teachings came to be known as “Scotism,” while his most devoted students and followers were known as “Dunsmen.”
For some reason, Scotus was also a proponent of the use of pointy hats. It has been said that he was inspired by the use of such hats by wizards, and also conversely that it was Scotus’ love of the headgear that inspired the popular image of wizards wearing conical caps. Whichever version is true, they were both meant to denote wise men.
In fact, Scotus believed the pointed shape of the hat would, in some metaphysical way, act as a reverse funnel for knowledge, with wisdom flowing into the pointed tip, and spreading into the brain below. These hats became popular among the Dunsmen, and were soon viewed as not just as a symbol of Scotism, but as a signifier of high intelligence.
But pointed caps were only a badge of honor until the 1500s rolled around. Scotus’ teachings had continued to be viewed favorably by ecclesiastical academics and the church in the centuries after his death in 1308, but by the mid-16th century the popular thought among church scholars began to turn against the Dunsmen.
The Subtle Doctor’s intensely analytical writings and labyrinthine logic came to be seen as overly complex, and increasingly in conflict with the more humanistic views emerging with Renaissance thought. The remaining Dunsmen, who continued to devote themselves to Scotist thought, began to be thought of as hopelessly behind the times, or just plain stupid. Thus the Dunsmen, or Duns (can you see it coming?), came to be associated with idiocy, and their pointy hats became symbols of this ignominious new reputation.
Photo: Wikipedia/Public Domain
The term “dunce” as we understand it today appeared as early as 1624, when a “dunce-table” was mentioned in the John Ford play, The Sun’s Darling, in reference to a place where children or dullards were seated apart from others. One of the earliest mentions of the dunce cap itself came more than 200 years later, when it appeared in Charles Dickens’ 1840 novel, The Old Curiosity Shop. It is noted as just one of the many things found on an elementary school classroom wall, and described as being set on a shelf all its own, made from “old newspapers and decorated with glaring wafers of the largest size.” The casual way the dunce cap is mentioned speaks to the fact that its appearance and use was already common.
The heyday of the dunce cap (or the low point of disruptive children) seems to have been the Victorian era, when use of the dunce cap as a disciplinary symbol took off in Europe and America. The classic image is of a sullen child in a basic cone hat adorned with the word “dunce” or simply a large letter “D,” who is sent to a stool in a corner of the classroom. It was as much a punishment as a warning to other children thinking of potentially acting out.
A boy’s school in 1905. (Photo: Library of Congress)
This practice of conspicuous punishment continued on for a surprisingly long portion of the 20th century, in schools on both sides of the Atlantic. Class clowns, slow learners, or any other child causing a ruckus or not paying attention would be made to sit or stand on the stool wearing the former Dunsmen’s cap. It was used as late as the 1950s in American schools. As modern conceptions of classroom etiquette and punishments that didn’t humiliate and traumatize students evolved, use of the dunce cap was phased out and banned in most Western schools.
While the use of the pointed cap may have eventually fallen out of favor, the practice of putting kids in a “dunce’s corner” continued well into the 2000s in some parts of England. In a 2010 Telegraph article, it was reported that putting kids in the dunce’s corner had at last been forbidden in a number of areas.
The dunce cap may have gone out of style as a popular form of punishment, but as an icon it lives on. These days, calling someone a dunce continues to be an effective, if slightly archaic, insult. But there may be hope for the hat yet.
Today John Dun Scotus is thought be one of the great thinkers of the Middle Ages. He was even beatified in 1993 by Pope John Paul II, in recognition for his contributions to religious theory. Perhaps there is still room for the cap to be viewed as the symbol of learning it once was.What's the best division in the NFL?
The Around the League gang -- Gregg Rosenthal, Dan Hanzus, Marc Sessler and Brian McIntyre -- each took a swipe at ranking the NFL's eight divisions from best (1 point) to worst (8 points). Our votes were cast, the numbers were tallied and here's what we came up with:
Divisional Power Rankings Division Points Notes 1. NFC South 8 Cam Newton's emergence creates a trio of contenders. 2. NFC North 10 Best quarterback division and potentially three playoff teams. 3. AFC North 11 Best defensive division. Revitalized Bengals help. 4. NFC East 14 Division with the most drama and last year's champion. 5. AFC East 17 Top-heavy division in 2011. Jets, Bills have a lot to prove. 6. AFC West 26 Competitive, but mediocre, despite the presence of Manning. 7. NFC West 28 Lot of young talent despite ranking, but still has ways to go. 8. AFC South 30 Colts and Jaguars are bottom feeders, but Texans are scary.
A few notes:
» The NFC South grabbed our top-overall ranking because of voting consistency. McIntyre pegged them at No. 1, and nobody had the division ranked lower than No. 3.
» Hanzus, who clearly watches a lot of Sunday Night Football, named the NFC East No. 1. Rosenthal and Sessler had the NFC North on top.
» Very little love was shown to the AFC South, which received three last-place votes and McIntyre's sixth-place ballot (netting a 30 ranking, just two away from a worst-possible 32). There was a lot of agreement at the bottom of the list. Three divisions -- the AFC South, NFC West and AFC West -- didn't receive higher than a sixth-place ranking from any of the ATL writers.
» Despite its consistently low ranking, the NFC West has made strides. The gap between, say, the NFC East and NFC West has closed dramatically. The NFC West would have been dead last, often by a wide margin, for much of the past decade. It's a division on the rise with the San Francisco 49ers, Seattle Seahawks and Arizona Cardinals all possessing good defenses.
» Back to the NFC East for a minute. It drew a varied response. Hanzus, of course, believes it's football's best. Sessler and McIntyre said No. 4, and Rosenthal placed it at No. 5. If an NFC East team fails to represent the conference in the Super Bowl, Hanzus has agreed to mow Jerry Jones' epic Dallas lawn until 2016.
Feel free to tell us where you disagree below.
While you're at it, give a listen to the latest edition of the Dave Dameshek Football Program, in which Hanzus and Sessler debate with Shek about which division is king of the world.Yep, you heard me. Loui will score more goals than Marchand, Bergeron, Krejci, Iginla or Lucic. Here’s why.
Okay B’s fans, it’s time to stop throwing a fit about the Seguin trade. We lost one of Boston’s party boys and there’s nothing we can do about it except move on. Yes, Seguin is probably going to score 30-plus goals a season for the next decade. Yes, he’s going to drink until his balls fall off. And yes, he’s absolutely going to bang out every puck slut within a 100 mile radius of the American Airlines Center in Dallas. I’m going to miss him just as much as anyone else but it’s time to let it go and realize what we got in return.
So, who the hell is Loui Eriksson? Well, he’s the exact opposite of Seguin. Loui’s not as fast, or as flashy, or as drunk, or as STD infested (not a fact, I’m just assuming Seguin is a dirty dog and I think most would agree). But what Loui lacks in comparison to Seguin he more than makes up for in the other aspects of his game. He’s a smart, powerful goal scorer who has proven his ability to net 30-plus goals a season. His last five seasons: 36 goals, 29 goals, 27 goals, 26 goals, and 12 goals in last year’s shortened season.
Is he a sniper? No, not necessarily. Can he wheel? Sometimes. Are his hands sexy? Kind of. So how does he score all these goals? Loui’s they type of player that’s always in the right place at the right time. He’s one of the best in the league when it comes to reading plays and anticipating his next move. He scores grinder type goals, and plays his best hockey when his team is trailing and needs a big goal. Now what team thrives on that old-time-hockey style of play? Oh yeah. The god damn Bruins, that’s who! This guy is going to feel right at home under Claude Julien.
Loui has a lot of skill but adds even more value with his durability. The guy is an absolute gamer. In his last five seasons with the Stars he missed only two games, TWO GAMES. He’s not very well known around the league yet, being stuck in Dallas for the last seven seasons, but now that he’s in the Boston spotlight that will all change come next season. He was netting huge numbers on an average Dallas squad, imagine what this guy is going to accomplish surrounded by a more talented Boston roster. Mark my words, Loui will lead the Bruins in goal scoring next season. Pin him with Bergy and March and just watch it happen. Tell me I’m wrong. I dare you.
Reporter wants to get Loui drunk and take complete advantage of him:A mocked-up set of busy streets in Ann Arbor, Michigan, will provide the sternest test yet for self-driving cars. Complex intersections, confusing lane markings, and busy construction crews will be used to gauge the aptitude of the latest automotive sensors and driving algorithms; mechanical pedestrians will even leap into the road from between parked cars so researchers can see if they trip up onboard safety systems.
The site of Ann Arbor’s driverless town, currently under construction.
The urban setting will be used to create situations that automated driving systems have struggled with, such as subtle driver-pedestrian interactions, unusual road surfaces, tunnels, and tree canopies, which can confuse sensors and obscure GPS signals.
“If you go out on the public streets you come up against rare events that are very challenging for sensors,” says Peter Sweatman, director of the University of Michigan’s Mobility Transformation Center, which is overseeing the project. “Having identified challenging scenarios, we need to re-create them in a highly repeatable way. We don’t want to be just driving around the public roads.”
Google and others have been driving automated cars around public roads for several years, albeit with a human ready to take the wheel if necessary. Most automated vehicles use accurate digital maps and satellite positioning, together with a suite of different sensors, to navigate safely.
Highway driving, which is less complex than city driving, has proved easy enough for self-driving cars, but busy downtown streets—where cars and pedestrians jockey for space and behave in confusing and surprising ways—are more problematic.
“I think it’s a great idea,” says John Leonard, a professor at MIT who led the development of a self-driving vehicle for a challenge run by DARPA in 2007. “It is important for us to try to collect statistically meaningful data about the performance of self-driving cars. Repeated operations—even in a small-scale environment—can yield valuable data sets for testing and evaluating new algorithms.”
The simulation is being built on the edge of the University of Michigan’s campus with funding from the Michigan Department of Transportation and 13 companies involved with developing automated driving technology. It is scheduled to open next spring. It will consist of four miles of roads with 13 different intersections.
Even Google, which has an ambitious vision of vehicle automation, acknowledges that urban driving is a significant challenge. Speaking at an event in California this July, Chris Urmson, who leads the company’s self-driving car project, said several common urban situations remain thorny (see “Urban Jungle a Tough Challenge for Google’s Autonomous Car”). Speaking with MIT Technology Review last month, Urmson gave further details about as-yet-unsolved scenarios (see “Hidden Obstacles for Google’s Self-Driving Cars”).
Such challenges notwithstanding, the first automated cars will go into production shortly. General Motors announced last month that a 2017 Cadillac will be the first car to offer entirely automated driving on highways. It’s not yet clear how the system will work—for example, how it will ensure that the driver isn’t too distracted to take the wheel in an emergency, or under what road conditions it might refuse to take the wheel—but in some situations, the car’s Super Cruise system will take care of steering, braking, and accelerating.
Another technology to be tested in the simulated town is vehicle-to-vehicle communications. The University of Michigan recently concluded a government-funded study in Ann Arbor involving thousands of vehicles equipped with transmitters that broadcast position, direction of travel, speed, and other information to other vehicles and to city infrastructure. The trial showed that vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications could prevent many common accidents by providing advanced warning of a possible collision.
“One of the interesting things, from our point of view, is what extra value you get by combining” automation and car-to-car communications, Sweatman says. “What happens when you put the two together—how much faster can you deploy it?”Join Eligible Magazine for the hottest event of TIFF 2016!
Friday, September 16th will be your chance to meet, socialize and have photos with your favourite stars of The Bachelor/Bachelorette and the current Bachelor In Paradise series. Meet Robby Hayes, Jared Haibon, Brett Melnick and Vinny Ventiera!
The "Blackfly Beverages" VIP party starts at 8pm and is strictly for pre-paid ticket holders, media and other celebrities in attendance. The ticket includes specialty cocktails, appetizers, delicious desserts and admittance to the "Softlips®" main party starting at 10pm. ($20 ticket price for the 10pm party included)
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Red carpet hosted by former The Bachelor, Bachelor In Paradise and "bachelor nation" fan favourite Tenley Molzhan.
VIP Meet & Greet cocktail party sponsored by Blackfly Beverages.
TIFF Bachelor Party main event sponsored by Softlips®Commissions+ HOW TO COMMISSION ME +
+ Send me a note with your info
- As much or as little as you like, just let me know how strictly I need to follow it!
- Alternatively email me at iiao.ryii(at)gmail(dot)com
+ When I've accepted, you'll need to pay before I start work (Paypal or Points)
- You'll get a better price with Paypal
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+ I'll send you a super-rough sketch and we'll agree on the pose
- From this point I can continue independently
- Optional - we can review again after the detailed sketch for minor changes
- Optional - we can review again after colouration for very minor changes
+ Commissions jump to the front of my queue
- I aim for turnaround within 14 days (If this isn't possible, I'll tell you before payment)
- It may be possible to speed the process up, please let me know when oVenerable French fashion house Chanel is facing an online backlash for offering an accessory that critics say appropriates the cultural heritage of Australia's Aboriginal people for profit.
The accessory, a Chanel-branded boomerang made of wood and resin, appears on the company's website with a recommended Canadian retail price of $1,725.
The boomerang gained attention online after make-up artist and model Jeffree Star posted pictures of it on Instagram and Snapchat.
Make-up artist and model Jeffree Star posted a picture of a Chanel boomerang on social media. (Instagram/Jeffree Star)
"This is a cultural symbol of |
Босанац) are referred to as members of the general population of Bosnia, one of two main regions of Bosnia and Herzegovina. As a common demonym, the term Bosnians refers to the entire population of the region, regardless of any ethnic or religious affiliation. It can also be used as a designation for anyone who is descended from the region of Bosnia. Also, a Bosnian can be anyone who holds citizenship of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina and thus is largely synonymous with the all-encompassing national demonym Bosnians and Herzegovinians. This includes, but is not limited to, members of the constituent ethnic groups of Bosnia and Herzegovina: Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats. Those who reside in the smaller geographical region of Herzegovina usually prefer to identify as Herzegovinians.
As a common demonym, the term Bosnians should not be confused with somewhat similar, but not identical ethnonym Bosniaks, designating ethnic Bosniaks.
Terminology [ edit ]
In modern English, term Bosnians is the most commonly used exonym for the general population of Bosnia. In older English literature, inhabitants of Bosnia were sometimes also referred to as Bosniacs or Bosniaks. All of those terms (Bosnians, Bosniacs, Bosniaks) were used interchangeably, as common demonyms for the entire population of Bosnia, including all ethnic and religious groups. When pointing to different religious affiliations within the general population of Bosnia, English authors were using common terms like Christian Bosniacs, or Mohammedan Bosniacs, and also Christian Bosniaks, or Mohammedan Bosniaks. Up to the 20th century, in English language, none of those terms (Bosnians, Bosniacs, Bosniaks) were used to designate a distinctive ethnicity.
Since the end of the 20th century, when the majority of ethnic Muslims in former Yugoslavia decided to adopt term Bosniaks as their ethnic designation, consequent use of that particular term in English language has gradually adapted to the new situation. Today, term Bosniaks (including the spelling variant Bosniacs) is primarily used in English language as a designation for ethnic Bosniaks, while the term Bosnians has kept its general meaning, designating all inhabitants of Bosnia.
History [ edit ]
Territorial expansion of the Bosnian state in the Middle Ages
Medieval Bosnians [ edit ]
The name Bosnia as a polity was first recorded in the middle of the 10th century, in the Greek form Βόσονα, designating the region. By that time, the Migration Period of the Early Middle Ages was already over. During that turbulent period, from the beginning of the 6th, up to middle of the 7th century, the South Slavic peoples have invaded the Eastern Roman Empire and settled throughout the Southeastern Europe. In many regions, they encountered various groups of the remaining, previously romanized population of the former Roman provinces of Dalmatia, Praevalitana, Pannonia Secunda, Pannonia Savia and others. Remaining romanized population retreated mainly to mountainous regions, while South Slavic tribes settled in plains and valleys, gradually coalescing into early principalities. As these expanded, they came to include other surrounding territories, and later evolved into more centralized states.
During the twelfth century, the Banate of Bosnia was created, centered in the valley of the river Bosna. There are several theories among linguists and other scholars regarding the origins of both terms, for the region and the river, and also regarding the relation between those two terms. It is speculated that the name Bosnia could be drawn from an older regional term, itself originally derived from the name of the Bosna river, which flows through the heart of the land. From that root, local demonym was derived in endonym form of Bošnjani, designating the inhabitants of Bosnia.
During the 13th and 14th century, the Banate of Bosnia gradually expanded, incorporating regions of Soli,Usora, Donji Kraji and Zahumlje. Inhabitants of all those regions also kept their regional individuality. By 1377, the Kingdom of Bosnia was created under the Kotromanić dynasty. It also included several territories of medieval Serbia and Croatia. As a consequence, many Eastern Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholics became subjects of Bosnian rulers, along with adherents of a native Bosnian Church whose origins and nature are a subject of continued debate among scholars. Those belonging to this sect simply called themselves Krstjani ("Christians"). Many scholars have argued that these Bosnian Krstjani were Manichaean dualists related to the Bogomils of Bulgaria, while others question this theory, citing lack of historical evidence. Both Catholic and Orthodox Church authorities considered the Bosnian Church heretical, and launched vigorous proselytizing campaigns to stem its influence. As a result of these divisions, no coherent religious identity developed in medieval Bosnia, as it had in Croatia and Serbia.
Ottoman era [ edit ]
As the centuries passed, the Bosnian kingdom slowly began to decline. It had become fractured by increased political and religious disunity. By then, the Ottoman Turks had already gained a foothold in the Balkans. First defeating the Serbs at the Battle of Kosovo and expanding westward, the Turks eventually conquered all of Bosnia and portions of neighboring Croatia. Territory that partly belonged to the medieval Croatian Kingdom and partly to the Bosnian Kingdom remained under Ottoman rule for centuries, so long that it was referred to as Turkish Croatia (later as Bosanska Krajina).
These developments altered Bosnian history, as many residents adopted Islam, adding to the complex Bosnian ethno-religious identity. The Bosnian Church disappeared, although the circumstances of its decline has been debated as much as defining its nature and origins. Some historians contend that the Bosnian Krstjani converted en masse to Islam, seeking refuge from Catholic and Orthodox persecution. Others argue that the Bosnian Church had already ceased to operate many decades before the Turkish conquest. Whatever the case, a native and distinct Slavic Muslim community developed among the Bosnians under Ottoman rule, quickly becoming dominant. By the early 1600s, approximately two-thirds of the Bosnian population was Muslim.
Austro-Hungarian era [ edit ]
Bosnians at the time of the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
During the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1878 to 1918, Benjamin Kallay, Joint Imperial Minister of Finance and Vienna-based administrator of Bosnia, promoted Bošnjaštvo, a policy that aimed to inspire in Bosnia's people 'a feeling that they belong to a great and powerful nation'.[18] The policy advocated the ideal of a pluralist and multi-confessional Bosnian nation and viewed Bosnians as "speaking the Bosnian language and divided into three religions with equal rights."[19][20] The policy tried to isolate Bosnia and Herzegovina from its irredentist neighbors (the Orthodox in Serbia, Catholics in Croatia, and the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire). The empire tried to discourage the concept of Croat or Serb nationhood, which had spread to Bosnia and Herzegovina's Catholic and Orthodox communities from neighboring Croatia and Serbia in the mid-19th century.[20] Croats and Serbs who opposed the imperial policy and identified with nationalist ideas, ignored claims of Bosnian nationhood and instead counted Bosnian Muslims as part of their own nations, a concept that was rejected by most Bosnian Muslims.[21][22] Following the death of Kallay, the policy was abandoned. By the latter half of the 1910s, nationalism was an integral factor of Bosnian politics, with national political parties corresponding to the three groups dominating elections.[20]
U.S. scholars Robert J. Donia and John V.A. Fine conclude that:
“ A Bosnian's identity as a Bosnian - even if it originally referred to his geographical homeland or state membership - has roots going back many centuries, whereas the classification of any Christian Bosnian as a Serb or a Croat goes back barely a century. The idea of being Bosnian Muslim in a "national" (as opposed to a religious) sense is even more recent. ” — Robert J. Donia and John V.A. Fine, excerpt from their book- Bosnia and Hercegovina: A Tradition Betrayed
Yugoslav era [ edit ]
During the period when Yugoslavia was established as a nation, the political establishment in Bosnia and Herzegovina was dominated by Serb and Croat policies; neither of the two terms, Bosnian or Bosniak, was recognized to identify the people as a constituent nation.[24][25] Consequently, Bosnian Muslims, or anyone who claimed a Bosnian/Bosniak ethnicity, were classified in Yugoslav population statistics as under the category'regional affiliation.' This classification was used in the last Yugoslav census taken in 1991 in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The census classifications in former Yugoslavia were often subject to political manipulation because the counting of populations was critical to power of each group. In the constitutional amendments of 1947, Bosnian Muslims requested the option of 'Bosnian.' But, in the 1948 census, they were given only the choices to identify as 'ethnically undeclared Muslim', 'Serb-Muslim' or 'Croat-Muslim' (the vast majority chose the first option).[25] In the 1953 census, the category "Yugoslav, ethnically undeclared" was introduced; the overwhelming majority of those who identified by this category were Bosnian Muslim.[25]
In the 1961 census, the Bosniaks or Bosnian Muslims were categorized as an ethnic group defined as one of 'Muslim-Ethnic affiliation,' but not as a Yugoslav "constitutive nation" alongside Serbs and Croats. In 1964, the Fourth Congress of the Bosnian Party assured the Bosniaks' of the right to self-determination. In 1968 at a meeting of the Bosnian Central Committee, Bosniaks were accepted as a distinct nation, though the leadership decided not to use the Bosniak or Bosnian name.[25][26] Hence, as a compromise, the option of "Muslims by nationality" was introduced as a category in the 1971 census. This was the official category for use by Bosniaks until the final Yugoslav census in 1991.[25]
Modern era [ edit ]
In 1990 the name Bosniaks was reintroduced to replace the term "Muslim by nationality". This resulted in Bosniak, or even Muslim, as terms being (re)coined recently as a political compromise. In the centuries of the Ottoman Empire, distinctions among citizens (for taxation purposes, military service etc.) was made based primarily on the individual's religious identity, which was closely tied to ethnicity.
The number of people who identified as Bosnians under the latest (2013) population census is not exactly known, however it is not above 2.73%, as this is the number of people who identified as "Others" and "Bosnians" are listed under this "Others" category.
Religion [ edit ]
Mosque, Catholic church and Serbian Orthodox Church in Bosanska Krupa
According to the latest population census (2013) of Bosnia and Herzegovina, there were relatively few people who identified as "Bosnians", thereby it is difficult to establish the religious connection between this group of people and some of the religions present in that country.
According to Tone Bringa, an author and anthropologist, she says of Bosnia and Bosnians:
"Neither Bosniak, nor Croat, nor Serb identities can be fully understood with reference only to Islam or Christianity respectively but have to be considered in a specific Bosnian context that has resulted in a shared history and locality among Bosnians of Islamic as well as Christian backgrounds."[27]
According to Bringa, in Bosnia there is a singular, "trans-ethnic culture" that encompassed each ethnicity and makes different faiths, including Christianity and Islam, "synergistically interdependent".[27] Still, large numbers of Bosnians are secular, a trend strengthened in the post-World War II in Bosnia and Herzegovina as they were part of the Communist political system that rejected traditional organized religion.
Identification [ edit ]
According to the latest official population census made in Bosnia and Herzegovina, most of the population identified with Bosniak, Croat or Serb ethnicity. Some people identified with "Bosnian" nationality, however these are listed under the category "Others" (along with all the other options such as ethnic Muslims, Jews, Romas etc.). According to the latest population census (2013), there were around 2.7% "Others".
The CIA World Factbook, used in this article as a source for numbers, does not mention a sole "Bosnian" nationality. Instead, it mentions "Bosnian(s), Herzegovinian(s)", thereby emphasizing the regional significance and equity between the terms.
Ethnic minorities in this territory, such as Jews, Roma, Albanians, Montenegrins and others, may consider "Bosnian" as an adjective modifying their ethnicity (e.g. "Bosnian Roma") to indicate place of residence. Other times, they use (with equal rights) the term "Herzegovinians".
In addition, a sizable population in Bosnia and Herzegovina believe that the term "Bosnians" defines a people who constitute a distinct collective cultural identity or ethnic group. According to the latest (2013) census, however, this population does not rise above 2.7%.
In a 2007 survey conducted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 57% of those surveyed primarily identified by an ethnic designation, while 43% opted for "being a citizen of Bosnia-Herzegovina". In addition, 75% of the surveyors answered positively to the question "As well as thinking of yourself as a [Bosniak, Croat, Serb], do you also think of yourself as being a citizen of the whole of Bosnia-Herzegovina?". In the same survey, 43% said that they identify as a citizen of Bosnia-Herzegovina as the primary identity, 14% identified with a specific ethnic or religious group, while 41% chose the dual identity.[28][29]
According to a study conducted by the University of Montenegro, Faculty for Sport and Physical Education in Nikšić, Montenegro and the University of Novi Sad in Serbia, Bosnian people are the tallest in the world.[30][31][32][33]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]This cat-and-mouse game turned into a full-fledged Times Square brawl.
Costumed hustlers dressed as Hello Kitty and Minnie Mouse bared their claws while fighting over a tip Thursday — and ended up in cuffs.
The fur flew after the two posed together with some passers-by, and the Hello Kitty “performer” — Jiovanna Melendez, 40 — allegedly wouldn’t share the resulting tip with Minnie Mouse Sandra Mocha, 34.
Even a faux Spider-Man swung into action, but the ersatz webslinger couldn’t break them apart as they slapped, scratched and punched each other.
“I tried to stop them, but they were hysterical,” said Spidey, who on Friday would only identify himself as — you guessed it — “Peter Parker.”
Cops tried to cool things down, but the women insisted on pressing charges, Spider-Man recalled.
Tourists on Friday were disappointed they missed the action.
“I would definitely have tipped extra,” said Anthony Jacobi-Dolce, 23, of Chicago. “And I would bet on Minnie to win because I don’t even know what Hello Kitty is.”
By the sight of them in Manhattan Criminal Court, Minnie Mouse got the upper paw: Hello Kitty sported a sizable scratch on her face.
That didn’t surprise Times Square tourist Malachi Cornelius, 10, from Evanston, Ill.
“The mouse always outsmarts the cat,” he said.
Additional reporting by Natasha Velez and Laura ItalianoDespite the recent rash of space-debris problems, the risk that the space shuttle mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope will have a catastrophic collision with space junk and micrometeoroids won't exceed NASA guidelines.
NASA said Thursday the new orbital debris risk for STS-125 had fallen to 1 in 221. A couple of precautionary maneuvers – in particular coming into a lower, less crowded orbit on the 10th day of the mission and using Hubble as a shield – reduced the spaceship's chance of getting hit with a stray paint chip or metal bolt.
New, more precise observations of the orbital debris encircling Earth also showed the amount of junk was slightly lower than had previously been calculated. The new information means the shuttle mission to the Hubble can fly without any safety reservations.
"It's an improvement," said Steve Stich, the head of the orbiter project office at Johnson Space Center.
An initial risk assessment in October calculated a 1 in 185 risk that a piece of space debris or a micrometeorite would hit the shuttle and cause a catastrophic loss of the crew and vehicle. Only the Hubble service mission STS-61 in December 1993 faced a higher calculated risk of a catastrophic hit by space junk, at 1 in 150. Risk higher than 1 in 200 requires a special waiver to fly. The absolute cut-off for a shuttle mission is 1 in 60.
The Hubble is located in a debris-ridden area that's three times riskier than the orbit the International Space Station flies in. Given the difficult environment, it seemed the final Hubble service mission would be the first in 58 shuttle launches to exceed the 1 in 200 risk threshold.
Then, in February, an American communications satellite collided with a Russian Kosmos satellite, spreading debris around the Earth and prompting fears that the risk to the Hubble service mission would would be even higher. Orbital debris specialist Mark Matney of Johnson Space Center told Nature the mission was "uncomfortably close to unacceptable levels" and that the satellite collision was "only going to add on to that."
But NASA officials have managed to re-engineer the flight plan to not just keep the risk level from rising, but to reduce it. They came up with ways to carry out the mission's important scientific mission while protecting the vulnerable areas on the spacecraft, namely the nose cap and the leading edge of the wings. And, in what has become standard procedure, the astronauts will give the Shuttle a thorough inspection on the next-to-last day of the mission before attempting to re-enter
Earth's atmosphere.
Despite the good news for this mission, the overall orbital debris trend remains disturbing. The satellite collision alone increased the risk to the shuttle mission by 8 percent. The risk of a micrometeroid or orbital debris (MMOD) hit is, in fact, very real.
"MMOD is the highest risk for the shuttle program," Stich said. "That's why we take such extra special precautions."
If during inspections, the astronauts find that their shuttle has been hit, they'll have options to save themselves.
"We have a couple mitigations there. One is that we could effect a repair using a material called NOAX," Stich said, alluding to a putty-like material akin to space-strength Bondo. Astronauts would spacewalk out to the problem and patch up the craft.
In the case of a more severe hit, NASA would fly the shuttle Endeavor up to the crew.
Because they won't be able to wait in the International Space Station, which would be normal protocol for a shuttle docked there, they've brought extra food and water. Stich said they'd have 18 days to retrieve the crew from a damaged vehicle.
Impacts occur regularly on shuttle flights. Wired Science obtained the Hypervelocity Impact Database, which revealed that in the 54 missions from STS-50 through STS-114, space junk and meteoroids hit shuttle windows 1,634 times necessitating 92 window replacements. In addition, the shuttle's radiator was hit 317 times, actually causing holes in the radiator's facesheet 53 times.
None of those impacts, apparently, were severe enough to endanger the crew or vehicles involved (the Columbia disaster was attributed to damage that occurred during liftoff). It could, however, just be a matter of time before NASA can't outmaneuver the space-debris risk, particularly in the most satellite-crowded orbit, which is several hundred miles above Hubble.
"That region of space is already supercritical. Given the amount of debris that was up there, the debris would double in 50 years, even if you didn't launch anything up there." said David Wright, a space security specialist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "What that says is that debris mitigation isn't enough. We're at the point where we have to do debris remediation and we don't know how to do that."
But at lower orbits, where Hubble and the space station are, we will be able to continue the cat-and-mouse game with tiny pieces of debris, at least for a while.
"You certainly can't say that anytime soon, the debris consequences are going to be so high that it's going to keep us out of space," Wright said.
See Also:
Image: NASA
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter, Google Reader feed, and project site, Inventing Green: the lost history of American clean tech; Wired Science on Facebook.The long parade of genuflection in Carlos Gonzalez‘s corner of the Rockies’ clubhouse Wednesday night included shouted Spanish insults and a young catcher trying, feebly, to make fun of the slugger’s maroon leather jacket. It was all done in love.
Gonzalez, the Rockies’ longest-tenured position player, the slugger with the sweet swing, is on short time. A weekend series against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Coors Field, with a postseason berth on the line, likely will be his last homestand in Denver.
“It was going through my head when we got home (this week) and I realized it could be the end,” said Nolan Arenado, the Rockies’ all-star third baseman. “It breaks my heart. I love him. He’s like a brother to me.”
Gonzalez, a 31-year-old right fielder, likely is playing out the final days of a nine-year career with the Rockies. He will become a free agent the day after the final game of the World Series. Gonzalez and Rockies general manager Jeff Bridich had significant discussions last spring about a contract extension, but a deal fizzled and they haven’t talked about the topic since.
But for just the second time in a decade, Gonzalez has a shot at playing in the postseason. The Rockies are on the brink of clinching a spot in the National League’s wild-card game Wednesday at Arizona.
Gonzalez, who has come out of a season-long slump this month, will be playing with an opportunity to extend his season and his Rockies career.
“I signed an extension in 2010 thinking this is a team that can potentially be in the postseason for a long time,” Gonzalez said. “And I haven’t reached that yet. I want to keep playing for as long as possible in the postseason. I want to be the last one standing.”
The smile never left Gonzalez’s face, even as the Rockies played through six losing seasons since 2011. His first season with the Rockies, in 2009, ended in the playoffs — a loss to the Phillies in an NLDS. Now the Rockies are on the verge of returning to the postseason.
Since 2011, they have folded before September could find any meaning — even as Gonzalez earned three all-star appearances, two Gold Gloves and a Silver Slugger trophy.
His worst season, oddly, has coincided with Colorado’s turnaround. In the final year of a seven-year, $80 million contract extension, he was hitting only.198 on May 11, when the Rockies were in first place in the NL West. He hit only four home runs in the first two months of this season, a dramatic dip after blasting a total of 65 home runs the past two years.
Gonzalez now has 13 homers and a.259 batting average. He is hitting.371 in September (26-for-70) — with 11 doubles, five homers and 15 RBIs.
“Every day is a fun day, even when there are ups and downs,” he said. “Baseball is what I love. I always have fun. Every day can be your last day. That’s why you play with passion. Whenever you’re healthy and you have an opportunity, you go out and give it your all. You never know what the future will hold.”
Gonzalez’s future with Colorado is in doubt. The Rockies certainly would miss his home run prowess and defensive ability in front of the out-of-town scoreboard in right at Coors Field. But with rookies Raimel Tapia and David Dahl, and veterans Charlie Blackmon, Gerardo Parra and Ian Desmond, the Rockies seem to have a surplus of outfielders heading into 2018. Related Articles February 26, 2019 From Nolan Arenado to Kenneth Faried: The biggest contracts in Denver sports history
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“I hope he comes back. You never know what can happen,” Arenado said. “I love playing with CarGo. I’ve loved it ever since my rookie year. My first big-league camp, he treated me right. Some veterans were on me all the time, giving me a hard time. He was always cool with me. He always told me to keep getting better. That’s something I will always remember.
“I will always protect him, because he always protected me.”
If these are his final days in purple, Gonzalez said they won’t wear on him. He won’t be occupied by nostalgia or sentimentality. His thoughts, he said, will be only on the postseason. He will play to the end by having fun.In 2008, the image of a presidential hopeful glued to his BlackBerry was something novel in American politics. Today, in a world of iPhones and smartwatches, it looks out of date.
In his two terms as president, Barack Obama has led the nation during the mass consumer adoption of the internet. His victories at the ballot have largely been credited to an army of nerds who drove his tech-savvy campaigns with talent from Twitter, Facebook, and Google. It was Harper Reed and "Narwhal" that took down Mitt Romney and "Orca" — not merely a campaign ad that was more clever than the other guy’s.
Obama's nerds are marching in the wrong direction
Today, Obama’s cunning campaign looks like an anomaly in the face of two gargantuan failures: Healthcare.gov and the monstrosity of NSA spying. When the nerds marched in to build Healthcare.gov, they didn’t come from Google or Facebook; they came from Canadian firm CGI Federal and dozens of other insider contractors. When the nerds of the NSA marched under legacy orders from President Bush, Obama renewed their mission and even expanded their intrusive, unprecedented surveillance of American citizens and efforts to crack the security measures that ensure privacy for everyone on the internet. These aren’t superficial matters; once we begin to start administering our laws electronically, the systems of administration will effectively enforce the limits of our freedom. With the internet now a staple in the lives of millions of citizens, our government can’t remain behind the curve.
The president, of course, is just one man. Not all of the technological failures can be attributed to Obama, and they probably shouldn’t be; perception of the president’s power has arguably exceeded the office’s authority by a vast margin as the scope of the executive branch has expanded over the past century. Healthcare.gov — the massive system which was supposed to be a primary expression of Obama’s landmark Affordable Care Act — was mired by a nightmarish federal IT procurement system that the president inherited along with years of Republican efforts to derail implementation of the ACA. And the intelligence community’s unprecedented, expansive spying programs were already snowballing from the days of 9/11 and the Patriot Act. But that won’t keep the public, or Obama’s opponents, from holding the deep technology problems of his second term over his head for the remainder of his presidency and beyond. The president can’t blame all his failures on preexisting conditions.
The president can't blame his failure on preexisting conditions
The administration seems to think of technology the way consumers do — a commodity that can easily be bought. In November, Obama said he wouldn’t have launched Healthcare.gov if he had known it wasn’t going to work, but that’s ultimately a poor excuse; Obama was responsible for the incoherent management mess that didn’t understand how to develop a website or to see the red flags along the way. In the years following passage of the ACA, no single person was responsible for Healthcare.gov’s development. Instead, responsibilities for managing the project and its 55 contractors were spread across several agencies and deputies who weren’t focused on the site’s development full-time. Imagine a handful of Google engineers trying to build Android from the ground up in their spare time.
The president’s decision to delay certain crucial policy measures for political reasons also impacted the process, leaving the engineers without the specifications they needed to build a fully functional site until the final hours. That kind of ragtag approach might work if you’re building a campaign website, but not when you’re building a massive health-care exchange that millions of Americans must rely upon.
To fix the site the president called for a "tech surge," drawing an unfortunate comparison to another surge that also didn’t turn out well for the US. The Healthcare.gov surge added workers at all levels, expanding an already bloated project. "‘Tech surge’ is just a couple buzzwords thrown together," a source familiar with CGI Federal told The Verge in an email. More than two months after launch and an estimated $600 million in development costs, the website still faces problems.
The companies Obama is now enlisting to help fix the health-care site — America’s technological brain trust — are starting to turn their backs on him. On Tuesday, at a White House meeting meant to get recommendations on Healthcare.gov from giants like Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, Netflix’s Reed Hastings, and Google’s Eric Schmidt, executives reportedly steered the conversation towards government spying. Obama wanted to talk about the insurance site. "That is not going to happen," one executive reportedly said. "We are there to talk about the NSA." Yahoo, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and others have filed lawsuits or supported briefs against NSA surveillance, and last week a coalition of major tech companies sent an open letter to the White House demanding reform.
"Yes we scan."
It’s not clear how Obama ended up supporting the intelligence community’s massive, questionable programs. As a senator and presidential candidate, Obama encouraged prudence and caution when it came to laws like the Patriot Act, but as president, Obama has extended Bush’s legacy of spying. Obama may not have been able to predict that a single contractor would leak the nature of NSA spying to the world, but that he enabled them in secret is arguably more concerning.
As commander in chief, there’s little argument that the NSA’s programs are directly Obama’s responsibility. While the White House has denied knowledge of some of the agency’s programs, like spying on the personal phones of world leaders, the president has defended the most controversial programs which indiscriminately surveil American citizens. Obama’s initial defense of the NSA’s programs may bite him in the long run now that congressional opposition is mounting, and since a federal court has just found for the first time that the government’s dragnet phone surveillance program is likely unconstitutional.
Any president’s second term is effectively far shorter than four years; with midterm elections and the natural abatement of political power, presidents famously become "lame ducks," sometimes long before their tenure ends. According to some wonks, Obama’s second term could meaningfully be up as soon as next year. If he can’t deliver on Healthcare.gov or NSA reform by then, the president’s legacy could already be sealed.
If Obama’s technology legacy has a lesson, it’s that the government can’t waste any more time transitioning to the internet age. It must learn how to quickly and efficiently utilize technology to carry out the nation’s laws, and know enough not to willfully break it. It’s time for Obama to ditch his BlackBerry. We can’t afford another presidency that learns the hard way.Former judge barred from ever sitting on Nevada bench
CARSON CITY — The Nevada Commission on Judicial Discipline has banned former Clark County Family Court Judge Steven Jones from ever again serving as a judge in the state.
Jones, who pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges, was sentenced in February 2015 to 26 months in prison and ordered to pay $2.9 million in restitution to dozens of victims of an investment scheme.
Prosecutors said investors were tricked with false promises they could buy and sell water rights worth millions as part of a secret government program. Instead, prosecutors said, Jones and others spent the money on gambling and their own living expenses.
Jones is now in a federal prison in Taft, Calif.
The commission branded Jones “a liar, a manipulator and a thief” and said its order “closes a very lengthy and sad chapter in the history of the Nevada judiciary.”
The commission said Jones took advantage of every opportunity to delay its efforts to resolve the allegations of misconduct against him.
It said Jones “repeatedly abused the legal system by filing duplicative litigations in multiple courts” in to delay the commission from acting on the case.
Jones served some 20 years as a judge in Clark County.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.I wrote this, and posted it to the Bartcop Forum in 2003. I also sent a copy to Terry Gross of Fresh Air, just before she interviewed him.It was my first big Rock and Roll gig as a Theatre Stagehand. I had gotten my parents to write school to excuse me for work. I was thrilled. I mean, there I was, a 16 year old kid and working on the KISS "Asylum" (no makeup) tour-- TOTALLY GEEKED.Well, the load-in started at 5am, and the wind blew straight off of Lake Huron into the McMorran Arena--it was brutally cold.All went well as far as the load-in goes, at 5'5", and 105 pounds at the time, I managed to hold my own and do what was expected of me. At 11am we broke for an hour's lunch. During that time, two key things happened: Someone stole Gene Simmon's fiber-optic cape (about $5,000) from the cleaners. Second, the Band moved into the facility-- the local crew wasn't notified before hand that KISS would be using the locker room we had been using for our head.So, my friends and I returned from lunch chatting, and walked right into their dressing room-- what we saw was every boy's rock & roll fantasy: There was the band, partying it up with women who NEVER lived in Port Huron, a FULLY STOCKED bar on the counter, a spread of decadence for TWENTY people, let alone four...The band had ripped a mirror from the wall and put on top of one of those big wire spools. Paul Stanley was sitting at the table, straw up his nose and snorting deeply from a HUGE pile of cocaine. We walked in and stopped dead in our tracks-- Stanley was about four feet from me (I was in the front). He finishes his snort, catches his breath and just stops--everything gets quite--everyone is looking at me..."OUT," Paul says, with snow hanging from his nose tip, "Get the FUCK OUT--" I'm blocked by my idiot friends who were trying to catch a peek. Suddenly, Gene throws a whiskey bottle at us, and it explodes against the wall about a foot from my head. Booze goes spraying all over me-- great!"Get Out!" he yells, "And you didn't see anything, you pansies!"It was all I could do to get out of there, and I pushed past my buddies.I'm on deck, putting some vacuform trim in the shape of amplifier speakers on the drum risers, when I hear Gene screaming bloody murder behind me. He just found out his costume was stolen.He comes up onstage, raging with anger. My back was turned to him."What the fuck is this?" he says, "Who the fuck fucked up?" He was right behind me.Suddenly, his hands were on me. "YOU. What the fuck are you doing?" He grabs me with one hand around my neck and with the other, he grabs my crotch from the back hoisting my over his head, shaking me in a "body slam" posture."Is this a little joke of your's, little guy?" he screams, "I'm pissed-- QUIT FUCKING WITH ME!!" he screams.Meanwhile, I'm terrified, saying, "I'm just working, please put me down, I'm just working." Somewhere across the arena, I hear someone shout, "Put the little guy down, Gene, you're going to hurt him."He put me down, alright--just let go and stepped backwards. Now Gene's about six and a half feet tall and had me at full arm length over his head. I SLAMMED against the deck, and I SWEAR I bounced. I was stunned and couldn't move, while I assessed my body for damage and caught my breath.All of a sudden, he straddled me and sat on my chest. He collared me with one hand while slapping me with his other. he grilled me about where the fuck his costume was, and whether I was talking about what I saw in the dressing room. I repeatedly told him that I was just trying to work (slap) and really had no idea about his costume (slap) and I wasn't talking to anybody... I had a clove cigarette in the stem of my glasses and tried to offer it to him. He slapped me again, got very close to my face and growled, "I don't smoke."I was thinking to myself, Gosh, Gene, you snort coke, drink, and breathe fire on stage-- how should I know if you don't smoke... I just stared at him. Finally, he |
lurking, there’s still a high probability that other users face the same challenges.
RECOMMENDATION: Allow users to determine what “interesting” content means to them for personalized content discovery, as they expect to. Redesign the Browse page to allow self-conducted curation and customization of content. Self-curated collections is a prevalent design pattern within content-based networks (i.e. Medium, Pinterest, Youtube).
SEARCH RESULTS
Users find it difficult to sort through search results because they all look the same and because the quality signals are hard to find (i.e. upvotes, number of answers, answerer background).
“All the results look the same — no distinction between topic and questions. I had to sort through unwanted stuff (blog, questions, answers) just to find topics.”
Summary of user comments while interacting with “Search Results” screen.
RECOMMENDATION: Allow users to easily distinguish between the different search result types and see clearer quality signals. Improve the visual hierarchy for search results by making the differences between search result types more apparent (i.e. Topic vs. Blog vs. Profile) and by displaying highly-visible quality signals (i.e. Upvotes). Possible solutions include typography adjustments, search results filtering, and other applications of Gestalt Laws.
Design Solution: Small Fixes vs. Deeper Design Challenges
In usability testing, small (yet caustic) usability problems usually arise and can generally be fixable without requiring elaborate redesign. For example, a fellow Tradecraft UX Designer recently conducted a usability test on Dropbox Photos and proposed simple but impactful solutions.
In Quora’s case, however, the product is not so contained. Changing the entire content taxonomy of Quora (Question / Answer, Open Question, Topic, Blog Post, Profile, Answer Wiki) is very different from improving how a user interacts with one screen. The categories are difficult to untangle because they’re not mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. Changing any of these intermingled items can have large ramifications for the entire user experience.
As a designer, I want to make sure I solve the user’s problems, not weave together patches and end up with a frankenproduct. Content Discovery and Visual Hierarchy / Quality Signals are deep design challenges that require more scientific rigor in the design process to address. To address these usability issues, I’ve borrowed elements from Adaptive Path’s design process as taught in their UX Intensive workshop.
My design process: Currently in Part One, I focus on the Usability Test and some personal Research I’ve conducted in the past.
In my next post, I explore the design problem much further and propose higher fidelity prototype solutions.
Some example sketches during my Ideation phase of my Design Process. Diverging and coming up with as many solutions as possible is critical.
Up Next — The Solution & Process: Persona, User Stories, Sketches, Wireframes, and Prototypes.IRS attorneys will be even busier than normal next week, because another federal judge has told them to show up in court July 11 to defend the federal tax agency.
They will have to explain to U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton why the IRS shouldn't be required to let an outside expert evaluate whether emails on the computer hard drives of former IRS official Lois Lerner and six colleagues really are lost forever, as the agency recently told Congress.
Responding to a motion filed Monday by True the Vote, a Houston-based conservative nonprofit at the center of IRS targeting during the 2010 and 2012 campaigns, Walton issued an order Tuesday to hear arguments next week.
The IRS recently told Congress that a mysterious crash of the hard drives last year irretrievably destroyed nearly two years of emails to and from Lerner and the others to and from people in other federal agencies, including the White House.
But True the Vote wants a digital forensics expert from outside the IRS to assess the evidence.
“Even if the ill-timed hard drive ‘crash’ was truly an accident, and even if the IRS genuinely believes that the emails are ‘unrecoverable,’ the circumstances of the spoliation at issue cry out for a second opinion,” True the Vote's attorneys told Walton in the motion filed late Monday.
“It may well prove to be the case that a computer forensics expert could recover evidence that the IRS has been unable to retrieve.
"At the very least, such an expert could preserve whatever evidence has not already been wiped clean from the IRS’s computers along with whatever is stored on the Individual Defendants’ home computers, cell phones, and other PDAs.”
IRS attorneys will be in the federal District Court on July 10 to explain why the government failed to tell Judicial Watch about the lost emails for months despite their being evidence in the nonprofit's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
Judicial Watch, a government watchdog nonprofit, filed its lawsuit last October after IRS officials failed to respond adequately to a May 2013 FOIA request for the Lerner emails.
The government asked Walton on Monday night to dismiss the motion for an outside digital forensics expert. But True the Vote argued that merely asking for the dismissal “does not give them carte blanche to destroy or permit the destruction of documents and discoverable information that are relevant to the IRS Targeting Scheme in general and the application of True the Vote for exempt status.
“If the IRS’s public statements about ‘recycling’ Ms. Lerner’s hard drive are true, that alone establishes spoliation of evidence that violates federal statutes and regulations, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and professional ethics and responsibility.
“These statements, coupled with the refusal of Defendants’ counsel, to provide any assurances about what has been and will be done to preserve evidence underscore the need for the relief that True the Vote seeks."
An IRS spokesman has been asked for comment on True the Vote's motion and the July 11 court date.
Editor's note: Judicial Watch is representing the Washington Examiner in the newspaper's federal lawsuit seeking access to Consumer Financial Protection Bureau records under FOIA.
Mark Tapscott is executive editor of the Washington Examiner.BY: Follow @HashtagGriswold
Google and YouTube on Tuesday temporarily locked out the accounts of a Canadian professor critical of gender-neutral pronouns and other transgender issues.
University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson made headlines in Canada last year when he was openly critical of a bill that would prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity and expression under the Canadian Human Rights Act. The bill also extended hate speech provisions to transgender people.
The psychology professor warned that the bill could hamper free speech by punishing those who refuse to use gender-neutral or preferred pronouns.
"I will never use words I hate, like the trendy and artificially constructed words ‘zhe' and ‘zher,'" Peterson argued. "These words are at the vanguard of a post-modern, radical leftist ideology that I detest, and which is, in my professional opinion, frighteningly similar to the Marxist doctrines that killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century."
Peterson was subsequently accused of bigotry and protested by transgender students. The University of Toronto sent two letters to Peterson warning that his refusal to use students' preferred pronouns could be a form of discrimination.
On Tuesday, Peterson reported that he was locked out of the Google/YouTube account he uses to spread his views.
Google has disabled my main account. No explanation given. Cannot access my YouTube channel. — Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) August 1, 2017
Google is refusing to reinstate my account. Violation of terms of service. No explanation given. https://t.co/sLOxXgw7De — Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) August 1, 2017
I cannot post new YouTube videos, including last week's Biblical lecture. No access. At least — for now — the videos are still up. https://t.co/BfDhw9bDzn — Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) August 1, 2017
Peterson posted screencaps of him battling with Google to regain control of his account.
"After review, your account is not eligible to be reinstated due to a violation of our Terms of Service," Google told him in an email.
Eventually, they relented and unblocked Peterson.
"Why was it shut down? Who knows?" he lamented. "Why did they refuse to reinstate it? Who knows?"Update: A few people were kind enough to correct me on some of my terminology. Where appropriate, 'decompiling' has been replaced with 'extracting'. My apologies if that confused or mislead anybody :) Updated post is here
A few weeks ago I got a home security system installed. The package included a 7-inch tablet called the Honeywell Tuxedo that mounts on the wall. It’s basically a primary controller for the security system. Given what’s been going on in the IoT space and just my pure curiosity, it didn’t take long before the poking and prodding began. My first approach was to treat it like a standard penetration test, identifying network services, lighting testing the web application and enumerating the attack surface. After the first two days of testing in my spare time, the thought occurred that it would suck to ruin the device by testing it too heavily. Nothing like breaking your system and telling support it’s because you fuzzed it to death.
Instead of investigating from the outside in, I decided to take a different approach and start looking at reverse engineering the firmware. However, as a penetration tester I’m completely out of my comfort zone; but there’s a first time for everything so bear with me.
Reading through the documentation of the Tuxedo there is a capability to install software updates via SD card. I also found where you can download the latest software update for the device. I couldn’t find any available source code on the web so perhaps this avenue is a good first step. At the time of this writing the latest software update is v5.3.9.0.
The software downloads as a ZIP, and when extracted reveals an executable. Extracting the.exe shows the HDR files mentioned on the website, but what is an HDR file? I was expecting something like a.bin, and running file just shows they are data files. Not a lot of help.
bullz3ye@ubuntu:~/honeywell$ unrar x TUXW_V5.3.9.0_CN.exe UNRAR 5.30 beta 2 freeware Copyright ( c ) 1993 -2015 Alexander Roshal Extracting from TUXW_V5.3.9.0_CN.exe Extracting ProgCV.hdr OK Extracting seconboot.hdr OK Extracting app1.hdr OK Extracting app2.hdr OK Extracting app3.hdr OK Extracting MCU.hex OK All OK bullz3ye@ubuntu:~/honeywell$ ls app1.hdr app2.hdr app3.hdr honeywell.log MCU.hex ProgCV.hdr seconboot.hdr TUXW_V5.3.9.0_CN.exe TUXW_V5.3.9.0_CN.zip bullz3ye@ubuntu:~/honeywell$ file *.hdr app1.hdr: data app2.hdr: data app3.hdr: data ProgCV.hdr: data seconboot.hdr: data
I spend entirely too much time googling what an HDR file is and how to decompress/extract/open it. Apparently an HDR is a high-dynamic-range image used for photography or something. I’m thinking, maybe Honeywell has some proprietary packaging tool that uses actual images for software updates?
What really reinforced this thought pattern was when using strings I get tons of references to a Linux environment.
bullz3ye@ubuntu:~/honeywell$ strings *.hdr | grep Linux Linux-2.6.31-207-g7286c01 Uncompressing Linux... Welcome to Freescale Semiconductor Embedded Linux Environment No Linux %s Ramdisk Image Linux bullz3ye@ubuntu:~/honeywell$ strings *.hdr | grep bash bash bash Ubashbug bashbug dabash.bash_history.bash_history getopt-parse.bash & getopt-test.bash getopt-parse.bash getopt-test.bash bullz3ye@ubuntu:~/honeywell$ strings *.hdr | grep passwd passwd passwd bullz3ye@ubuntu:~/honeywell$ strings *.hdr | grep Freescale Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. Welcome to Freescale Semiconductor Embedded Linux Environment CPU: Freescale i.MX35 at1 %d MHz
How did an embedded linux environment get packaged/compiled into a literal image file? I was getting somewhere though using strings to grep for more keywords. Perhaps there really is a file system in all this. At the very least I know I’m dealing with an embedded linux environment, know the kernel version, and can later read up on Freescale to get an idea of my target and the build process. I continue to use strings in order to try and put the pieces together.
At the same time, I couldn’t find a single reference point between files with extension HDR and embedded linux or Honeywell. I started looking for any references regarding Honeywell Tuxedo code at all to see if I could get any indication as to what these files are and how they are used. I didn’t find much at all, but finally doing a search for honeywell app2.hdr I run across a repo in Github that saved the day.
Two shell scripts exists, yitiaolong.sh and vam_dailybuild.sh, both appear to have something to do with the compilation process.
VAM apparently stands for VISTA Automation Module and is related to the Tuxedo. A youtube video shows the same interface that is on my Tuxedo device. Long story short these scripts had a wealth of useful information, but I’ll try to highlight some of the key points.
The code above shows project path to the Tuxedo source code and a project called Barracuda (which I’ve yet to dig into). A separate search shows that Barracuda is the web server of choice for the device, and is a separate task all together. Of course the first thing I do it try to access the source code but apparently the acssvn.honeywell.com site no longer exists. There were other past references to the Tuxedo project path online, leading me to think that at one point this repository was publicly available. Either way I can’t access it now.
Later I come across a slideshow with a reference to the subdomain above and it reads:
Here is what we have: acssvn.honeywell.com is their internal link to their version control system, which must mean that the github scripts are intended for internal usage. Are these the scripts used to compile their internal software updates? If so, why is it publicly available? It doesn’t seem to come from a formal Honeywell github repo, just a normal user…perhaps an employee?
I read through both scripts, and at the end of yitiaolong.sh it shows the files that I’ve extracted from the.exe being copied to an ftp.
Okay so these scripts definitely have something to do with the software updates. Going up a bit in the code I see this the following:
It looks like the source code is pushed into a root JFFS2 file system (perhaps that Freescale embedded environment), and the file system is generated into a binary. We now know that app2.jffs2 exists somewhere within the app2.hdr file, which is a JFFS2 file system compiled with Freescale tool ‘sumtool’. However, there is a bit of a grey area between how app2.jffs2 turns into app2.hdr and where the rest of the files come from. Lines 55 through 59 shows a python script named header.py that appends a string somewhere in app.jffs2? Let’s take a look at the actual app2.hdr.
bullz3ye@ubuntu:~/honeywell$ head -10 app2.hdr appl000�����w�Fri Oct 07 13 :09:51 2016app2.jffs2TUXW_V5.3.9.0APPTUXEDOPLUSVA��2�v7P6R�W ���i'�Drop_Cache�����d5�����6R�W6R�W6R�W����w^x^�UMlU�u����ր�O [ E {(( ����B ( ��� ( EQ���ec/� { ��nR [ BJJT����P�!H� R�������!�J��� | �?��6�<3o�ͼ�yo2���
Objdump wasn’t recognizing the file format so I just used head and less to see if that header does exists. At least we can draw the conclusion that some form of header is being prepended to the data file using header.py, is responsible for changing the extension. Still the question remains, is HDR some custom file type?
I decide to step away for a bit since I don’t have access to header.py, and that extension is really sending me for a loop. About an hour later it occurs to me that what if the.hdr extension stands for ‘header’ and wasn’t the name of any valid file type?! What if it’s just a JFFS2 file system renamed to indicate that a header has been included for the sake of installation?
bullz3ye@ubuntu:~/honeywell$ binwalk app2.hdr DECIMAL HEXADECIMAL DESCRIPTION -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 128 0x80 JFFS2 filesystem, little endian
What the f###…I should have done that to begin with.
Well, at least we know what we are dealing with here. JFFS2 is a popular file system, and we can use dd to extract it out.
bullz3ye@ubuntu:~/honeywell$ dd bs = 1 skip = 128 if = app2.hdr of = app2.jffs2 130211540 +0 records in 130211540 +0 records out 130211540 bytes ( 130 MB, 124 MiB ) copied, 119.978 s, 1.1 MB/s bullz3ye@ubuntu:~/honeywell$ file app2.jffs2 app2.jffs2: Linux jffs2 filesystem data little endian
Now that we’ve got the file system, let’s mount it. You can’t mount it like a standard loopback device, but have to create a fake flash device first.
bullz3ye@ubuntu:~/honeywell$ sudo modprobe mtdram total_size = 32768 erase_size = 256 bullz3ye@ubuntu:~/honeywell$ sudo modprobe mtdblock bullz3ye@ubuntu:~/honeywell$ sudo mkdir -p /mnt/disk bullz3ye@ubuntu:~/honeywell$ sudo dd if = app2.jffs2 of = /dev/mtdblock0 dd: writing to '/dev/mtdblock0' : No space left on device 65537 +0 records in 65536 +0 records out 33554432 bytes ( 34 MB, 32 MiB ) copied, 0.211631 s, 159 MB/s bullz3ye@ubuntu:~/honeywell$ sudo mount -t jffs2 /dev/mtdblock0 /mnt/disk
Let’s mount and cd into /mnt/disk…
Yes! The first thing I go for now is /etc/shadow or some credentials but it turns out that the Linux environment folders are empty.
bullz3ye@ubuntu:/mnt/disk$ ls -ldh */ drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Oct 7 2016 bin/ drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Oct 7 2016 dev/ drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 0 Oct 7 2016 etc/ drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 0 Oct 7 2016 home/ drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 0 Oct 7 2016 lib/ drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Oct 7 2016 mdns/ drwxr-xr-x 8 root root 0 Oct 7 2016 mnt/ drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 0 Oct 7 2016 opt/ drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Oct 7 2016 proc/ drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Oct 7 2016 root/ drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Oct 7 2016 sbin/ drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Oct 7 2016 sys/ drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 0 Oct 7 2016 tmp/ drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Oct 7 2016 usr/ drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Oct 7 2016 var/ drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Oct 7 2016 vidrec/
This leaves the executables, which are apparently ELF 32-bit LSB ARM executables. Based on the file names, these are definitely the executables that facilitate the processes running on the Tuxedo tablet, specifically the files tuxedo, TotalConnect, and SDCardStatus are interesting. tuxedo has to be the core binary, and TotalConnect must be used to interface with the product’s Honeywell Total Connect 2.0 application. Between this and the empty folders, I assume (at least in this case) that the software update doesn’t replace the entire file system but just the proprietary ELF binaries.
Taking a step back, I repeat this process of binwalk-ing the hdr files; extracting it’s contents to gather as much info as I can. Through this I discover a ton of useful information for going forward, including certificates, Makefiles, and some CRC32 polynomial tables. The next step is to figure out how to reverse engineer and decompile the binaries, starting with tuxedo for further analysis. That will likely be a part 2 to this post, but I’ve got a lot of work cut out for me.
Conclusion:
Starting from a software update, and some critical thinking, I was able to decompile the firmware update for my Honeywell Tuxedo. As a result, I have access to the proprietary binaries, and additional components that make up the device. My next two approaches are:
Reverse engineer the binaries in an attempt to discovery exploitable vulnerabilities, and learn more about the device. Set up a test environment to execute the binaries so I can actively identify the attack surface, fuzz where possible, and really dig into it.
I hit a few bumps in the road along the way but hey that’s how you learn. Thanks for taking the time to read and definitely feel free to give feedback! Below are some good links that were extremely helpful along the way.
https://blog.bramp.net/post/2012/01/24/hacking-linksys-e4200v2-firmware/ https://wiki.securityweekly.com/Reverse_Engineering_Firmware_PrimerThe fallout from the deadly 2014 Lindt cafe siege in Sydney triggered a year-long review of the so-called callout provisions of the Defence Act amid fears the legislation contained so many legal and administrative barriers it would hinder any swift military response to a terrorist assault in Australia. Legal hurdles will be cleared away to allow the amy to respond to domestic terror incidents Credit:Defence Media It was the first major review of Defence's contribution to domestic counter-terrorism in more than a decade. "We cannot afford to take a'set and forget' mentality on national security," Mr Turnbull said. "We must constantly review and update our responses to the threat of terrorism." Other changes will see army commandos train select state and territory police teams, while Defence will also offer to permanently embed officers within state law enforcement agencies to act as liaisons and advisers.
The Australian Defence Force has two tactical assault groups - one in Sydney and one in Perth - on standby to rapidly deploy to a terrorist attack. Hostages flee from the Lindt cafe in Martin Place during the early hours of December 16, 2014. Credit:Andrew Meares While Defence was prepared to intervene in the Sydney siege and even built a mock-up of the Lindt cafe at the Holsworthy Barracks, it was never asked to get involved. The coroner overseeing the Lindt cafe inquiry found the ADF did not need to be deployed because the complex callout criteria had not been met and NSW Police largely had the situation in hand. But the coroner did note the "challenge global terrorism poses for state police forces calls into question the adequacy of existing arrangements". Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Defence Minister Marise Payne will announce the changes on Monday. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
Under the current system, the ADF can only be deployed if state or territory police believe their capability or capacity to respond has been exceeded. That provision will be abolished under the Turnbull government's changes, meaning states could request federal help even if they retained control of the situation. Under extraordinary circumstances, the Commonwealth would not need to wait for an invitation and could make the decision to deploy the ADF. The system also only allows the ADF to be deployed if the governor-general signs off on a request from the prime minister, attorney-general and defence minister, who all have to agree state forces are incapable of properly responding. Mr Turnbull said state and territory police remain the best first responders "immediately after an attack starts". "But Defence can offer more support... to enhance their capabilities and increase their understanding of Defence's unique capabilities to ensure a comprehensive response to potential terrorist attacks," he said.
The changes, which need to pass Parliament, will be discussed at the next Council of Australian Governments meeting. Mr Turnbull said the new system would better support states in preparing for terrorist incidents and improve information flows between the ADF and police during an incident. Former SAS commander-turned federal MP Andrew Hastie has previously said the Sydney siege response demonstrated state police were "not up to the task" of dealing with the unique nature of Islamist terrorism. "The most lethal means of statecraft resides with the ADF," Mr Hastie said. "Contain and negotiating, which was the approach in the Lindt cafe siege, isn't going to work [in dealing with Islamist terrorists]."
Australia's terror threat level remains at "probable", meaning the government has credible intelligence indicating individuals or groups have the intent and capability to conduct a terrorist attack. Follow us on FacebookThe first Clinton-Trump debate was roughly a draw — which is bad news for her, because she needs to turn this race around, and she failed.
Clinton was on the attack most of the night, with the marked help of moderator Lester Holt. But she didn’t score any body blows — nor remotely offer a rationale for her candidacy beyond he’s just too dangerous, a case she failed to make.
Trump wasted time on pointless defense on basically irrelevant issues — the birther stuff, his taxes and so on. But he didn’t come off as the maniac she needs him to be. New to this game, yes; too volatile, no.
And, while he failed to hit on some obvious openings (no mention of her email follies when cybersecurity came up), he hit hard on the fact that she’s been around forever without actually delivering on anything she’s promising now.
Indeed, Trump won the opening round — because he actually had credible ideas on creating jobs (better deals on trade, lower taxes on business, less deadening regulation), while she offered nothing beyond social-justice thoughts on “justice”: equal pay, sick leave, tax the rich to pay for it all. Good stuff for people who are employed; nothing for those who aren’t.
Donald Trump remains the candidate of change; Hillary Clinton, the tribune of the status quo.10 little things that I love about football
chawla7687 FOLLOW ANALYST Editor's Pick 7.35K // 25 Nov 2011, 18:15 IST SHARE Share Options × Facebook Twitter Flipboard Reddit Google+ Email
Another top ten, well I can’t help it. I love this sport so much, this time I decided to focus on the little things we love about the game. I feel each one of the following points warrants an article of its own titled “Reasons why I love football”, like the three previous articles I have written on this topic. But I thought I would compile them for your benefit, go ahead and enjoy, and share the little things you love about this game.
10. Penalty shoot-outs
Many commentators call it a lottery, and if a result is undecided after 120 minutes, they probably are correct. I don’t care. All the emotions attached with any classic film can be experienced in the 10 minutes of a penalty shootout, irrespective of which team you are supporting. The feelings are there even if you are a neutral.
The drama when the tenth penalty is about to be taken, that decides the result of a Champions League or a World Cup final, can never be matched. My first, and one of the best, memory of football is a penalty shoot out. Tucked away in Saudi Arabia with my dad, we watched the final of the 1994 World Cup final, where Romario scored his penalty, and Baggio sent his kick over the bar, hence handing Brazil the trophy. Total absolute heartbreak for the best player of the tournament. And since that day, I am totally in love with penalty shootouts.
1 / 10 NEXTUpdate (6:30 pm ET): In further proof that Spain's brutal crackdown on today's Catalan independence referendum only helped bolster the seccessionist cause, the regional government announced that voters had overwhelmingly voted in favor of independence, with 89% voting to separate from Spain.
Shortly after midnight on Sunday, Catalan government spokesman Jordi Turull announced that 2,262,424 ballot papers had been counted. There were 2,020,144 "yes" votes, or just under 90% of the total, and just 176,565 "no" votes.
The regional government has promised to officially declare independence within 48 hours.
Even though Spanish authorities ruled that the vote was illegal, Dimitrij Rupel, head of the International Parliamentary delegation on Catalonia’s referendum, said at a news conference in Barcelona on Sunday that the referendum on independence was prepared in agreement with Spanish existing legislation, potentially setting up the regional government for a legal battle.
In a speech earlier this evening, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, who tried to suppress the vote by jailing public officials, shutting down electronic voting systems, ordering police to manually destroy ballots and seal off polling places, declared that no referendum had taken place.
All eyes now turn to Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont as tensions between Spain and its restive state are expected to come to a head, as the prospect of intensifying street violence looms.
Update (5:30 pm ET): Though the results of today's referendum have yet to be announced, separatists in Catalonia are urging the government to declare independence from Spain, citing today's violent crackdown as the reason. In a rousing speech following the close of voting, Carles Puigdemont, the leader of the Catalan government, said its citizens had earned the right to form an independent state and said the results of the referendum, which are not yet known, will be sent to the local parliament to be ratified.
Though the central government in Spain declared the refendum illegal, and send federal Civil Guard and National Police forces to try and suppress the vote, police only managed to shut down a small sliver of polling stations, allowing many in the region of more than 7 million people which has a larger economy than Portugal, to cast ballots.
(1) A vosaltres, que heu ensenyat al món el civisme d'un poble pacífic, que heu resistit vexacions i repressió, us dono les gràcies #1Oct pic.twitter.com/TmofPAfHmU — Carles Puigdemont (@KRLS) October 1, 2017
In public remarks delivered following a speech from Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, Puigdemont said that "with this day of hope and suffering, the citizens of Catalonia have won the right to an independent state in the form a republic." He also said that the EU could no longer “continue to look the other way” from human rights violations around the referendum, according to a translation in the Guardian.
"The Spanish government has today written a shameful page in its relationship with Catalonia," adding that there had been abuses of human rights committed by Spanish police.
Puigdemont added that he will keep his pledge to declare independence unilaterally if the "Yes" side wins. A law passed by the Catalan parliament says a win of more than 50% for the "Yes" side will trigger a declaration of independence within 48 hours of the vote regardless of the turnout. He appealed to European leaders, saying the Catalan crisis was "no longer an internal Spanish matter".
"The Catalan government will transmit to the Catalan Parliament, the seat and expression of the sovereignty of our people, the results of the referendum, so that it can act according to that laid out in the referendum law", he said.
Spain's Constitutional Court suspended the regional law governing the independence referendum, but Puigdemont's government pushed ahead with the vote anyway, as the Associated Press noted.
So far, 844 people have been injured, including 33 police, in the day's demonstrations.
Meanwhile, Barcelona Mayor Ada Colaucalled for Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to resign after the shocking brutality that federal police sent by the government in Madrid demonstrated. Police attacked peaceful demonstrators, punched and kicked voters and dragged some from polling places.
Mayor Ada Colau told a local television station that "Rajoy has been a coward, hiding behind the prosecutors and courts. Today he crossed all the red lines with the police actions against normal people, old people, families who were defending their fundamental rights."
"It seems obvious to me that Mariano Rajoy should resign."
Mirroring Puigdemont's comments, Colau said that Catalans had "earned the right to demand" a proper vote on independence from Spain, adding that "the European Union must take a stand on what has happened in Catalonia.
Rajoy in a speech earlier in the evening declared that the referendum was illegitimate, and that no vote had even taken place, eliciting calls for his resignation from local officials.
Government officials from across Europe criticized Rajoy for the violent crackdown. But perhaps the most amusing criticism came from Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro who on Sunday slammed Rajoy for trying to halt the referendum, saying the conservative leader was a hypocrite for supporting Venezuela’s opposition while cracking down on dissent at home.
Spain has been a vocal critic of leftist Maduro, accusing him of undermining Venezuela’s democracy and plunging the country’s 30 million people into the direst poverty because of his government's economic mismanagement. Maduro seized on the images of Spanish riot police bursting into polling stations across Catalonia on Sunday, confiscating ballot boxes and voting papers, as evidence that it is Rajoy who lacks democratic credentials. Venezuela’s opposition responded by accusing Maduro of hypocrisy, saying the Venezuelan leader violently clamped down on four months of protests demanding humanitarian aid, early elections, and respect for the opposition-led Congress.
* * *
Update (4:15 pm ET): As promised, Barcelona FC played its season opening against Las Palmas to an empty stadium to protest the brutal actions of the Spanish government. In a statement released earlier, the team said it had asked the Professional Football League to postpone the game because of today's referendum, but it had refused.
Polls across the region have now closed, but because many of the region's centralized voting systems have been cut off by Spanish authorities, the regional government hasn't been able to provide estimates for turnout. Counting the votes could take time. However, the Catalan government has said it would declare independence within 48 hours should the vote be in favor of leaving.
...Meanwhile, the number injured in today's unrest has climbed above 750.
Barcelona game played with empty stands at Camp Nou in protest of the Spanish government's actions in #Catalonia. https://t.co/3qoVmhn7ed pic.twitter.com/sSiK8wOjHm — Holger Zschaepitz (@Schuldensuehner) October 1, 2017
* * *
Update (12:30 pm ET): Clashes between riot police and voters in Barcelona and other towns and cities across Catalonia have left hundreds injured as police beat peaceful demonstrators with sticks and fired rubber bullets into crowds. The clashes, which have been well-documented by journalists and members of the public, are resulting in a massive public embarassment for the government in Madrid, as photos of elderly Catalonian pensioners with blood streaming down their faces have flooded the internet.
According to the Catalonian health ministry, 465 people have been injured during today's demonstrations, including at least nine local police officers and three Civil Guard officers. Here's a breakdown via the Guardian: 216 were hurt in Barcelona, 80 in Girona, 64 in Lleida, 53 in Terres de l’Ebre, 27 in Catalunya central and 25 in Tarragona.
Despite the crackdown, the Guardian reports that the majority of polling stations in the province have remained open. Spanish national police have closed down 46 in total (27 in Barcelona, six in Tarragona, six in Girona and seven in Lleida). The Guardia Civil have closed another 46 (14 in Barcelona, 12 in Tarragona, eight in Girona and 12 in Lleida). Catalan police, the Mossos, say they have closed 244 polling stations across Catalonia. In total, 336 polling stations have been shuttered. To put this in context, the Catalan government said more than 2,000 polling stations were set up across the province for the referendum. Meanwhile, the Spanish government said that three people, including one girl, have been arrested for civil disobedience and attacking officers.
The shocking photos have provoked widespread condemnation. In the UK, Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn urged Prime Minister Theresa May to urge Spanish PM Mariano Rajoy to end the crackdown.
I urge @Theresa_May to appeal directly to Rajoy to end police violence in Catalonia & find political solution to this constitutional crisis. — Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) October 1, 2017
A solidarity march with Catalonia is taking place outside the European Union offices in Edinburgh.
Outside EU offices in Edinburgh. @Jonathon_Shafi calls for "a wave of solidarity" in response to every attack upon Catalan democracy. pic.twitter.com/NA2F2ZcPZo — Michael Gray (@GrayInGlasgow) October 1, 2017
All elements of Catalonian society have pitched in to try and protect voters from brutal police tactics. This video emerged showing Catalonian firemen being beaten with sticks by the police.
We thought we had seen it all. The Spanish police battering the Catalonian Fire Service tells us this is sickening. pic.twitter.com/SwMOkm4kjG — YES East Kilbride (@EKsaysYES |
, because we're way overdue").
The original BF1 pitch given onstage was WW1, with one caveat: "screw realism, we're adding female soldiers, because we're way overdue". — Amandine Coget (@LiaSae) June 12, 2016
This changed, however, as DICE decided female multiplayer characters did not appeal "to the core audience of boys".
I did eventually get them to spit out the real reasons.
All that is believable but female soldiers are not, to the core audience of boys. — Amandine Coget (@LiaSae) June 12, 2016
Even if this is just in DLC, it's pleasing to see the decision changed.Sage Stallone, son of actor Sylvester Stallone, has been found dead, The New York Post and TMZ report.
The junior Stallone was reportedly found at home in Los Angeles. TMZ reports that his father is extremely distraught. The Post spoke with Sage Moonblood Stallone's attorney, who said the death came as a complete shock.
"He was in good spirits, and working on all kinds of projects,” George Braunstein told the paper. “He was planning on getting married. I am just devastated. He was an extremely wonderful, loving guy. This is a tragedy.”
The Post reports that his mother, Sasha Czack, had also been notified of her son's passing. Stallone made his acting debut alongside his father in "Rocky V." He went on to act in a number of films, most recently in "Promises Written in Water" in 2010 (he also appeared in "The Agent," a short, and in a 2011 television documentary episode on the Rocky films).
Sylvester Stallone was in San Diego Thursday to promote "Expendables 2," his new film with Arnold Schwarzenegger. The actors spoke on a panel in Hall H at Comic-Con.
For more information, visit the Post and TMZ.Share this...
The demonization of the outdoor barbecue has begun – expect it to be banned soon in our lifetime.
I like visiting the German alarmist websites. Among my favorites is klimaretter “climate rescuers”, a leading alarmist site run by a gaggle of tree-hugging, panic-spreading kooks who insist the end is near. They’re aligned with Joe Romm, Bill McKibben and other nutjobs. Stefan Rahmstorf donates money to them.
Today their entertainment did not disappoint me. Climate-rescuer contributor Georg Etscheit shares his experience and exasperation over a barbecue birthday party he was invited to by his barbecue-fan dentist – too much smoke, environmental destruction and fat!
For the environmentally and climatically obsessed Georg, all that the charcoal-burning and meat-eating is a “pyromaniacal ritual” that is intolerable and has to stop.
First he frets that in the future climate change will surely bring us many more days that will be ideal for having more environmentally destructive barbecues.
Next, he describes the set-up his meat-eating dentist had:
In his yard behind his dental practice, he had a pavilion set up for guests and his barbecue equipment was placed near it. The first thing that caught my eye was this voluminous casket-like appliance of US-American origin, a metal box with a huge cover for the charcoal. There’s an overheat feature that is supposed to be good for handling an entire pig. And such an animal was indeed lying on that casket, red, oozing and carved – a wretched picture. And I was supposed to eat that soon?”
But the cruelty that the poor pig frying on the grill had to endure was the least of his worries. Next he describes the dentist’s grill in more detail:
My barbecue-enthusiast dentist of course owned a luxurious barbecue grill, the kind you can buy at every home-center. Such a luxury grill-monster on wheels can easily cost several thousand euros. Sizzling on the grill, producing huge clouds of smoke, was an abundance of sausage and spare ribs. Then I noticed he also had a smaller spherical grill with a dozen grilled chickens going as well.”
Georg then complains about the all the smoke and grease, advising barbecue guests that it’s best to wear old clothing to barbecues because…
Smelly clouds of smoke are produced by the burning spare ribs and charred chicken, which are also drenched with artificial smoke-aroma barbecue sauces, all accompanied by mayonnaise-soaked egg, potato and pasta salads, which all surely leave fat and grease everywhere.”
How yukky! By now I can imagine poor Georg sitting as far away as possible, in some corner all by himself. He adds:
I don’t want to go further into detail. But for me it is clear that there is little to be desired from such pyromaniacal male rituals from the early times of the homo sapien sapiens. From a culinary perspective, invitations to barbecues are almost always a catastrophe, also health-wise because charred fat and meat in addition to the synthetically produced sauces and marinades are known to be extremely carcinogenic and very difficult to digest without huge quantities of pure alcohol.”
Well, alcohol does help. Next he describes the environmental and climatic impacts of barbecues:
Ecologically and from a climate perspective, barbecues are nothing but a disaster. Just the enormous quantities of meat at barbecues is completely unacceptable. Then there’s the charcoal, which is ecologically okay only if you look at it only on the surface. About two thirds of the 300,000 tons of charcoal burned in Germany every year by barbecue fans comes from the South American rain-forests. Most of the raw wood for this must be illegally cut.”
Again the rainforests. Georg then says that barbecues will take the planet to a tipping point:
Barbecue fans contribute to the destruction of the rain forests in three ways, and thus to climate change: First because of the soy production needed for producing huge amounts of meat. Secondly through the chopping of trees for producing charcoal. Moreover, this takes away an important source of fuel for the local people, who then in turn have to cut even more trees down. Now that rising temperatures are leading to a classic vicious circle whereby the number of summer evenings with”super barbecue weather” are rising, which in turn drives up demand for more charcoal, which leads to more deforestation and so on.”
Has he never gone camping in the forest? I think Georg just needs more getting used to barbecues. Everybody invite Georg to your next barbecue: etscheit@gute-geschichten.de. I’m having one on August 25, and Georg you are invited to come.Sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP) is becoming increasingly recognized as a very real and devastating problem in which impaired breathing is thought to play a critical role. Researchers believe breathing may be impaired during and after seizures, without the patient's knowledge.
By using electrical stimulation to activate the amygdala, a group of University of Iowa researchers has identified areas of the human brain in which breathing is controlled and, in some cases, impaired, providing an important insight into SUDEP.
Their study - which marks the first time researchers have stimulated the amygdala in humans and reported loss of breathing - is published in the July 15 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.
Using a research participant with medically intractable epilepsy - epilepsy which can't be well-controlled with two or more medications - whose brain was already being monitored to map the focus of seizures, researchers found that when seizures spread to the amygdala, the patient stopped breathing. That effect could be reproduced by electrically stimulating the amygdala. Strikingly, the patient wasn't aware he wasn't breathing even though he was wide awake at the time. This finding was reproduced in two other human subjects.
"Amazingly, the patient was completely unaware that he had stopped breathing," says Brian Dlouhy, M.D., assistant professor of neurosurgery at UI Carver College of Medicine and lead author of the study. "It was remarkable to all of us that one of the essentials of life - breathing - could be inhibited and the patients themselves were completely unaware of this."
"The patient just sat there, unconcerned that he was not breathing," says John Wemmie, M.D., Ph.D., professor of psychiatry, molecular physiology and biophysics, and neurosurgery at the UI Carver College of medicine, and an author of the paper. "If we asked him to hold his breath for the same duration of time, it was difficult for him and he could barely do it. But when the amygdala was stimulated, he didn't even notice that his breathing had stopped."
Dr. George Richerson, M.D., Ph.D., professor and chairman of neurology, and professor of molecular physiology and biophysics, and neurosurgery at the UI Carver College of Medicine, also an author on the paper, says, "These findings provide an explanation for why SUDEP occurs after seizures, because patients would stop breathing but be completely unaware that their blood oxygen levels are progressively dropping to fatally low levels. The lack of awareness would prevent activation of the reflex that is needed to restore oxygen levels back to normal."
The team's findings may be key in helping to decrease instances of SUDEP, Dlouhy says.
"Identifying brain areas where seizure spread interferes with breathing may help identify patients at risk for SUDEP and lead to preventive strategies," he says.Season 14 is here! Have old or no comp stats? Play at least one more comp game and close Overwatch. You should then be set!
408 Shiftdt PSN Played 2 months Updated 2 months 3000 Skill Rating 6% On Fire 333 Wins Overview
Heroes
Records
Trends
Activity
Compare Most Played Heroes More All Offense Offense Defense Defense Tank Tank Support Support Genji 2 months ∞ Quick Rank 9,682 Quick Score 147 Wins 4.84 Medals 1 day Time Played 5.5% On Fire 26.41 Eliminations 7.01 Obj Kills 00:58 Obj Time 8,034 Damage 12.52 Deaths 28% Weapon Acc 7.0% Critical Hits 2,207 Dmg Reflected 15.14 Final Blows 6.49 Solo Kills 3.64 Dragon Kills Pharah 2 years ∞ Quick Rank 7,283 Quick Score 36 Wins 4.42 Medals 7 hours Time Played 11.0% On Fire 27.25 Eliminations 7.72 Obj Kills 00:31 Obj Time 9,596 Damage 10.00 Deaths 42% Weapon Acc 38.75 Direct Hits 7.69 Solo Kills 17.61 Final Blows 0.39 Env Kills 3.44 Barrage Kills Widowmaker 9 months ∞ Quick Rank 6,787 Quick Score 30 Wins 3.40 Medals 7 hours Time Played 3.1% On Fire 23.03 Eliminations 4.90 Obj Kills 00:20 Obj Time 7,266 Damage 12.33 Deaths 38% Scoped Acc 8.0% Critical Hits 33% Weapon Acc 8.23 Solo Kills 15.50 Final Blows 1.33 Venom Kills Hanzo 1 year ∞ Quick Rank 5,087 Quick Score 28 Wins 4.21 Medals 6 hours Time Played 6.9% On Fire 22.50 Eliminations 6.71 Obj Kills 00:41 Obj Time 7,506 Damage 15.64 Deaths 18% Weapon Acc 8.0% Critical Hits 72% Final Blows 7.68 Solo Kills 0.00 Storm Kills 2.11 Dragon Kills Tracer 7 months ∞ Quick Rank 4,891 Quick Score 19 Wins 5.26 Medals 4 hours Time Played 3.1% On Fire 24.79 Eliminations 6.74 Obj Kills 00:55 Obj Time 7,580 Damage 1,154 Self Healing 11.74 Deaths 32% Weapon Acc 7.0% Critical Hits 13.05 Final Blows 5.21 Solo Kills 0.63 Bombs Stuck 1.32 Bomb Kills Winston 2 months ∞ Quick Rank 5,115 Quick Score 12 Wins 3.67 Medals 2 hours Time Played 6.1% On Fire 24.08 Eliminations 7.58 Obj Kills 01:24 Obj Time 5,850 Damage 11.17 Deaths 5.00 Solo Kills 55% Final Blows 9,413 Dmg Blocked 6.08 Melee Kills 7.08 Jump Kills 2.50 Rage Kills McCree 1 year ∞ Quick Rank 3,574 Quick Score 10 Wins 2.80 Medals 1 hour Time Played 5.5% On Fire 23.80 Eliminations 7.80 Obj Kills 00:33 Obj Time 6,187 Damage 11.80 Deaths 28% Weapon Acc 9.0% Critical Hits 14.00 Final Blows 5.20 Solo Kills 0.40 FTH Kills 2.20 Deadeye Kills Sombra 2 years ∞ Quick Rank 3,993 Quick Score 8 Wins 4.12 Medals 1 hour Time Played 7.9% On Fire 32.38 Eliminations 7.12 Obj Kills 00:57 Obj Time 8,728 Damage 11.62 Deaths 36% Weapon Acc 0.0% Critical Hits 18.25 Final Blows 7.50 Solo Kills 6.12 Enemies Hacked 4.75 Enemies Pulsed Soldier: 76 2 years ∞ Quick Rank 2,898 Quick Score 9 Wins 4.56 Medals 60 minutes Time Played 7.6% On Fire 23.67 Eliminations 8.44 Obj Kills 00:25 Obj Time 6,862 Damage 1,169 Healing 9.89 Deaths 32% Weapon Acc 5.0% Critical Hits 12.78 Final Blows 11.44 Biotic Fields 6.00 Helix Kills 2.67 Visor Kills Bastion 1 year ∞ Quick Rank 4,070 Quick Score 6 Wins 6.33 Medals 60 minutes Time Played 30.7% On Fire 33.00 Eliminations 9.33 Obj Kills 00:22 Obj Time 14,080 Damage 1,411 Self Healing 15.17 Deaths 22% Weapon Acc 1.0% Critical Hits 68% Final Blows 10.00 Recon Kills 19.67 Sentry Kills 3.33 Tank Kills Junkrat 1 year ∞ Quick Rank 4,092 Quick Score 6 Wins 6.17 Medals 60 minutes Time Played 9.3% On Fire 27.67 Eliminations 9.83 Obj Kills 01:05 Obj Time 12,854 Damage 17.50 Deaths 19% Weapon Acc 19.83 Final Blows 8.83 Solo Kills 0.17 Env Kills 4.67 Enemy Traps 3.17 Tire Kills Reaper 2 years ∞ Quick Rank 2,114 Quick Score 3 Wins 5.00 Medals 40 minutes Time Played 10.0% On Fire 25.67 Eliminations 9.67 Obj Kills 01:02 Obj Time 7,526 Damage 833 Self Healing 10.33 Deaths 23% Weapon Acc 7.2% Critical Hits 13.00 Final Blows 8.67 Solo Kills 4.00 Blossom Kills Roadhog 2 years ∞ Quick Rank 1,817 Quick Score 3 Wins 5.33 Medals 39 minutes Time Played 0.0% On Fire 23.00 Eliminations 5.67 Obj Kills 01:00 Obj Time 6,589 Damage 4,015 Self Healing 10.33 Deaths 14% Weapon Acc 16.3% Critical Hits 4.33 Solo Kills 13.33 Heroes Hooked 43.0% Hook Acc 1.33 Hog Kills Zarya 2 years ∞ Quick Rank 1,185 Quick Score 2 Wins 6.50 Medals 34 minutes Time Played 7.5% On Fire 26.00 Eliminations 6.50 Obj Kills 01:07 Obj Time 6,218 Damage 11.50 Deaths 21% Weapon Acc 11.00% Avg Energy 4,758 Dmg Blocked 4.00 Power Kills 1.50 Graviton Kills 23.50 Proj Barriers Lúcio 9 months ∞ Quick Rank 1,363 Quick Score 2 Wins 5.00 Medals 29 minutes Time Played 2.9% On Fire 18.50 Eliminations 5.50 Obj Kills 01:37 Obj Time 5,967 Damage 4,579 Healing 13.00 Deaths 34% Weapon Acc 8.0% Critical Hits 0.50 Env Kills 1.50 Off Assists 4.00 Def Assists 12.50 Sound Barriers D.Va 2 years ∞ Quick Rank 0 Quick Score 1 Wins 11.00 Medals 28 minutes Time Played 2.3% On Fire 46.00 Eliminations 9.00 Obj Kills 01:01 Obj Time 11,998 Damage 19.00 Deaths 22% Weapon Acc 9.3% Critical Hits 21,540 Dmg Blocked 23.00 Final Blows 24.00 Mech Deaths 6.00 Destruct Kills Mercy 2 years ∞ Quick Rank 0 Quick Score 1 Wins 4.00 Medals 21 minutes Time Played 6.9% On Fire 18.00 Eliminations 7.00 Obj Kills 01:46 Obj Time 5,363 Damage 8,903 Healing 16.00 Deaths 30% Weapon Acc 11.6% Critical Hits 622 Dmg Amped 13.00 Off Assists 20.00 Def Assists 9.00 Resurrects Ana 2 years ∞ Quick Rank 0 Quick Score 1 Wins 5.00 Medals 19 minutes Time Played 10.7% On Fire 18.00 Eliminations 5.00 Obj Kills 00:35 Obj Time 4,759 Damage 7,075 Healing 20.00 Deaths 15% Weapon Acc 64% Scoped Acc 10.00 Enemies Slept 13.00 Off Assists 16.00 Def Assists 4.00 Boost Assists Doomfist 2 years ∞ Quick Rank -156 Quick Score 3 Wins 3.00 Medals 17 minutes Time Played 0.8% On Fire 10.67 Eliminations 4.00 Obj Kills 00:29 Obj Time 2,516 Damage 5.67 Deaths 17% Weapon Acc 72% Final Blows 1,804 Ability Damage 549 Defense Shield 1.67 Meteor Kills Symmetra 2 years ∞ Quick Rank 631 Quick Score 2 Wins 1.00 Medals 16 minutes Time Played 0.0% On Fire 9.50 Eliminations 2.50 Obj Kills 00:07 Obj Time 1,736 Damage 6.00 Deaths 0% Weapon Acc 3.50 Final Blows 7.00 Portal Trips 500 Dmg Blocked 5.00 Photon Kills 4.50 Sentry Kills Torbjörn 2 years ∞ Quick Rank 1,125 Quick Score 2 Wins 5.00 Medals 13 minutes Time Played 0.0% On Fire 12.00 Eliminations 6.00 Obj Kills 01:04 Obj Time 3,542 Damage 6.00 Deaths 27% Weapon Acc 4.4% Critical Hits 3.00 Weapon Kills 0.00 Overload Kills 9.00 Turret Kills 0.50 Molten Kills Zenyatta 2 years ∞ Quick Rank 0 Quick Score 1 Wins 7.00 Medals 9 minutes Time Played 0.0% On Fire 10.00 Eliminations 3.00 Obj Kills 00:38 Obj Time 3,012 Damage 1,389 Healing 13.00 Deaths 18% Weapon Acc 3.4% Critical Hits 5.00 Final Blows 5.00 Off Assists 3.00 Def Assists 0.00 Trans Healing Mei 2 years ∞ Quick Rank 0 Quick Score 1 Wins 2.00 Medals 8 minutes Time Played 3.8% On Fire 11.00 Eliminations 7.00 Obj Kills 00:16 Obj Time 2,191 Damage 524 Self Healing 6.00 Deaths 20% Weapon Acc 21.0% Critical Hits 2,057 Dmg Blocked 7.00 Final Blows 3.00 Enemies Frozen 1.00 Blizzard Kills Orisa 2 years ∞ Quick Rank 0 Quick Score 1 Wins 1.00 Medals 5 minutes Time Played 0.0% On Fire 4.00 Eliminations 0.00 Obj Kills 00:04 Obj Time 1,819 Damage 7.00 Deaths 22% Weapon Acc 0.00 Final Blows 0.00 Env Kills 0.00 Off Assists 807 Dmg Blocked 0 Dmg Amped Roles Role Wins Support 1 hour 7 Offense 2 days 235 Defense 15 hours 73 Tank 4 hours 19 Trends Wins On Fire Recent Activity More Quick Play 2 months 2 Wins 6.00 Medals 46.00 Eliminations 8.00 Obj Kills 01:42 Obj Time 15,166 Damage 0 Healing 20.00 Deaths 1 1 Competitive 4 months 1 - 0 Record 2.00 Medals 3,000 Skill Rating 25.00 Eliminations 17.00 Obj Kills 02:37 Obj Time 10,393 Damage 0 Healing 12.00 Deaths 1 - 0 Competitive 5 months 1 - 4 Record 2.60 Medals 3,000 Skill Rating 29.80 Eliminations 11.80 Obj Kills 02:04 Obj Time 14,041 Damage 746 Healing 11.80 Deaths 0 - 2 0 - 1 0 - 1 0 - 1 1,575 Medals 4.73 Avg 590 1.77 Avg 529 1.59 Avg 456 1.37 Avg Lifetime Stats Game Time Games Won 333 Avg Game Time 14:27 Time Spent Playing 3 days Time Spent Alive 2 days Time Spent Dead 9 hours (11.75%) Medals and Cards Total Medals 1,575 (4.73 avg) Gold Medals 590 (1.77 avg) Silver Medals 529 (1.59 avg) Bronze Medals 456 (1.37 avg) Voting Cards 190 (0.57 avg) Eliminations Eliminations 8,683 (26.1 avg) Final Blows 5,199 (59.88%) Solo Kills 2,264 (6.80) Deaths 4,242 (12.7 avg) E:D Ratio 2.05 Combat Statistics Damage Done 2,722,730 (8,176 avg) Healing Done 88,560 (266 avg)Image caption Harmohan Nangpal (l) and Vikram Singh, along with nine other men, deny sex charges against two vulnerable girls
Members of a child sex ring abused two vulnerable schoolgirls on a "massive scale", a court has heard.
One girl, who was aged 12 or 13 at the time, alleges she was abused and passed between 60 men who had sex with her, in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire.
Eleven men, on trial at the Old Bailey, variously deny 47 sexual offences between 2006 and 2012.
Prosecutor Oliver Saxby QC said the girls were conditioned into believing their "horrifying" ordeal was normal.
Both came from troubled backgrounds and wanted to feel grown up when they were taken in by the men.
'Easy prey'
Charges included the multiple rape of a child under 13, child prostitution and administering a substance to "stupefy" a girl in order to engage in sexual activity.
In all, 45 charges relate to one child, who cannot be identified for legal reasons and is known as "A", and four against a second girl, referred to as "B".
Mr Saxby said: "This case concerns child sexual exploitation on a massive scale.
"It features two young girls who were... sexually abused from the age of 12 or 13.
"Both girls were from unstable backgrounds, making perfect targets.
Image copyright Google Image caption The 11 men on trial at the Old Bailey all deny raping and abusing two vulnerable girls
"Their lives were 'off the rails'. They were looking for excitement, for attention, for somewhere to hang out away from school and home.
"They were wanting to feel grown up and looked after. And they were easy prey for a group of men wanting casual sexual gratification that was easy, regular and readily available."
Mr Saxby said the girls were befriended and given gifts such as alcohol, DVDs, food, and occasionally drugs.
"They were children, they spoke in terms of these men being their boyfriends. And they were passed from man to man - sometimes on a daily basis.
"The scale of it is, you may agree, horrifying. A estimated that she had sex with about 60 men," said Mr Saxby.
The 11 on trial are accused of being among the men who abused the schoolgirls.
At the time they lived in Aylesbury where the alleged abuse occurred and some were friends.
The trial continues.
Charges against the men:Adidas’ latest running shoe is subtle and soft-looking, with stitching that evokes the sea. It’s also made almost entirely from plastic recovered from the ocean.
Last year, Adidas teased a prototype of a shoe that it was working on to clean up the oceans and adjust its supply chain to better reflect the constraints of climate change.
Image: Adidas
Read More: Brands to Buy If You Want to Make the World a Better Place
Partnering with Parley for the Oceans, a non-profit committed to reducing plastic waste in the oceans, Adidas developed a finished product earlier this year with 95% ocean plastic recovered from near the Maldives.
And the shoe isn’t just a gimmick. It represents real change for the brand.
Read More: Adidas Is Making Swimsuits From Ocean Plastic, Too
Soon, 7,000 pairs of the “UltraBOOST Uncaged Parley" will be on sale for $220 each. In 2017, the brand aims to produce 1 million pairs of the sneakers from more than 11 million plastic bottles. Eventually, Adidas strives to eliminate virgin plastic from its supply chain altogether and hopes to expand its plastic cultivation to much more of its product line.
As Adidas notes on the product page, the shoes are “ spinning the problem into a solution. The threat into a thread.”
Adidas
This initiative gives consumers everywhere something to root for. It allows them to show their appreciation for the oceans and could potentially spur other companies to see the ocean’s waste problem as an opportunity for innovative environmentalism.
Read More: These Skateboards and Sunglasses Are Cleaning Up the Oceans
It’s no secret that the world’s oceans are filled with plastic and that this is harming marine life.
Each year, 8 million tons, or 16 billion pounds (7.2 billion kilograms) of plastic enter the world’s oceans. There are about 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic in the oceans today. Big pieces of plastic are routinely ingested by animals who then face a range of health problems. As plastic breaks down it leaches toxic chemicals into the water and deteriorates into small debris that blanket the ocean’s floors and are ingested by organisms up and down the food chain.
On its own, Adidas is merely chipping away at the problem, but the huge multinational corporation is shining a light on the problem and is lending credibility to clean-up efforts.
Read More: Does Recycling Your Clothes Actually Make a Difference?
When supply chains become circular and self-sustaining, the environment is protected from overexploitation and pollution. If this became the norm, then environments everywhere would be saved. And then there’d be a lot more space to test out these sneakers.Tuesday morning wasn't the first time that Hector Forastieri had to clean up blood from a sidewalk in Rogers Park.
A maintenance man at an apartment building at Ashland Avenue and Jonquil Terrace, Forastieri this time poured bleach and hot water on the jagged pool of blood where Keno Glass, 16, was killed in a shooting hours earlier as he visited friends.
Glass, an aspiring rapper who went by the name Kay Pee Lashore, was the latest casualty of gun violence in a Far North Side community that has now seen 15 people shot, three fatally, so far this year.
Forastieri, who has worked at the apartment building for about five years, said he has witnessed gunfire while walking down Jonquil, a pocket of the ethnically and racially diverse community that for years has been plagued by gang conflicts and violence.
“I don't want to work over here, but I have to,” said Forastieri, trying to sweep the blood away with a broom along the icy sidewalk left icy by Monday's snowstorm.
Glass, a student at Senn High School who was on spring break, was shot in the head at about 2:40 a.m. Tuesday by one or more occupants of a gray minivan, Chicago police said. He died at the scene.
Charlie Carter was watching TV in his second-floor apartment in the building when he heard four gunshots. He looked out of his window and saw Glass lying on his back on the sidewalk.
“Then I heard somebody else...crying,” Carter said Tuesday in front of the building.
Officers, responding quickly to a call of shots fired, saw a vehicle flee the scene, said police, citing preliminary information. The vehicle crashed nearby and officers apparehended at least one possible suspect on foot, police said.
Police were questioning at least two persons of interest, but no charges had been filed as of Tuesday evening, authorities said.
The shooting happened across the street from the Stephen F. Gale Math and Science Academy and about three blocks from the Howard station on the CTA's Red Line. The motive for the shooting remained unclear, police said.
Glass' brother, Antwan Hubbard, 19, said his brother “had a good heart.”
“He just wanted to get his family out of the hood. He wanted to make a change for everybody. That's why he was rapping,” Hubbard said. “To make a change.”
The neighborhood is statistically one of the safest in the city. But so far this year, 14 people in addition to Glass have been shot, according to a Tribune analysis. Glass was the third fatal shooting victim in the neighborhood so far this year.
The previous homicide came on April 7 when Darnall Gordon, 36, was fatally shot and two others wounded outside a convenience store near Ashland and Howard Street, just a few blocks south of Tuesday's shooting.
Much of the violence in Rogers Park over the last few years has been attributed to feuding between two factions of the Gangster Disciples, according to police sources. But another brother of Glass' denied hs brother belonged to a gang.
Anthony Doss, a supervisor with the anti-violence group CeaseFire Illinois, said flare-ups are bound to happen in the neighborhood.
“It has its moments where violence is its daily agenda,” said Doss, who works with troubled youths in Rogers Park.
Carter, 42, who has lived in the apartment for about two years, continues to be bothered by the gang violence in his neighborhood, violence that he says takes place in the dog days of summer as well as the dead of winter.
“I just don't want to be walking out the door and bullets flying everywhere,” he said.
WGN-TV reporter Randi Belisomo contributed.
jgorner@tribune.com
asege@tribune.comHillary Clinton's image has plummeted to its lowest level in the two decades Gallup has tracked her standing with the public.
Her favorability rating has dropped from 59 percent in 2015 to 38 percent this month, a record low. Clinton's unfavorability score has skyrocketed from 36 percent early last year to 57 percent now, the July 16-23 survey found.
Even at the height of investigations into the former secretary of state's actions during the 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, Clinton had a 55 percent approval rate.
Clinton had been on a downward spiral since last year's email scandal surfaced. Her tenure with majority approval slipped early this year. By mid-June, only 41 percent of voters had a positive view of her.
Republican nominee Donald Trump still fares worse than his rival. Over the past seven days, Trump had a 36 percent favorability score and 59 percent unfavorability rating.
A random sample of 3,545 national adults were interviewed in the telephone survey. The poll had a 3 percent margin of error.I learned a lot this weekend. I called Jules to ask her to come out. I even offered to make lemonade, even though I’m not really that good at it. She was too busy. At first I got upset and started to explain how I need her now. Then she started telling me about all the things going on in her life right now. I will respect her privacy and not share those things here; however, I quickly realized that she has a very complicated life of her own and I was not respecting this. So I apologized.
From there, we talked for hours. It was like we were children again. Near the end of the call, she asked how my Mushroom Men were doing. For nearly two hours, I forgot about them. Excited, I told her all about the ideas and advice people have given me on the blog and how I am going to go out and find my robot and see what the Mushroom Men are up to.
Then Jules got so solemn, she told me that she thinks I should start on a new robot from scratch and make it the best robot the world has ever seen! I was so excited that I spent most of today looking photographs on the hypertext Internet – you know, for inspiration.
Then, tonight, Jules had to remind me to update my blog. When I saw the video we are posting today – I realized I have been wanting to start a new robot all along. It is so clear now. It is a blessing that my last project is gone. Now I can begin new and fresh.
Still, I feel a little sad about my last robot. She was sleek and full of potential. I would have enjoyed seeing her fully operational and complete. But jules reminded me not to dwell on the past.
I am thankful for how full my life is. I will start a new robot. However, I must first deal with the crisis at hand. We still have videos and photographs to share with the world. Getting the word out is key!
I also have a mission – I must infiltrate the Mushroom Men kingdom and get a status update. Visitors to my blog have told me that they are encountering Mushroom Men all around the world. Some claim that they can communicate. I do not know if I can trust these reports, but as the first person to encounter this life form – I MUST FIND OUT!With the NFL Draft hours away trade talks are heating up, especially for the number two overall selection, currently held by the Titans. The Cleveland Browns are reportedly pushing hard to trade-up either in an attempt to grab Marcus Mariota, or to do some type of miracle made-for-Hollywood movie trade with the Eagles to get Sam Bradford and reunite Kelly with his QB prodigy.
Whatever scenarios are playing out behind closed doors, reports from Mary Kat Cabot of the Cleveland Plain Dealer the Browns are unwilling to give up next year’s first round pick. The Browns have the 12th and 19th selection and are smart not to give up next year’s first as well. That mortgages a team’s future too much in one player. Sammy Watkins is that player in Buffalo.
I would stand pat if I were in GM Ray Farmer’s shoes, build talent around that team that managed to win seven games as a member of the in the difficult AFC North. Yes, you have the Manziel issues, but they can’t move up for a quarterback with questions.
Stay tuned tonight to find out….What will the Browns do? Comment below…
Dan Schalk covers the NFL for MFST, you can follow him on Twitter @ffsportstalkGerman authorities are preparing a law that will force device manufacturers to include backdoors within their products that law enforcement agencies could use at their discretion for legal investigations. The law would target all modern devices, such as cars, phones, computers, IoT products, and more.
Officials are expected to submit their proposed law for debate this week, according to local news outlet RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland (RND).
Difficulties in investigating modern crime, terrorist attacks
The man supporting this proposal is Thomas de Maizière, Germany's Interior Minister, who cites the difficulty law enforcement agents have had in past months investigating the recent surge of terrorist attacks and other crimes.
The Interior Minister says that police officers are having a hard time investigating cases because smart devices are warning owners before officers could do anything about it. The Minister cites the cases of smart cars that alert an owner as soon as the car is shaken, even a little bit. He says he'd like police to be able to intercept that warning and stop it when investigating a case.
De Maizière claims that companies have a "legal obligation" to introduce backdoors for the use of law enforcement agencies and he also wants to require the industry to disclose its "programming protocols" for future analysis. This latter clause could allow German officials to force companies to disclose details about their encrypted communication practices.
German officials want "Hack Back" clause
Furthermore, the new law would also give German officials powers akin to the "Hack Back" bill proposed in the US, allowing authorities the power to hack any remote computer. The Minister says this is important to "shut down private computers in the event of a crisis," such as is the case with botnet takedowns.
But privacy advocates who also read the new law proposal say the text also contains verbiage that would allow the German state to intercept any traffic on the Internet [1, 2], effectively setting up a surveillance state with full snooping powers over everyone's online communications. Experts called for caution before approving the new law, which could be abused in its current state.
German authorities anticipated such reaction and said that any access to such data would be allowed |
article was published 16/9/2010 (3085 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/9/2010 (3085 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
To suggest Winnipeg and Quebec City are competing for an NHL franchise is both presumptuous and ridiculous.
First of all, in the words of commissioner Gary Bettman, the NHL views relocation as undesirable.
Secondly, should the league be forced to make such a move, Winnipeg is years ahead of Quebec City in the relocation queue.
Setting aside the fact Winnipeg has an NHL-ready building and Quebec City does not, the relationship between True North Sports and Entertainment and the NHL has been carefully cultivated and slowly matured. It's ready to bear fruit.
In dating terms, Winnipeg has asked for the league's hand in marriage and nicely been told to wait on the porch while dad mulls it over.
Quebec? They haven't even been on a date, let alone done some of the back-seat wrestling True North and the NHL have engaged in over the last couple of years.
No disrespect to Quebec City mayor Regis Labeaume, who we are sure is a fine gentleman, but to suggest his relationship is anywhere close to the one developed between the NHL and True North Partners Mark Chipman and David Thomson is, as we've already said, ridiculous.
Chipman and Thomson own an AHL franchise and are established as legitimate operators in the hockey world.
They've been on the block for a while and will remain for some time to come. Money is not an object where they are concerned and the NHL has shown they'd be happy to welcome them to the club.
A local politician? Any politician? Give me a break. Gary Bettman can't afford to tie his fortunes to someone who may or may not be around the next time a civic election is held.
But don't take our word for any of this. Mr. Bettman has already said as much.
This past spring he addressed the subject of relocation prior to the Stanley Cup final.
"You know our view on franchise relocation: We try to avoid it," Bettman said in Chicago. "And frankly, if we're going to move a franchise, there are a couple of places in Canada that I'd like to give my attention first, because when Winnipeg and Quebec lost their franchises — remember, I always talk about three things for franchises: market, owner and building — both of those teams were moved because two of the criteria went away. There was no building and there was no owner. Nobody wanted to own a team there anymore.
"To the extent that those markets are in a position to deal with those issues, I'd like to try and fix something that I wish might not have happened in the first place, not unlike what we did in Minnesota (the league replaced the departed North Stars with the Wild)."
Building and owner. Winnipeg has both. Quebec City? Nope on both accounts.
"Winnipeg, I believe, has an NHL building, and in Quebec they're talking about building one," said Bettman.
Where has the talk of an arena in Quebec City gone to this point? Nowhere.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper floated a trial balloon a week ago about helping to fund a new arena in Quebec and has been backpedalling like a defensive back ever since.
Bettman also went so far as to place his personal blessing on True North by telling the hockey world he'd been dancing in the dark with them for some time.
"There has been a lot of speculation about Winnipeg," Bettman said. "Winnipeg did make a bona fide offer (on the Phoenix Coyotes). We never concluded a deal. That offer was made by Mark Chipman and David Thomson as partners in True North and they're very comfortable with the process. They understood that the likelihood was that the team was going to be remaining in Phoenix. They wanted us to know of their interest and they have told us that they are prepared to be patient."
So there you have it. Sure, the NHL is happy to talk to the folks in Quebec City. But don't mistake polite hellos with the kind of heavy breathing that's gone on between Bettman's office and True North.
Winnipeg may never get another NHL franchise, but as of today and the foreseeable future, this city is first in any lineups for such movement.
gary.lawless@freepress.mb.caKevin Smith has a long, storied history with the Man of Steel, dating back to his years working on Tim Burton’s ill-fated film version that was supposed to star Nicolas Cage. (For that project’s collapse, check out Jon Schnepp’s documentary The Death of “Superman Lives”: What Happened?). It was little surprise that he had plenty of opinions about Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, especially since his good friend Ben Affleck (star of his Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma and Jersey Girl) was playing the Dark Knight. And at New York Comic Con on Friday, the writer, director, and host of AMC’s Comic Book Men continued to expound on the polarizing superhero face-off.
When the film first came out, Smith stated that, while he loved Affleck’s more brutal incarnation of Batman, he felt the overall result was a movie that “didn’t really have a heart. It was certainly f—ing humorless — there was nothing funny going on in that world, whatsoever. But it had lots of spectacle… But you need more than just the pictures — you need characterization. And these characters seemed off-character.”
Upon subsequently revisiting the film, Smith expressed more positive thoughts about Zack Snyder’s blockbuster. And Friday at his Comic-Con panel for Comic Book Men, he again remarked upon BvS — revealing, most notably, that he’s endlessly rewatching the film in a desperate attempt to make himself love it. As Comicbook.com reports, Smith confessed:
“I’ve watched Batman versus Superman extended edition 25 times since I got it, my wife has said ‘You’ve watched this s— 25 times, you know what happens… f—ing Martha.’ And I just say, ‘I know, I’m just going to keep watching it until I love it’….So, yes, I do hope that we get a better version of Batman versus Superman, you know, like maybe the version in my head.”
Smith also continued to praise Affleck’s performance at the expense of other Batmans: “I mean it used to be Michael Keaton, and f—, Mr. Mom doesn’t hit too hard. But Ben comes in and blows up 12 people just coming in the door.” He also reminded the audience that — no matter what side of the Marvel-DC divide they’re on — this is a golden age of comic book movies, and fans should be thankful they exist in such abundance. To read a full run-down of Smith’s Comic Con panel thoughts, head over to Comicbook.com.
Watch Smith share a sweet moment with his daughter:Why Patriots are still AFC favorite without Rob Gronkowski
By Michael Renner • Dec 1, 2016
After quarterback Tom Brady, the one player the Patriots would least like to lose was just declared out for the rest of the regular season. Rob Gronkowski—PFF’s highest-graded tight end at the moment—is having back surgery that conservative estimates say will sideline him until around the time of the Super Bowl.
Immediately, the question on everybody’s mind becomes, “Do the Patriots still have enough fire power to win the AFC?”
There were times this season that it looked like a forgone conclusion that the Patriots would represent their conference in Super Bowl LI. That was before they lost their most dynamic weapons on defense (Jamie Collins, via a trade to the Browns) and now on offense. Gronk’s loss doesn’t really pose a threat to New England’s quest for a first-round bye, as the Patriots already have a multiple-game lead in that regard, but they don’t want to be traveling on the road as they did a season ago, and they are tied with the 9-2 Raiders for home-field advantage at the moment. They also have the Ravens, Broncos, and Dolphins remaining on their schedule—all teams fighting for their playoff lives.
Let’s assume the Patriots do get through the regular season unscathed, though, and clinch home-field advantage. A Gronk-less New England team may not be the death sentence to opponents it once was back in 2013. There was a concerted effort this offseason to make the receiving corps more multifaceted, and the additions of Chris Hogan, rookie Malcolm Mitchell, and Martellus Bennett have done just that. With QB Jimmy Garappolo at the helm in Weeks 1 and 2, the Patriots’ offense outperformed everyone’s wildest dreams, and those new additions were a big reason why. Bennett was the highest-graded tight end in the league over that span, while Hogan recorded 119 receiving yards on 7-of-9 targets himself.
This was a far cry from the first six weeks of the 2013 season, when Tom Brady was our 12th-highest graded quarterback in the league without Gronkowski, throwing for a passer rating of just 79.5 over that span. Over the past two weeks of the 2016 season, with Gronk playing a grand total of seven snaps, Brady earned the sixth-highest grade among NFL quarterbacks, with a passer rating of 100.5. It won’t be the scorched earth that we saw at times with a fully-healthy roster, yet this is still one of the most talented rosters in the league. The New England Patriots may not be the odds-on favorites anymore with the way the AFC West is playing, but this team should still be the conference favorite to make Super Bowl LI.BERKELEY — Outspoken talk-show host Bill Maher appeared Saturday at UC Berkeley’s December graduation, greeted by loud cheers from the audience and a handful of silent demonstrators protesting the comedian’s statements about Islam.
Maher delivered the keynote speech at the winter commencement ceremony, where about 500 students were honored. During his 15-minute address, Maher mentioned Cal’s tradition of dissent, noting it was the 50th anniversary of the campus’ free speech movement.
“C’mon, it’s Berkeley. I think I can speak freely here,” he said. “I mean, I hope I can.”
The audience responded with cheers.
Maher’s selection this fall as keynote speaker prompted a student-led movement to rescind his invitation, including an online petition that gathered nearly 6,000 signatures. On his HBO show, “Real Time with Bill Maher,” he reaffirmed his decision to speak at the event but left open the possibility of canceling his appearance if his presence would cause too much of a distraction.
A small group of protesters gathered outside Haas Pavilion before the ceremony, saying that UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks was supporting racism and Islamophobia by allowing Maher to speak. A handmade sign outside the arena read: “I’m oppressed by Islamophobia, not Islam.”
At one point during Maher’s speech, a group of protesters silently rose in the audience, holding up a series of placards that read,” Dear (administrators), don’t Maher our commencement.”
Maher indirectly referenced the controversy in his remarks, saying: “Liberals should own the First Amendment the way conservatives own the Second Amendment.”
“If you call yourself a liberal, you have to fight oppression from wherever it comes … that’s what makes you a liberal.”
He also urged UC Berkeley graduates to avoid the perils of group think. “That’s the last thing I’ll suggest to you — be a free thinker,” he said. “One reason our politics is so screwed up is that it’s gotten so tribal.”
Maher is no stranger to political controversy. He was sharply criticized in late 2001 for comments about the Sept. 11 attacks on his late-night talk show, “Politically Incorrect.” The network canceled the show nine months later.
Maher, producer and star of the documentary “Religulous,” is a frequent critic of all organized religion.
He often speaks out about Islamic extremism, but he drew criticism this fall when he said on his show that Islam is “the only religion that acts like the Mafia — that will (expletive) kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture or write the wrong book.”
Some Muslim students on campus were outraged when they learned Maher would give the keynote address Saturday. Many argued his views on Islam and violence spread fear and bigotry against Muslims, and that he did not deserve the elevated status afforded a commencement speaker, instead of a campus lecture, for example.
Maher recently promised on his show, in its 12th season, that his speech would be about the graduates. He also suggested that his detractors did not embrace the campus’s legacy of free speech.
Under pressure from students unhappy with the choice, the student group that invited Maher later voted to take back the speaking offer — only to have UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks intervene, saying it was a matter of free speech and that Maher was still welcome.
Staff writer Katy Murphy contributed to this report. Contact Chris De Benedetti at 510-293-2480. Follow him at Twitter.com/cdebenedetti.With Carmelo Anthony designated as their power forward of the future, the Knicks feel they can use more than just another pure point guard when the NBA Draft arrives on Thursday.
Last season’s decision to switch Anthony to the four has opened up a hole for a genuine small forward/shooting guard who can defend and shoot the 3-pointer. The Knicks averaged just 88 points in the playoffs, and feel they need another perimeter scoring option.
Considering their point-guard-less roster following the retirement of Jason Kidd — now the coach of the Nets — it will be a vexing decision to pass on a pure point guard such as South Dakota State’s Nate Wolters with the 24th pick.
But if the right swingman falls to them who can shoot the 3 and defend, they will snap him up. With Anthony at power forward, they never had a genuine starting small forward, which is why they started two point guards last season.
“They are looking for help on the perimeter,’’ said one person briefed on the Knicks’ draft strategy. “A small forward would be nice. They lost to Indiana and got outrebounded, but Tyson Chandler wasn’t right. They feel they can get a big man in free agency.’’
The swingmen on their radar are Michigan’s Tim Hardaway Jr., California shooting guard Allen Crabbe, North Carolina’s Reggie Bullock and New Mexico’s Tony Snell.
Wolters, the 6-foot-4 point guard, has intrigued them too. He likely will be the only pure point guard left by the time they select. If they go the point-guard route, they want a playmaker, not a scoring point guard such as undersized Isaiah Canaan of Murray State.
Their preference of having Miami point guard Shane Larkin fall to them at 24 is a pipe dream. Agent Happy Walters refused to have Larkin work out for the Knicks because he believes his client won’t fall past 19.
Of Wolters, NBA draft consultant Chris Ekstrand said: “He’s got great floor vision — able to see plays before they happen — innate point-guard instincts. The problem is his foot speed. But you’ll see him make a lot of passes guys can’t make, and his perimeter shot is very good.
“He’s got a lot of boxes checked, but he’s just not that fast. But neither was Steve Nash.’’
At small forward, Bullock could be a good fit. Ryan Blake, another NBA draft consultant, said the UNC junior is more NBA-ready, coming out of the Tar Heels environment.
“He’s got that big-time experience, he defends and hits 44 percent of his 3-pointers,’’ Blake said. “The only knock is you’d like to see him be more aggressive as a scorer.’’
However, one Eastern Conference scout said Bullock doesn’t have the ability to create his own shot, but adds he’s “tough’’ and an “excellent spot-up shooter.’’
There are no offensive worries about Crabbe.
“He can be one of the lethal outside shooters,’’ Blake said. “He’s a pretty smooth player, 6-6, strong, good size.’’
However, one team executive called Crabbe “a below-average defender.’’
Hardaway is a bigger name who has experience in big moments.
“He’s a catch-and-shoot type of kid,’’ Ekstrand said. “There’s nothing similar to his father. He’s a catch-and-shoot type of kid who’s going to play off the ball his whole career. His future is on how consistent he shoots the ball from the perimeter.’’
Snell is a smooth scorer who can “put it on the floor with the best of any of them and create his own shot.’’
Glen Rice Jr., of Georgia Tech, son of the former Knick, worked out for the Knicks, but appears a reach at 24.
With the point- guard group looking slim when the Knicks’ pick comes up, Mike Woodson, a defensive coach, is primed to add perimeter offense, especially since J.R. Smith is no guarantee to re-sign.
marc.berman@nypost.comWarner Bros./Time Warner Inc. has been on such a winning streak as of late (The LEGO Batman Movie, Kong: Skull Island, Wonder Woman, Dunkirk, Annabelle: Creation, It) that it will be of less consequence (compared to this time last year) if Justice League underwhelms or underperforms. But since I ran the worst-case scenario numbers on Monday, it is only fair that I do the opposite today. So, here is a look at what might happen if everything goes according to plan for DC Films and related interested parties.
As always, this is not an ironclad prediction, and we have no idea how the film will play or be received at this early date. Oh, and this is very important: You should automatically increase all discussed box office figures by at least 25% if the final cut of Justice League contains Henry Cavill’s Superman in costume with his Mission: Impossible 6 mustache intact. Mark my words, if Henry Cavill’s resurrected Kal-El shows up rocking perfectly trimmed Mortdecai-worthy facial hair, then Justice League is almost sure to clear $1 billion… in North America… on opening weekend.
Okay, back to business. In this “Woohoo!” scenario, Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon’s Justice League (with the help of the likes of Chris Terrio and Geoff Johns) is a big, splashy, crowd-pleasing action adventure fantasy. It combines the “melt your eyeballs off in IMAX” visuals and ponderous Sturm und Drang of a Zack Snyder movie with the clever and quirky character interaction and emotional oomph a Joss Whedon film. Maybe it’s a grand culmination of the DC Films story thus far, or maybe it’s just a rockin’ good time with our favorite Super Friends kicking ass onscreen together. Whatever the case, the cast gels together, the action works, the film looks good and plays well for adults and kids. The return of Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman (coming off her blockbuster solo movie) gives the film that bit of event movie buzz beyond merely the idea that it’s a Justice League movie.
In this scenario, assuming the first wave of reviews are at least kind enough to offer hope for those burned by Suicide Squad and Dawn of Justice, we’re probably looking at an opening of between $133 million (Suicide Squad) and Batman v Superman ($166m). Maybe it’ll open higher, but it’s more of a known element, and it’s merely the second time a gang of interconnected superheroes has teamed up to save the world onscreen. And there will be trepidation after the last few DC movies and the notion that the Thanksgiving weekend will give folks a more convenient opportunity to avoid the die-hard fans and give the kids something to do over the holiday. Warner Bros. is counting on that holiday hold, by the by, so we shouldn’t panic if the film opens closer to $130m than $160m. And in this scenario, it gets those legs.
A well-received Justice League movie will unleash a wave of positive media, with thinkpieces and essays (some penned by me, of course) discussing what went right, what lessons were learned and what this does and doesn’t mean for the overall DC Films franchise. As you know, a good opening and good buzz lead to positive media which then continues the positive narrative heading into that second weekend. It will also allow the picture to become the de facto event movie for the next month, as there is very little opening after Thanksgiving between Coco and Star Wars: The Last Jedi. So, if it scores on opening weekend and gets decent word of mouth, we could see a somewhat leggy run.
Obviously, the worst-case scenario would be a domestic run like Twilight (2x). But even a Deathly Hallows part I (2.37x) weekend-to-final multiplier could offer significant payouts. To wit, a $170 million opening (we’re being optimistic) and said multipliers means a finish of $403m. Legs like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (3.5x), Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (3.14x) or The Grinch (4.7x) are likely not in play. But the realistically optimistic scenario sees a $170m+ opening with a multiplier between the Hunger Games sequels and the first Twilight (2.7-2.75x) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets ($262m/$88m = 2.9x). Of note, Goblet of Fire is right in the middle ($290m/$102m) with a 2.8x run.
Let’s assume that Justice League doesn’t just play strictly to the fan base (like the later Harry Potter/Twilight/Hunger Games offerings) but clicks with general audiences as well. Again, presuming a $170 million debut, if it plays like a slightly leggier pre-Thanksgiving blockbuster fantasy offering, we’re looking at a domestic total of between $460m and $495m. In case I don’t have time for a “realistic prediction” post, we should note that a $135m debut and a 2.37x multiplier still get the film over the $320m mark domestically, which is okay if it performs overseas. This is a conversation for another post, but we must confront the possibility that neither Justice League nor Thor: Ragnarok will outgross It in North America.
Speaking of overseas, as always the devil is in the split. Batman v Superman was an anomaly among recent DC Films offerings in that it made almost 2/3 of its money overseas. Most DC Comics adaptations are closer to 50/50. Heck, even in the last 10-15 years, Batman Begins, Superman Returns, The Dark Knight, Green Lantern and Wonder Woman all earned over half of their money in North America. So, the optimistic scenario is simply one where it performs at best-case-scenario in North America and makes as much of its total gross overseas as did Batman v Superman (62%). In this equation, we’re looking at a $170 million debut weekend, a $495m domestic total and then a $1.3 billion worldwide cume.
This is a little “pie in the sky.” A slightly more realistic optimistic run would be a $170 million debut, a 2.37x multiplier and a 42/58 split (like The Dark Knight Rises and just over Suicide Squad and Man of Steel) for a $403m domestic and $959m worldwide cume. You can do the math a million different ways that are more pessimistic ($135m x 2.7 /.44 = $320m domestic/$728m worldwide) or optimistic ($170m x 2.7x /.44 = $460m domestic and $1 billion worldwide). But barring a fluke in either direction, we’re probably looking at a weekend-to-final multiplier between 2.37 and 2.75x that opening weekend, with the domestic total, thus making up between 44% and 38% of its global total.
If Justice League turns out to be at least decent, fun and crowd-pleasing, with okay reviews and solid buzz to go with it, it will be an event for at least its first few weeks. Unless Walt Disney changes their plans, Warner Bros. likely won’t have to worry about The Last Jedi reviews sucking up all the oxygen until after Justice League’s fourth weekend. If it’s another artistic misfire, it may well have legs closer to Twilight Saga: New Moon than Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. But if it works as intended, if Wonder Woman gives it a boost while Aquaman, Cyborg and The Flash bring the party to you, then DC Films might not have to hit Pennywise up for a loan.“It was one of those days when I had to control myself as far as adrenaline,” Beckett said. “When Pedey hit that home run, it helped me calm down a little.”
Beckett retired the side in order in five of his seven innings. The two innings he got into some trouble, the third and the sixth, he neutralized the Rays’ best hitters — particularly the young slugger Evan Longoria.
Photo
After Carl Crawford’s one-out sacrifice fly in the third tied the score and left runners on first and second, Beckett got Longoria to fly out to right field to end the threat. And with Boston leading, 4-1, in the sixth, Crawford’s double put runners on second and third with none out and brought up Longoria as the potential tying run. But Longoria meekly fouled out to the catcher, Pena struck out looking on a 96-mile-per-hour inside fastball and Pat Burrell grounded to third with no damage done.
“He got himself in a bind, and just went right through the middle of their order,” Francona said. “That was pretty impressive.”
In a sign that the Rays-Red Sox rivalry is ripening with heroes and villains, the capacity Fenway crowd of 37,057 heartily booed Longoria — who played a key role in Tampa Bay’s winning the A.L. pennant — every time he stepped to the plate. He did not disappoint them, at least until he singled in two relatively meaningless runs in the eighth once Beckett had departed.
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“When he got into jams, he was able to make his pitches — when someone does that all you can do is tip your hat,” Longoria said. “I don’t think he was anything other than advertised. He’s Josh Beckett.”
Then again, Beckett was not quite Beckett last season, when he went 12-10 after winning 20 games the year before. He had a lower back sprain early, inflammation in his right shoulder in late summer and an oblique strain that hampered him through the postseason.
It was not enough to keep him from battling through his final start of October, a 4-2 win (also over Shields) to push the league championship series to a Game 7. But because Tampa Bay won that final game, Boston had to step aside as the upstart Rays went to the World Series.
By winning Tuesday — though there are 161 games to come — the Red Sox wrote the opening sentence to whatever this year’s Red Sox-Rays story will be. Longoria could appreciate the significance of starting the season with last year’s best of the A.L. facing each other.
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“I think it’s good — it’s a good test for where we’re at and what direction we’re going in,” Longoria said. That direction will be right back at each other Wednesday and Thursday to finish this series.30 second sequences from BiM
Not long ago, I had twelve artists from Natural Motion (of Morpheme and Clumsy Ninja fame) into Somerset House, my home away from home, for a four day anatomy workshop. At the end of each day we would take about 20 minutes to draw from the Bodies in Motion library.
sketching from BiM
We made extensive use of the timer for gesture drawing. It can be set to 10fps, 1fps, 30sec, 1min, 2min, or 5mins, and ticks down to zero before flipping to the next frame of the motion sequence. We had it set at 30 seconds per image and we were all drawing frantically trying to keep up. Anyone who goes to life drawing regularly knows this is challenging, but it’s great practice to help capture the essence of a pose – balance, gesture, rough volumes – quickly, without being drawn into the details. Here’s a timelapse of my scribbles (Procreate on Ipad Pro):
timelapse of a sequence of 30 second posesSkip to comments.
That's "D"..."D as in Donald"
Posted on by Scooter100
I was talking to an electronics supplier on the phone this morning and had to state the model number to the Sales Rep. As we all do, in order to clarify, we spell it out. When I came to a "D", I actually said, "D as in Donald". It came out so innocently that I stopped in mid-sentence and snickered. The Rep laughed too, when I said I must be watching too much election coverage. Amazingly, he responded, "We're getting a lot of that particular spelling for "D" lately, he's great isn't he?" What a surprise! Donald is becoming a replacement for "Delta" in the Voice Communications Code! I think we're gonna win!
So friends, if you're spelling it out over the phone: It's "D as in Donald"...(not "D as in Delta").
Yep: It's "D as in Donald".
That's DONALD, spelled....
DONALD--OSCAR--NOVEMBER--ALPHA--LIMA--DONALD
TRUMP/Pence 2016
TOPICS:
Humor
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KEYWORDS:
To: Scooter100
That’s great! I hope I have a chance to use it.
To: Scooter100
T= Tango TRUMP!
To: Pearls Before Swine
DONALD—JULIETTE—TANGO
To: Scooter100
D as in get used to saying President Trump?
by 5 posted onby Paleo Pete (Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.)
To: Scooter100
NO BRAKES!
To: Scooter100
He’s a brand.
To: struggle
UNSTOPPABLE....(with or without Denzel Washington!)
To: Mercat
Hes a brand. He’s a GODSEND. ; )
by 9 posted onby Uversabound (Our Military past and present: Our Highest example of Brotherhood of Man & Doing God's Will)
To: Scooter100
So do you say “T as in Trump” instead of using “tango”? “Ivanka” instead of “india”? “Eric” instead of “echo”?
To: Scooter100
A FULL-THROTTLE THRILLER!! (Inspired by true events)
To: Scooter100
That’s “H” as in crooked.
To: Scooter100
A as in Abedin B as in Beast C as in Crookedhillary D as in Donald
To: Scooter100
I was at a fast food joint and had to wait for my order. When the guy ask for my name so he could let me know when it was ready, I said Trump. He looked at me for a second and chuckled.
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FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John RobinsonThey say it takes a village? For the Miami Heat at this point, it might take a vineyard.
Three years ago, three bottles of wine did the trick. Not this time — not in the dire shape this team finds itself.
It was during the 2013 NBA Finals, after a 113-77 blowout loss in San Antonio put the Heat down 2-1, when Pat Riley famously knocked on the door of Erik Spoelstra’s hotel suite bearing three bottles of wine and an offer of help.
“I was despondent,” Spoelstra admitted then. “Beside myself.”
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Mentor and protégé broke down film for hours, the wine at a steady pour.
A key turned. Something clicked. Three wines turned into three wins as Miami went on to collect the second of two championships in the LeBron James era.
All Heat fans can hope now is that Riley knocked on the door of Spoelstra’s Toronto hotel suite late Wednesday night heroically carrying a giant vat of magic vino.
Here is the good news for Miami: Thirty NBA teams were dreaming as the season began, and it’s down to six or perhaps five teams still standing on this Friday the 13th — the Heat one of them. So that’s pretty good, right?
But from here none of the survivors faces the steep climb Miami does.
With Chris Bosh ruled out for the postseason, Hassan Whiteside (knee) still out and now perhaps no Luol Deng (wrist), either, that’s your entire starting frontcourt vanished by injuries. It leaves Spoelstra to play small-ball without a center, or to cobble a patchwork of minutes among Udonis Haslem, Amar’e Stoudemire and Josh McRoberts.
SHARE COPY LINK Wade says the injuries to Hassan Whiteside, Luol Deng can't serve as an excuse for the Heat in a must-win Game 6. May 13, 2016. Video by Manny Navarro
“We’re in a whatever-it-takes mentality right now,” Spoelstra said Thursday after returning to Miami.
From that unfavorable situation Miami must beat Toronto at home Friday night and then win a Game 7 on the road, which the Heat has never done in franchise history.
After that LeBron’s well-rested Cleveland Cavaliers would be waiting.
And after that Steph Curry’s mighty Golden State Warriors (presumably) would be your reward for advancing.
You like an underdog, America?
Adopt the Heat.
Spoelstra, of course, wants his team to have blinders on only for the essential game at hand.
“We’re focused on [Friday],” he said, “and not getting caught up in all the ups and downs and storylines.”
If Spoelstra wanted to ply psychology with his players he’d be well armed with ammo in the us-against-the-world or nobody-believes-in-us-but-us categories.
I’m not even sure most Heats fans really believe at this point.
Miami staved off two elimination games in the first round vs. Charlotte and now must beat back two more just to survive.
“This is how you grow as a team, when you face adversity and have to go through the uncomfortable times together,” Spoelstra said. “These series are built to push you and stress you and put you in uncomfortable situations.”
The playoffs have always been thus. The difference is, the Heat always felt like the favorite during the four LeBron years. This was the team piling the stress on opponents.
Now? Well, this has been an ugly more than artful playoffs for the Heat — or for what’s left of the Heat. Can’t say it’s been boring, though. For four years of the Big 3 era the early rounds were a perfunctory snooze; you woke up in the conference finals. Now you never leave the edge of your seat and the edge of your seat feels like a cliff. Every game night is a fight.
SHARE COPY LINK Miami Heat guard Josh Richardson speaks with the media on May 13, 2016. The Heat trail the Raptors 3-2 in the Eastern Conference semifinals and are trying to become the first team in history to win two playoff series after trailing 3-2.
Now? Miami would have fashioned the biggest, most shocking surprise in NBA history if, despite its battered, depleted lineup, it won a Game 7 in Toronto, and then beat LeBron and the Cavs, and then somehow beat Curry and the Warriors.
It would be like nothing else we had ever experienced in South Florida sports. “Even we’re impressed,” the Dolphins’ ’72 Perfect Season would have to admit.
Even the Miracle On Ice would curtsy and step aside because Miami would have just accomplished the new definition of a sporting miracle.
Dream big, Miami. But fast, please, while you still can.
Read Greg’s Random Evidence blog daily at MiamiHerald.com and follow on Twitter @gregcote.When Jerrilynn Patton was 4 years old, growing up in Gary, she went over to a neighbor’s house one day, drawn to the strange sound she heard leaking out of a pair of headphones: dark, twitchy, syncopated rhythms, songs firing at 160 beats per minute. It was her first taste of footwork, the hyperspeed dance music descendant of Chicago’s house scene. “It was like nothing I had ever heard before,” Patton remembers. It would be years before she would encounter footwork again, but that day would make a serious dent, marking a place in her to which she would one day return.
As a child, Patton was so baby-faced people called her Gaga—“like goo goo, ga ga,” she says. She loved watching documentaries, especially about ancient Egypt or elephants—as an adult, she once skipped her own birthday party because the National Geographic Channel was airing a special about woolly mammoths. She took piano for a while, but it never held her attention the way drums would. On weekends at home with her parents, Roberta Flack, Earth, Wind & Fire, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis records were all in heavy rotation. She was into basketball and played on the school team. Until, abruptly, she stopped.
When Patton talks now about working from a place of darkness and turmoil, that means a few things, but mostly she means the years of sustained bullying she endured as a teenager, a thorny combination of mean girls, verbal abuse, and shaming. It’s a painful legacy that followed her into adulthood. “They turned everyone against me,” she says. One day, no one on the basketball team |
on its own, do include transparency-related measures, such as bringing more White House lawyers in on certain legal memos and establishing a better system for declassifying information.
But that won’t do much, skeptics say. They note that Feinstein's recommendations to the White House do little to address the widespread Washington epidemic of over-classification and highly compartmentalized access to covert action programs. This problem, they believe, provided a veil of secrecy to the Bush White House and its chief spy agency.
“There’s virtually nothing about reforms to the classification system, which are so fundamental to what caused the problem... It was secrecy that allowed [torture] to start, that allowed Congress to be kept in the dark, it’s secrecy that’s impeded prosecution,” Hawkins added. “That’s the sort of glue that holds all of this together.”
“It doesn’t really get to the core of this issue, at least that part of it,” agreed Steve Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. “It’s basically saying do a better job... As a recommendation, it’s kind of weak.”
The lack of classification reform isn’t surprising, advocates believe, given what they see as Feinstein’s general preference for secrecy over transparency.
“I don’t think that they solve the problem of secret interpretations at all,” said Naureen Shah, director of Amnesty International’s Security and Human Rights Program. “That’s not surprising, because for all Senator Feinstein has done to get the summary of the Senate torture report out, she’s really not done much at all about getting covert action [information] out to the public.”
But a Democratic aide to the Senate Intelligence Committee said that more clearly codified anti-torture statutes would ensure that future administrations' interpretations -- even if they were secret -- were consistent with what Congress intended. And the secrecy issue, the aide noted, is also addressed by Feinstein's recommendation to change the way the executive branch handles covert action programs.
“The legislation is vital for two reasons: first, to create the laws and legislative history that will ensure the Justice Department interprets laws in the manner intended by Congress, and second, to codify the executive order that currently prevents coercive interrogation techniques,” the aide said.
The aide added that Feinstein's administrative proposals also include sharing more covert program information with State Department officials and National Security Council personnel.
Beyond the shortcomings of the administrative recommendations, though, the bigger hurdle will be getting the White House to do anything about them at all. Enacting Feinstein’s proposals would essentially require the Oval Office to willingly hamstring its own ability to run covert operations.
And will the Obama administration ask for more oversight? Don’t hold your breath.
“The proposals to structure management of covert action within the executive branch are likely to be resisted. This is the president’s prerogative to consult whom he wants within the executive branch, and he can decline to consult who he wants,” Aftergood said.
“We are reviewing Senator Feinstein’s specific recommendations," National Security Council spokesperson Ned Price told The Huffington Post in a statement. "As a general matter, however, we share the Senator’s goal of ensuring the techniques that led to those recommendations are never employed again.”
It's also unclear whether Feinstein has a real shot at getting her legislative proposals through a Republican Congress. Most Senate Republicans staunchly rejected her committee's behemoth torture study -- upon which her recommendations are based -- as a partisan witch hunt.
Certain Republicans -- chief among them Arizona’s John McCain -- have backed Feinstein in her fight against torture. Still, with a new GOP majority, it doesn’t look promising, especially if the legislation would have to get through the Intelligence Committee, now led by Richard Burr (R-N.C.) Although Feinstein would only need to sway one Republican member in order to get the bill through committee, it would be a fight to make it happen on Burr’s watch. Along with blasting Feinstein’s study, the North Carolina Republican has backed the use of harsh interrogation techniques.
It’s unclear when exactly Feinstein plans to file her bill, though she said in the letter to Obama that she intends to officially propose the legislation at the beginning of this Congress.An online anti-surveillance crusader is back with a bang.
Last year, a hacker who only went by the name "PhineasFisher" hacked the controversial surveillance tech company Gamma International, a British-German surveillance company that sells the spyware software FinFisher. He then went on to leak more than 40GB of internal data from the company, which has been long criticized for selling to repressive governments.
That same hacker has now claimed responsibility for the breach of Hacking Team, an Italian surveillance tech company that sells a similar product called Remote Controlled System Galileo.
"I am the same person behind that hack."
On Sunday night, I reached out to the hacker while he was in control of Hacking Team's Twitter account via a direct message to @hackingteam. Initially, PhineasFisher responded with sarcasm, saying he was willing to chat because "we got such good publicity from your last story!" referring to a recent story I wrote about the company's CEO claiming to be able to crack the dark web.
He then went on to reference the story publicly on Twitter, posting a screenshot of an internal email which included the link to my story.
Afterwards, however, he also claimed that he was PhineasFisher. To prove it, he told me he would use the parody account he used last year to promote the FinFisher hack to claim responsibility.
"I am the same person behind that hack," he told me before coming out publicly.
gamma and HT down, a few more to go Phineas FisherJuly 6, 2015
The hacker, however, declined to answer to any further questions.
In any case, now at least we know who is responsible for the massive hack of the controversial company, which has been accused in repeated occasions to sell its software to governments with questionable human rights records. Some of these customers were then caught using Hacking Team's spyware against human rights activists or journalists.
The leak of 400GB of internal files contains "everything," according to a person close to the company, who only spoke on condition of anonymity. The files contain internal emails between employees; a list of customers, including some, such as the FBI, that were previously unknown; and allegedly even the source code of Hacking Team's software, its crown jewels.FAKE NEWS: Media Up to Old Tricks, Pushes Phony Trump Approval Polls — TRUMP Calls Them Out
During the election the biased #FakeNews media was notorious for pushing fake polls that had Hillary Clinton way ahead of challenger Donald Trump.
Of course, they were way off in their predictions.
Well it looks like they are up to their old tricks again.
Via Zero Hedge:
In the month leaded up to the election on November 8th, we repeatedly demonstrated how the mainstream media polls from the likes of ABC/Washington Post, CNN and Reuters repeatedly manipulated their poll samples to engineer their desired results, namely a large Hillary Clinton lead (see “New Podesta Email Exposes Playbook For Rigging Polls Through ‘Oversamples’” and “ABC/Wapo Effectively Admit To Poll Tampering As Hillary’s “Lead” Shrinks To 2-Points“). In fact, just 16 days prior to the election an ABC/Wapo poll showed a 12-point lead for Hillary, a result that obviously turned out to be embarrassingly wrong for the pollsters. But, proving they still got it, ABC/Washington Post and CNN are out with a pair of polls on Trump’s favorability this morning that sport some of the most egregious “oversamples” we’ve seen. The ABC/Wapo poll showed an 8-point sampling margin for Democrats with only 23% of the results taken from Republicans… …while the CNN poll showed a similar 8-point advantage for Democrats with only 24% of respondents identifying as Republicans. Of course, as we’ve repeatedly pointed out, these sampling mixes couldn’t be further from reality.
Read the rest here.
Trump called them out earlier today:
The same people who did the phony election polls, and were so wrong, are now doing approval rating polls. They are rigged just like before. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 17, 2017
The same people who did the phony election polls, and were so wrong, are now doing approval rating polls. They are rigged just like before.Spring is the busiest time of year at Apparel Warehouse on Smithfield Street. The demand for men’s suits, ties and shoes almost doubles during March through June, said owner Wally Yasin.
But this year, he worries that a six-month road closure Downtown will cause him to lose customers.
“It’s going to be crazy,” said Yasin, who has owned Apparel Warehouse for 16 years. “It’ll be good if we can stay in business.”
A $5.3 million Forbes Avenue reconstruction project will require a six-month closure of a parking lane and the northbound travel lane on Smithfield Street beginning Monday. The road will close to all vehicle traffic, but pedestrians will have access to buildings on Smithfield Street, and the southbound bus-only lane will stay open.
The Forbes Avenue project, started in 2014, includes improvements to curbs, sidewalks, street lighting, signals and new storm systems, new pavement and underground work on sewer lines. Crews from A. Merante Contracting Inc. are performing the work.
The Smithfield closure will stretch from Fourth Avenue to Fifth Avenue. It’s necessary for a new storm sewer to be placed underground at the intersection. About 10 car lengths can fit in the parking lane between Fourth and Forbes.
The stretch previously shut down in the fall, then the contractor reopened the street after a month while it sought additional utility locations.
Yasin is concerned that the closure is going to cause him to lose customers who won’t have easy access to his shop.
“Parking spaces, people driving by, all of that makes a difference,” he said.
Kenneth Olup, project manager of Hill International, said local businesses will have access to a designated loading zone to pick up and drop off deliveries.
A designated parking zone for customers at a day care on Smithfield Street will be designated on Forbes Avenue, Olup said, so parents can park and walk their children to the facility.
At Ace’s Breakaway and Play, an arcade on Smithfield Street, many customers are either Downtown workers or residents, said Karen Desmond, an employee of about two years.
“I don’t expect this will affect us too much,” she said.
Rocky Washington, 54, of Chippewa shops Downtown frequently and drives into the city from Beaver County. He said the city should offer tax breaks to businesses that are going to lose income because of the road closure. Even the lack of a convenient parking space can keep shoppers away, he said, let alone a street closure.
“To me, that’s good business,” Washington said. “It would say a whole lot about what the city thinks of the businesses.”
Mario Moussa at Madonna’s Mediterranean Cuisine isn’t sure how the traffic closure will affect his business.
His restaurant hosted a meeting with project staff to discuss the impact it might have and how to get around. But even if Moussa loses customers, he said he has little recourse.
“Hopefully not too much,” he said. “What can you do?”
Melissa Daniels is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Reach her at 412-380-8511 or mdaniels@tribweb.com.I teach workshops to adults about how to have healthier, more pleasurable, more intimate sex lives. As a sex educator, I get to shed light on topics that most people didn't get the chance to learn about in during their formal education.
There are certain themes that come up in workshop after workshop. People have questions, concerns and gaps in knowledge that come up regardless of where in the country I'm teaching.
Often, people tell me, "I wish I'd learned that sooner." It's those key lessons that I wish I could magically implant in everyone's brain so they could experience more joy and less anxiety when it comes to their intimate lives.
Here are five of the things I wish everyone knew about sex:
1. Using sex toys doesn't mean your partner isn't "enough" for you.
This is a concern I hear often, nearly always from women worried that their male partners will be "threatened" by their vibrators.
Humans are tool-using primates. We don't think we're inadequate because we use a hammer to build a shelf. Why should we feel inadequate because we use tools to augment our sex play?
Tools make us clever. Sex toys are tools to bring pleasure, fun and maybe a little efficiency to your sex life. What's not to love? Let's have a little less judgment about them and a lot more high-fives about what fabulously clever tool-users we are, OK?
Just make sure they are made from body-safe materials like silicone, stainless steel, glass or hard plastic.
2. If you have a vagina and you do not orgasm from intercourse, you are in the majority.
I've had so many women in workshops tell me they feel "broken" because they "don't orgasm from sex." Despite the orgasmic throes we see depicted in mainstream movies and pornography alike, most women do not reliably orgasm from intercourse. Around three-quarters of women need clitoral stimulation in order to experience an orgasm.
Even vaginally-stimulated orgasms may be more clitorally-related than we realize. Many sex researchers think that the G-spot is actually just the internal structure of the clitoris. They suggest that "G-spot orgasms" are actually just clitoral orgasms stimulated from deeper inside the body. Regardless of what the G-spot is, the reality is that most women need additional sexual activities to have the Big O.
There are two really simple ways to incorporate clitoral stimulation into penis-in-vagina sex: use a hand (either person's hand can work) or a sex toy (see #1).
There is no "right" way to have an orgasm. The best way is whatever feels best to you and your partner.
3. Size matters to some, but not as much as most guys think.
When I was volunteering at San Francisco Sex Information, the most frequently asked question we got was some variation on "Is my penis too small?"
We were trained to answer this question by first offering a bit of a reality check: clarifying that the average penis is about 5 ½ inches long and that the overwhelming majority of males have penises very near that average.
For most of the callers, this was a huge relief. The only other erect male penises they'd seen were in porn, which are not in any way representative of typical bodies. It'd be like watching the Olympics to get a sense of what you should look like after working out.
What the research on the topic says is that while, yes, size does matter to some people, it doesn't matter to everyone. What is far, far more important is the quality of connection and willingness to co-create a mutually pleasurable experience.
4. Lots of women experience pain during sex and this is not inevitable.
Ideally, sex would always be a dreamy, nothing-but-pleasurable experience. But for many, sex can involve unwanted pain. The National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior found that 30 percent of women reported some pain during their most recent sexual experience.
The researchers behind the study suspect that a large number of these painful experiences could be avoided if 1) they had more time to get aroused, and 2) they used additional lubrication.
If you're experiencing pain during sex, it's important to see your health care provider to rule out infection as a culprit. It's also essential to know that you have the right to stop sexual activity if it becomes painful and ask your partner for what you need.
If pain or discomfort is happening to your partner, show up with empathy and do whatever it takes to co-create a pleasurable experience for both of you. That may mean expanding your definition of "sex" to include non-penetrative activities.
5. Having meaningful conversations about sex is important.
The longer I work in the sex education field, the more I see how important it is to bring meaningful conversations about sex into the light.
When we silence these conversations, we create a perfect environment for shame to grow. If we feel shame, we don't seek answers to our most important questions. Misinformation can have consequences, both to our physical and mental wellbeing.
Sexuality is a big part of most romantic relationships. Being able to communicate about what is and is not working in all aspects of a relationship is key to its sustainability.
When we talk about sex, even with friends, we get better at using the vocabulary. Try saying to a friend, "Hey, I read this interesting article about [insert sex subject here]." Then chat about it. Just align the topic to your level of friendship intimacy and to any previous sex conversations you've had.
When we can create more safe spaces for meaningful conversations about sex, we can help reduce the amount of unnecessary shame around it.JewBelong Archie Gottesman (left) and Stacy Stuart are the founders of JewBelong. Share
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For almost two decades, Archie Gottesman and Stacy Stuart wrote the snarky ad campaigns for Manhattan Mini Storage that reached cult status with New Yorkers: “Why leave a city that has six professional sports teams, and also the Mets?,” one read. Another: “Let your personality be the reason people don’t want to come to your apartment.”
Then in 2013, the duo founded JewBelong, a non-profit that wants to welcome “disengaged Jews” back into the fold and show them what Judaism can mean for their lives. And once again, they are doing it with snarky, confrontational ads.
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Recent surveys have shown that fewer and fewer Jews consider themselves religious or are raising their children Jewish. “At this rate, Judaism just won’t exist anymore, it will just time itself out,” Gottesman told me. So she started a “crusade to save Judaism.”
“Stacy and I very much believe that people want meaning in their live,” Gottesman said. “And if they don’t get it from Judaism, they will get it from something else. They will get it from yoga or from meditation or a number of other ways.”
Gottesman and Stuart believe it’s often the fear of doing rituals or customs wrong that leads people to not do them at all – and thereby stops them from finding meaning in Judaism.
So JewBelong’s mission is to empower people and tell them, it’s ok how you do it, along as you do it.
“There is no Shabbat police,” Stuart told me. “If you wanna do Shabbat and you don’t have a challah and so you use a soft pretzel instead, use a soft pretzel! But still do it.”
The core philosophy of JewBelong is the “New Ten Commandments” that Gottesman wrote. Besides celebrating Shabbat together or a mandate to visit Israel, there are also some more controversial ones.
End boring synagogue services, for example. Or you don’t need to believe in God to be a Jew.
You might expect that there was a lot of controversy around the publication about these “commandments,” but Gottesman said the opposite is true. “They have gotten surprisingly little negative feedback,” she said. “Even if you don’t agree with all ten, they are an effort of stopping the slippage of numbers of Jews,” she said.
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To help with their mission, JewBelong has amassed a a number of engaging how-to guides for Shabbat dinners, the big holidays or even sitting shiva on their website. They explain each Jewish ritual in a low-key way, answer common questions and give tips on how to make the holidays more fun and engaging.
Let’s take Passover as an example. “The sad truth is, so many seders are as dull as a piece of plain matzah,” reads the intro of a Haggadah that you can download. They argue that there is too much Hebrew, that it takes forever and that everybody is hungry.
Gottesman and Stuart believe it’s important every Jew makes it through the full seder, so they came up with a livelier way to do it. (Secret weapon: More alcohol.)
Serve hors d’oeuvre and snacks in between so people don’t get hungry. Have the kids dress up and play skits. Take shorts of fireball whisky every time somebody says the name Moses (as a reference to the burning bush).
“If you are watching a TV show, you wouldn’t just want to skip to the end. I am sure you would miss something fun,” Stuart said. The same holds true for a seder.
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Both women have had different journeys that lead them to create JewBelong.
For Gottesman it was her husband’s conversion that made her realize that Judaism doesn’t always look welcoming from the outside. It is “a religion that can be heartwarming and full of joy, but at times can also be very intimidating and very rule-focused,” she said.
Stuart was raised in a secular household and her two Jewish parents didn’t teach her much about Judaism. Her immersion began when she went to a baby naming ceremony at Gottesman’s house.
“This event was so deeply meaningful and spiritual and beautiful,” Stuart recalled, putting both her hands on her heart. “It was really my first step to feeling this spirituality, this connection, this big meaning that Jews have available to them.”
What started as a pet project, now is a full time job for the two women. They say hundreds of thousands of people have visited their site so far.
“A rabbi once told me: Judaism is a great product, but the marketing sucks,” Gottesman said. Let’s see if JewBelong can change that.
Lilly Maier is a news intern at the Forward. Reach her at maier@forward.com or on Twitter at @lillymmaier
This story "JewBelong: How the Women Behind the Famous Manhattan Mini Storage Ads Are Trying to Save Judaism" was written by Lilly Maier.Labels Barely Release 1964 Dylan, Beach Boys Archive Materials Solely To Get Extended Copyrights
from the promoting-the-progress! dept
The Beach Boys released two copyright extension sets this week, both as downloads. The first, “Keep an Eye on Summer: The Beach Boys Sessions 1964,” is a collection of session outtakes, including working versions and remixes of “Fun Fun Fun,” “Don’t Worry Baby,” “I Get Around” and other hits, as well as live BBC recordings. The second, “The Beach Boys Live in Sacramento 1964,” includes two full concert performances.
A spokeswoman for Universal said that the label has “no current plans” for a Beatles release, but last year Universal and the Beatles’ label, Apple, kept plans under wraps until just before “The Beatles Bootleg Recordings 1963” turned up on iTunes. The group’s unreleased 1964 recordings include studio outtakes from the “Hard Day’s Night” and “Beatles for Sale” albums, as well as several BBC appearances and soundboard tapes of the band’s concerts in Paris, Melbourne, Adelaide, Vancouver, Philadelphia and several other cities.
Two years ago we wrote about the very odd release, by Sony, of just 100 copies of a set of previously unreleased Bob Dylan tracks. Why so few? Well, Sony sort of revealed the secret in the name of the title. See if you can spot it:Yup. The release had absolutely nothing to do with actually getting the works out to fans, and absolutely everything to do with copyright. You see, back in 2011, despite havingfor doing so, the EU retroactively extended copyright on music from 50 years to 70 years. However, there was a tiny catch: there was a "use it or lose it" provision in the law, saying that the music had to have been "released" to qualify for that 20 year extension. Thus, Sony realized with Dylan that it had to "release" (and I use the term loosely) some of its old recordings that had never been officially released, or it would lose the copyright on them.The other major labels have been doing the same. Last year, there was a series of releases of 1963 music, including more from Dylan, along with some previously unreleased Beatles tunes (at least those were somewhat more widely available). This year, we're getting a new crop of barely released 1964 songs including (yet again) more from Dylan, along with some from the Beach Boys as well (and some expect more Beatles tunes as well).At least when they're released on iTunes, people can get them, unlike the very limited CD releases some have chosen. But, either way, this music isn't being released for anyreason. They're solely being "released" to keep them out of the public domain. It's difficult to see how that has anything to do with furthering the interests of the public and culture. And it certainly highlights how ridiculous the copyright extension effort from 2011 was in the first place. It doesn't serve the public in the slightest, but it has offered up a chance for record labels to keep works out of the public domain for as long as possible.
Filed Under: beach boys, beatles, bob dylan, copyright, copyright extension, copyright term extension, eu, music
Companies: sony, universal musicToday In An MSNBC Interview, Clinton Claimed Her Personal Server Was "Allowed…" QUESTION: "But this report said that you, quote, had an obligation to discuss using your personal e-mail and that you didn't. How can you really say that it was allowed? Was it an error of judgment?" CLINTON: "Well, it was allowed and the rules have been clarified since I left about the practice. Having said that, I have said many times it was a mistake. And I if could go back, I would do it differently." ( MSNBC, 5/26/16)
Click To Watch
Politico Headline: "State Dept: Clinton Violated Email Rules" (Rachael Bade, Josh Gerstein, and Nick Gass, "State Dept: Clinton Violated Email Rules,"Politico, 5/25/16)
NBC News Headline: "Clinton Broke Federal Rules With Email Server, Audit Finds" (Ken Dilanian, "Clinton Broke Federal Rules With Email Server, Audit Finds," NBC News, 5/25/16)
Reuters Headline: "Clinton Email Server Broke Government Rules, Watchdog Finds" (Jonathan Allen, "Clinton Email Server Broke Government Rules, Watchdog Finds," Reuters, 5/25/16)
Regulations Implemented In 2005 Prohibited The Use Of A Personal Server To Conduct Government Business On A Regular Basis. " The Department's current policy, implemented in 2005, is that normal day-to-day operations should be conducted on an authorized Automated Information System (AIS), which 'has the proper level of security control to … ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the resident information.' The FAM defines an AIS as an assembly of hardware, software, and firmware used to electronically input, process, store, and/or output data." ("Office Of The Secretary: Evaluation Of Email Records Management And Cybersecurity Requirements," State Department Office Of Inspector General, 5/25/16)
According To The OIG, The State Department's Response To Ambassador Gration's Use Of A Personal Email On A Daily Basis Is How The Department Would Normally Respond To Such Behavior. "OIG identified many examples of staff using personal email accounts to conduct official business; however, OIG could only identify three cases where officials used non-Departmental systems on an exclusive basis for day-to-day operations. These include former Secretaries Powell and Clinton, as well as Jonathan Scott Gration, a former Ambassador to Kenya. Although the former Ambassador was not a member of the Office of the Secretary, the Department's response to his actions demonstrates how such usage is normally handled when Department cybersecurity officials become aware of it." ("Office Of The Secretary: Evaluation Of Email Records Management And Cybersecurity Requirements," State Department Office Of Inspector General, 5/25/16)
Gration Left His Position As U.S. Ambassador To Kenya Shortly Before An OIG Report Was Released That Was Highly Critical Of Him And Cited His Repeated Use Of Unsecure Internet Technology. "The U.S. ambassador to Kenya, J. Scott Gration, a close adviser and friend of President Obama, announced his resignation Friday, weeks before the scheduled release of a U.S. government audit highly critical of his leadership at the embassy. Gration did not provide specific reasons for moving on from what he described as 'his dream job.' But in an e-mailed statement, he said that 'differences with Washington regarding my leadership style and certain priorities lead me to believe that it's now time to leave.' The audit by the State Department Office of Inspector General found that Gration repeatedly violated diplomatic security protocols at the embassy by using unsecured Internet connections despite warnings, according to a former State Department Africa Bureau official who has seen a draft of the report." (Susdarsan Raghavan, "U.S. Ambassador To Kenya J. Scott Gration Resigns Over 'Differences' With Washington," The Washington Post, 6/29/12)
" State Department Regulations Mandated Normal Day-To-Day Operations Should Be Conducted On Department Equipment, But Clinton Failed To Do So And OIG Found No Evidence That Clinton Ever Sought Permission For Her Set Up. " Throughout Secretary Clinton's tenure, the FAM stated that normal day-to-day operations should be conducted on an authorized AIS, yet OIG found no evidence that the Secretary requested or obtained guidance or approval to conduct official business via a personal email account on her private server." ("Office Of The Secretary: Evaluation Of Email Records Management And Cybersecurity Requirements," State Department Office Of Inspector General, 5/25/16)
According To State Department Officials, The State Department Would Not Have Approved Clinton's Exclusive Use Of Personal Email Because Of Existing Prohibitions Against It And Security Risks. "However, according to these officials, DS and IRM did not-and would not-approve her exclusive reliance on a personal email account to conduct Department business, because of the restrictions in the FAM and the security risks in doing so." ("Office Of The Secretary: Evaluation Of Email Records Management And Cybersecurity Requirements," State Department Office Of Inspector General, 5/25/16)
Elections
Hillary ClintonWEST LINN, Ore. -- On Wednesday night, as a snowstorm settled over the Portland metro area, Michaela Wagenor found herself stuck on a steep, snow-covered hill in West Linn.
All around her, cars were sliding off South Rosemont Road as the brakes on her Buick Century fought their own battle with gravity.
“I'm spinning and I thought, ‘I'm going to roll back down and hit somebody,’” said Wagenor. “Then, he turned around. I guess he decided he was going to help one last person and he came running up to my window.”
He was Zach Marshall, who’d been busy helping other cars after his own truck succumbed to the hill.
“I got to Michaela's car and she was crying,” said Marshall. “I got a little girl myself so I was like, ‘no parent should walk away from a crying kid.’”
Marshall helped 20-year-old Wagenor turn her car around and guided her down the hill, out of harm's way. He even moved his stuck truck to give her his spot.
“That caused him to go back up the hill and fight a little ways so he could park safely,” said Wagenor. “That was incredibly kind.”
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It was just the beginning of Marshall’s kindness.
“He asked me if I had anywhere to go that night and I said ‘no, I live on Mt. Hood.’ He said, ‘Ok, let me make a call, you're going to come home with me tonight.’”
Marshall called his fiancée, Tanya. The couple live just a mile away. Marshall said he did his best to put Wagenor at ease, given that they had just met.
“This is scary,” said Marshall. “I can only imagine what it would be like being a 20-year-old out here and some construction worker says ‘Hey little girl, come on home!’”
“He had been so kind to me,” said Wagenor. “I honestly had nowhere else to go so I had to have some faith in him.”
The two started their snowy trek to Marshall’s home. Twenty minutes later, they were out of the cold.
“His fiancé immediately started saying ‘Can I get you a coat, hot cocoa, blankets or tea?’” Wagenor recalled.
“A cup of tea and some pajamas, and that solves most of the problems of the world,” said Marshall.
At least the problems in that corner of the world on a night Wagenor said she thought she’d spend huddled up, freezing in her car.
“Sometimes you could be somebody else's angel in the middle of the night and you never know what that could mean to somebody,” said Wagenor. “I know I really want to help somebody the way they helped me, now.”
For Marshall, that's the only thanks he needs.
“If you can take care of somebody else,” said Marshall. “Remember, that's what makes us great.”By Emily Jackson, Metro Vancouver, March 23, 2015
The battle between protesters and Kinder Morgan flared up on Monday after masked men allegedly broke into a vehicle on Burnaby Mountain to steal surveying equipment.
“I understand that a window was smashed on one of the contractors vehicles and some surveying equipment was taken by a masked man who we believe has previously interfered with the survey work we’ve been undertaking,” Trans Mountain Pipeline spokeswoman Lizette Parsons Bell said.
Parsons Bell alleged the man has previously interfered with the company’s surveying work by showing up and looking around the work site. She said there were three masked men involved in the incident.
A Burnaby RCMP spokeswoman said police were called to the area and are conducting an investigation, but refused to confirm or deny any details while the investigation is ongoing.
Kinder Morgan is surveying the mountain to determine whether it’s a possible route for the Trans Mountain pipeline, which the company wants to twin. Protests against the expansion led to more than 100 arrests on Burnaby Mountain in November 2014.
http://metronews.ca/news/vancouver/1320966/masked-protesters-allegedly-steal-kinder-morgan-equipment-on-burnaby-mountain/
AdvertisementsAs a gamer, its hard to find time to experience every new game that hits the shelf. With all the hype swirling around certain new titles some can definitely fall between the cracks. I love stumbling across a lesser promoted game and discovering gold in what is otherwise an under appreciated title.
Enslaved is an action adventure game that came out last October. It is a solid title that I would recommend to anyone that enjoys an entertaining single player experience without lots of moving parts or a learning curve. You can almost immediately jump right in and start playing without having to learn tons of moves or heavily invest lots of time. The premise of the storyline comes to head with high action sequences fairly early during gameplay. It goes something like this…
You are captured on what appears to be a futuristic slaver gunship ran by automated cyborg “mechs”, with little room for escape. With a stroke of luck a fellow prisoner breaks free and causes enough system failure within the flying prison to malfunction your cell. This fellow prisoner, your future confidant makes quick work of pursuing her freedom. You, a hulking, athletic and tribal looking man follow after her, but she always seems one step ahead of you.
Problems start to unfold as the gunship malfunctions begin to escalate and explosions cause it to lose altitude. A robotic voice rings out overhead saying something about escape pods and our protagonist decides this is his best chance for survival. Still running in the same direction of the fellow ex prisoner, you jump from drainpipes to crumbling floors then to adjacent balance beams. You move through make-shift solutions, even battling the high speed winds on the outside of the now crashing ship as your crawl along the side and back in to fight with the robotic slavers.
The dialog of our character helps move us in the right direction as the graphics and eye candy keep you engaged. This is accompanied with on screen coaching, walking you through the control scheme that can quite honestly seem over-exaggerated at times but not unbearable. Moving through the ship we are met with a slave with a headband fastened to his skull working at a computer terminal for the ship. Our character demands information about his stolen weapons but the slave begs us not to force him to talk. Instead, we do and almost immediately the headband activates, frying the poor slaves brain. Surprised, but without time to spare we move forward through the doomed ship.
A few daring jumps and hand-to-hand fights with robotic mechs later, you catch up to the girl whom you’ve been chasing. Unfortunately she is on the opposite side of an airlock door sealed tight. In an authoritative but panicked tone our character demands she open the door. She does not comply. We beat upon the window of the door and command it be opened, although hesitantly she turns and walks away toward the escape pods.
Frustrated our hero begins to assess a bad situation. No sooner does the computerized voice chime in as before, this time advising the ship is down to 5 escape pods remaining. The race is on as you control our athletic beast to quickly move from the outside of this ship, jumping from wing to wing. The overhead voice counting down the escape pods as they are launched one by one. Anticipation running high as you feel pressured to get to the last pod before the massive flying boat crashes in a blaze taking you with it. With seconds to spare, you crawl upon the outside of the last pod.
Peering through the window of the last escape pod, a frantic hero sees his fellow ex prisoner seconds from ejecting. In desperation he attempts to keep her from hitting the button. A regretful look crosses her face. They both know its too late. She presses the button. Our hero holds on for dear life. The screen cuts way out as we see the afterburners from the pod stream across the sky with our muscle bound character hanging on the front of it. It flies through the sky, through the trees and…the screen goes black as our character loses consciousness.
The world slowly starts coming back into focus. The obvious brutal treatment from being shot through the air at high velocity taking its toll, yet we seem to be intact. Our hero begins to regain a sense of his surroundings. Ruins of a fallen city, jungle and – and the girl! The fellow ex prisoner from the slave ship!
Once things snap into place for our character he all but attacks her, but suddenly something stops |
want it, but are scared of negotiating the contract yourself. To that I say, be honest in your query that you are looking for an agent to negotiate this contract. This isn’t a situation where you’re leveraging or nudging to lure an offer. An agent can agree to handle it or not, and you can discuss on the call whether this is a one-time thing or the beginning of a partnership. Some agents are perfectly happy to do this. Alternatively, you can use a lawyer for the contract and just query with the next one; they’re not subbing this ms anyway, so wouldn’t you rather ensure they’re the perfect fit for the next one?
I understand that sometimes, contests have judges that are both agents and editors. To that I say, if you’re in one of these contests, pick one path and stick with it. If you want an agent, and you get requests from both, send to agents only. If an agent offers, you can always state that you had interest from that pub and let the agent choose whether to sub there. If you want a small pub offer, send to editors only, and then see previous paragraph if you receive one and want an agent to negotiate it.
I understand that it’s a really, really freaking tough business. But it’s tough all around, and the best we can do is try to work together so everyone gets a fair shot and awesome manuscripts become books. Seems like a pretty solid goal to me, no?
AdvertisementsBY AMIT BARAN ROY | After a lot of rumors, fans will be glad to know that Ubisoft has finally announced the official PC specifications for the upcoming open world massive RPG game, ‘Tom Clancy’s The Division’. In a further press release, has also stated that the game will involve full mouse and keyboard support with customizable interface. Players can also communicate with other players using voice chat as well as text chat. The game will also have support for multiple graphic cards (upto three screens) and an unlocked frame rate. Here are the PC minimum and recommended PC specifications according to the official Ubisoft.
Minimum Specifications:
Supported OS: Windows® 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 (64-bit versions only)
Windows® 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 (64-bit versions only) Processor: Intel Core i5-2400 | AMD FX-6100, or better
Intel Core i5-2400 | AMD FX-6100, or better RAM: 6GB RAM
6GB RAM Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 with 2 GB VRAM (current equivalent NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760) | AMD Radeon HD 7770 with 2 GB VRAM, or better – See supported List*
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 with 2 GB VRAM (current equivalent NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760) | AMD Radeon HD 7770 with 2 GB VRAM, or better – See supported List* Notebook support: Laptop models of these desktop cards may work as long as they are on-par in terms of performance with at least the minimum configuration
Laptop models of these desktop cards may work as long as they are on-par in terms of performance with at least the minimum configuration DirectX: Version 11
Version 11 Hard Disk Space: 40GB
40GB Optical Drive: DVD-ROM Dual Layer
DVD-ROM Dual Layer Peripherals: Windows-compatible keyboard, mouse, headset, optional controller
Windows-compatible keyboard, mouse, headset, optional controller Multiplayer: Broadband connection with 256 kbps upstream, or faster
Recommended Specifications:
Supported OS: Windows® 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 (64-bit versions only)
Windows® 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 (64-bit versions only) Processor: Intel Core i7-3770 | AMD FX-8350, or better
Intel Core i7-3770 | AMD FX-8350, or better RAM: 8GB RAM
8GB RAM Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 | AMD Radeon R9 290, or better – See supported List*
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 | AMD Radeon R9 290, or better – See supported List* Notebook support: Laptop models of these desktop cards may work as long as they are on-par in terms of performance with at least the minimum configuration
Laptop models of these desktop cards may work as long as they are on-par in terms of performance with at least the minimum configuration DirectX: Version 11
Version 11 Hard Disk Space: 40GB
40GB Optical Drive: DVD-ROM Dual Layer
DVD-ROM Dual Layer Peripherals: Windows-compatible keyboard, mouse, optional controller
Windows-compatible keyboard, mouse, optional controller Multiplayer: Broadband connection with 512 kbps upstream, or faster
Supported NVIDIA Cards at Release:
GeForce GTX500 series: GeForce GTX560 (2 GB VRAM) or better • GeForce GTX600 series: GeForce GTX660 or better • GeForce GTX700 series: GeForce GTX760 or better • GeForce GTX900 Titan series: GeForce GTX960 or better
Supported AMD Cards at Release:
Radeon HD7000 series: Radeon HD7770 (2 GB VRAM) or better • Radeon 200 series: Radeon R7 270 or better • Radeon 300/Fury X series: Radeon R7 370 or better
To note, ‘The Division’ is set for an official launch on March 8, 2016 for PC, Xbox One and Playstation 4. But, Xbox One fans can get their hands on the game as early as on January 28, 2016 in the form of ‘Early Access’. Whereas, PC and PS4 fans will have to wait for another 24 hours until January 29, 2016 for the Closed Beta. The Beta version will allow players to explore the story driven missions of New York, and battle their way with other agents through the rampant wrecked streets of Manhattan. The closed Beta is available till January 31st. To get a waitlisted spot, you can sign up, or get the full guaranteed access by the game.
‘Tom Clancy's The Division’ presents a daunting task to a group of trained agents to save the city of New York from the verge of a massive collapse. It’s a seamless multiplayer and PvP enabled game that involves both Co-op and solo play. Players have to deal with some real dangerous and morally questionable situations. The Division’s character progression occurs through two types of paths.
Loot:- There are basically two types of loots- weapons and equipped gear. Players can carry a primary weapon, secondary weapon and a pistol. These weapons can be modded to provide additional accuracy, stability and range. All weapon upgrades ultimately deals with the damage per second. The equipped gear category consists of Body armor, gloves, packs, knee pads, holsters and many more. Air filters and gas masks can help in highly contaminated PvP enabled Dark Zones. There are also tiered versions of Loot. Common White-colored gear, Less common green colored ones, Rare blue ones and so on.
There are basically two types of loots- weapons and equipped gear. Players can carry a primary weapon, secondary weapon and a pistol. These weapons can be modded to provide additional accuracy, stability and range. All weapon upgrades ultimately deals with the damage per second. The equipped gear category consists of Body armor, gloves, packs, knee pads, holsters and many more. Air filters and gas masks can help in highly contaminated PvP enabled Dark Zones. There are also tiered versions of Loot. Common White-colored gear, Less common green colored ones, Rare blue ones and so on. Experience:- Players are designated by levels to let them use the particular level weapons and gear. Hence, levelling up is of essence to continue to use higher level weapons. For that to happen, one has to keep gaining experience- by killing enemies, discovering unexplored parts of the city, or completing missions. Note that killing enemies can be considered as the best way to earn experience in the Dark Zone (has separate levelling system).
You can get a feel of the game by watching the official RPG gameplay trailer below:-
Heads Up: Ubisoft has officially announced the PC specs for ‘Tom Clancy’s The Division’. Good to see that there is fair amount of difference between the minimum and recommended requirements. This shows that the game is nicely scalable, and can run well on a range of systems. The game in development by, and assisted by co-developers,, and is set for launch on March 8th, 2016 for PC, PS4 and Xbox One.For 297 kilometers (185 miles) from Georgetown in Washington, D.C., to Cumberland, Maryland, the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal generally follows along the north bank of the Potomac River. Constructed over a span of 22 years starting in 1828, the canal historically played an important role in transporting goods, primarily coal. The canal, towpath, and surviving system of locks and structures, are now a national historic park.
The Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 captured these images of the Potomac River and canal on September 27, 2016. The top image shows the stretch between Hancock and Cumberland, Maryland—about 97 kilometers (60 miles) if you were to hike or bike along the towpath between these two towns. West Virginia is south of the river.
Original plans called for the canal to wind all the way to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but cost overruns and construction delays prevented that from happening. One of the more infamous delays occurred near Paw Paw, West Virginia. The second image shows a detailed view of the region, where the Potomac takes on a sinuous shape. The meanders in this view are confined between parallel ridges running northeast to southwest.
Meanders along the rivers and streams in this region are not uncommon; they are visible in multiple locations in the top image. But the Paw Paw Bends curve to such a degree that engineers determined they would save 10 kilometers (6 miles) of canal by bypassing four of the bends incised deep in the bedrock. They decided instead to route the canal through the ravine of a tributary, and then excavate through shale rock to construct a 950-meter-long tunnel (3,118 feet), the largest structure along the canal. Work started in 1836 and was completed 14 years later—12 years longer than first planned.
This year is the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service. We are celebrating this milestone with a gallery of images that you can see here.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Caption by Kathryn Hansen.Conservative icon Sarah Palin quipped that paid anti-Trump protesters show presidential candidate Donald Trump is creating jobs even before taking office as she called them out for false accusations at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver, Colorado on Friday.
“Like a golden wrecking ball [Trump] shattered walls in the good ol’ boys club. He knocked out the hypocritical intolerance that dare stymie freedom of speech with intimidation and those false accusations of sexism and racism just to stop debate,” said 2008 vice presidential nominee Palin. Alaska’s former governor pointed to the “silly protesters” at Trump rallies as those behind the accusations. She remarked at seeing “a bunch of them this morning coming out of the hotel.”
“We’ve been telling him he should hold his rallies at construction sites. You know protesters aren’t going to show up at a job site,” said Palin. “Did you know some of those rebel rousers, they’re actually paid protesters. So there you go, not even president yet and our guy’s already creating jobs.”
Fox News Insider reported on a Craigslist ad soliciting for anti-Trump protesters, allegedly posted by supporters of Bernie Sanders.
The Washington Times has reported on MoveOn.org fundraising efforts capitalizing off of a Trump rally in Chicago that was cancelled due to massive numbers of protesters and the threat of impending violence.
Follow Michelle Moons on Twitter @MichelleDiana
Update: A paragraph in this article that presented inaccurate data has been removed.People magazine announced today that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has been crowned 2016’s “Sexiest Man Alive.” Johnson is a former college football player turned WWE wrestler turned Hollywood leading man. He is mixed race Black and Samoan, making him the first Pacific Islander American to be named People‘s Sexiest Man Alive.
Johnson is also only the second Black man (after Denzel Washington, who was named Sexiest Man in 1996) and the second AAPI man (after Keanu Reeves, who was retroactively named 1994’s Sexiest Man Alive in 2015) to receive the title.
Johnson is currently on a promotional tour for Disney’s Moana, which opens next week and which features the studio’s first Pacific Islander princess. Moana tells the story of the titular daughter of a Polynesian tribal chief who sets off on a quest to save her people. Johnson voices Maui, a heroic demigod inspired by the legendary Maui, a figure whose tales are common throughout many Pacific Islander cultures. While Disney has been hailed for casting two Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander actors — Johnson and newcomer Auli’i Cravalho — to voice the film’s main characters, the film has also faced backlash from some Pacific Islander advocates who took issue with the depiction of Maui as “overweight,” “appropriative,” and “frivolous“.
Disney was also heavily criticized for its sale of a child’s Halloween costume, which was akin to brownface. The costume was primarily was a one-piece brown-skinned suit with attached grass skirt and necklace. After community outcry, Disney pulled the costume from its shelves.
Nonetheless, many are praising Moana for the strength of its female main character. Like Brave‘s Merida, Moana joins Disney’s roster of princesses while expressing few of the trappings of the Disney cliche. She is a strong heroine whose quest revolves around saving her world rather than winning the heart of a love interest. Johnson has also received critical praise for his performance in the film.
In reaction to being named People‘s Sexiest Man this year, Johnson reflected upon what it meant for him as someone growing up as an American Samoan in Hawaii. Reports People:
“I said, ‘That’s awesome.’ And then what went through my mind was just how cool and exciting it is,” Johnson tells PEOPLE in this week’s cover story. “And then I thought, ‘Wow, we’ve pretty much reached the pinnacle.’ I’m not quite too sure where we go from here. I’ve done it all, this is it.” …At 6’5″ and 245 lbs., the Herculean star insists that becoming comfortable in his own skin “took a lot of time.” As a teen growing up in Hawaii, “I was doing a lot of things that I shouldn’t have. I was getting arrested multiple times, but at the same time, always very respectful to my teachers and elders. I was unsure of who I was and who I wanted to be,” he says.
AAPI men have long endured racialized gender stereotypes that disparage their masculine identity. Orientalist tropes informed by model minority stereotypes falsely portray many Asian American men as uniformly ’emasculated’ (read this for an important note on such linguistic framing) relative to White men, while portrayals of Pacific Islander masculinity lack reference to the model minority myth and often include more stereotypically ‘hypermasculine’ traits. Overall, such unsophisticated and generalizing images of AAPI masculinity persist due to a shared lack of nuance and diversity in our mainstream construction of the masculine which typically reserves access to normative and sexy manhood only for White straight men. Many AAPI gender activists seek to correct this problem by diversifying our media images of masculinity so that they are more inclusive of men of colour and other marginalized men, while they also acknowledge feminist critiques of hegemonic masculinity.
Johnson ruminated on the qualities that comprise male sexiness including some traits he felt might have lead to him receiving the honour, saying:
“Ah, a sense of humor. And I think probably just not trying to be sexy and just being cool and confident in your movies. I think with a lot of my fans, I’ve gotten to a very, very cool place where there’s a direct line between the man they know off-screen and the man they see on-screen.”
People‘s Sexiest Man Alive feature has long been dominated by White heterosexual male recipients, including some (White) actors named multiple times in the feature’s three decade history. While non-White men have appeared lower in the list’s rankings, only three men of colour — Johnson, Reeves and Washington — have received the pinnacle honour of being the year’s Sexiest Man Alive for the magazine. One can only hope that the naming of Dwayne Johnson as 2016’s image of male sexiness by People will serve as a necessary step towards helping to dismantle the overarching anti-AAPI stereotypes that continue to insult the masculine and heterosexual self-image of straight AAPI men, and that it will usher in a broader and necessary diversification of hegemonic masculinity.
After all, there is no shortage of hot AAPI men. If you want more, check out Haikus on Hotties, a fantastic 2017 wall calendar featuring… well, pretty much what it sounds like. Haikus on Hotties is the second iteration of last year’s Haikus with Hotties calendar.
People‘s announcement marks a noteworthy mainstream recognition of AAPI male sexiness that is sure to be much-celebrated for the AAPI community in the coming days. I furthermore hope that this marks a new trend for People in finally starting to consider more non-White men in general for the position of Sexiest Man Alive in future years.
Update: An earlier version of this post lacked a detailed discussion of the diversity of PI male portrayals in media. Many thanks to J for the critique; this post has been revised to try and do better.The rising furore over President-elect Donald Trump's naming of alt-right hero Stephen K. Bannon as chief strategist has devolved into a bizarre argument over whether Bannon is personally racist and anti-Semitic or "only" ran a website questioning the loyalty of Jewish critics and espousing the views of far-right European parties.
It's not bad enough that a high-ranking White House official praises right-wing, anti-Semitic parties, boasts of his publication's association with white nationalists and built a campaign around the threat of globalist, international moneymen – a thinly disguised anti-Semitic trope? (Actually, Bannon's former wife claims that he did object to sending his children to a school with Jewish students. Doesn't this "count"?) House Speaker Paul Ryan tells us not to worry; it's all good. Really.
Funny how Trump and some of his closest aides who rail against globalism are enmeshed in foreign businesses. Trump, of course, is indebted to foreign banks.
From The Wall Street Journal: "Germany's Deutsche Bank has been one of Trump's long-time suppliers of credit. The bank provided him with hundreds of millions in loans to finance the DC hotel and other projects. Deutsche Bank, which does plenty of business in America, has already been hit with massive fines by US regulators for various shenanigans. So what happens when a foreign bank that federal regulators oversee is a creditor to the president those regulators answer to? The same problem could play out with banks in China and other foreign countries that Trump has had dealings with."The National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS), of the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) in Japan, has achieved an electrical current of 100,000 amperes, which is by far the highest in the world, by using the new idea of assembling the state-of-the-art yttrium-based high-temperature superconducting tapes to fabricate a large-scale magnet conductor.
NIFS is undertaking the development of a high-temperature superconducting coil that is appropriate for the fusion reactor magnet. Using the state-of-the-art yttrium-based high-temperature superconducting tapes which have been developed and produced in Japan through the new thinking that simply stacks the tapes, NIFS manufactured a conductor of exceptional mechanical strength. For the conductor joints, which are important for the production of the large-scale coils, NIFS developed low-resistance joint technology through collaborative research with Tohoku University.
As a result of the prototype conductor test, at the absolute temperature of 20 degrees Kelvin (minus 253 degrees Celsius) the electrical current exceeds 100,000 amperes. The overall current density exceeds 40 A/mm2 including the jackets, and this value is of practical use for manufacturing large-scale fusion reactor magnets. This result is of global importance. We use 54 yttrium-based high-temperature superconducting tapes. Each tape is 10 mm in width and 0.2 mm in thickness.
The electrical current flows only through one area. Together with the substrate used for this type of tape that is exceptional in strength and flexibility, by surrounding this area by a copper jacket and a stainless steel jacket an extremely strong conductor is produced. The current is induced by magnetic induction.
The revolutionary method by which the helical fusion reactor's massive magnet is manufactured by sequentially connecting the short high-temperature superconductors has received much attention. Further, the large current-capacity high-temperature superconductor with simple stacking of yttrium-based tapes and the so-called "joint winding method" have also impacted the development of high-temperature superconducting magnets used in medical instruments and power-electric devices. Ripple effects are anticipated in the future.You're Not Going Crazy: 7 Ingredients Chipotle Employees Give You Less Of (ABC News)
If you’re a rabid Chipotle lover, then chances are you've noticed that employees can be a little... thrifty when it comes to certain ingredients. Turns out you’re not nuts.
The Wall Street Journal writer Sarah Nassauer got a glimpse inside the complicated world of Chipotle, and the results were certainly revealing.
There are seven “critical” ingredients that employees are trained to serve smaller portion sizes of than foods like rice, beans and salsa, according to Nassauer.
Steak, carnitas, barbacoa, chicken, cheese, guacamole and sour cream are served in less than full scoops, and if customers request more, employees must inform them there is an extra charge.
“Our menu prices are based on food costs, and the ‘critical seven’ are ingredients that are much more expensive (things like meat and cheese),” Chipotle communications director Chris Arnold told ABC News. “Employees have more latitude with ingredients like rice and beans and salsa, but we try to be more mindful of serving sizes with the more costly ingredients. But, prices are based on prescribed serving sizes of every ingredient.”
Those prescribed serving sizes are four ounces of meat and rice, two ounces of green or red salsa and a one-ounce pinch of cheese or lettuce, according to an employee handbook that describes the “art of portioning.”
“Chipotle employees get extensive training and training materials to support the things they are taught,” Arnold said.
In order to keep those employees in check, Chipotle employs “restaurateurs,” or especially good restaurant managers who receive stock options, a higher salary than a general manager plus a company-owned Toyota Prius. Restaurateurs are evaluated on how well his employees develop and perform, and every two weeks they meet with employees to discuss everything from how work is going and how other employees are performing to their personal lives.
So next time you’re building your perfect burrito, notice your portions and keep an eye out for restaurateurs.John McCain's campaign acknowledged this weekend that Sarah Palin is unprepared to be vice president or president of the United States.
Of course, McCain's people said no such thing. But their actions told you all you needed to know.
McCain, Barack Obama and Joe Biden all subjected themselves to tough questioning on the regular Sunday news programs. Palin was the only no-show. And it's not just the Sunday interviews. She has not opened herself to any serious questioning since McCain picked her to be next in line for the presidency.
McCain's advisers clearly don't trust Palin to answer questions about policy and don't want her to answer many of the questions that have been raised about her tenure as governor of Alaska.
Rick Davis, McCain's campaign manager, gave the game away when he said on "Fox News Sunday" that she would not meet with reporters until they showed a willingness to treat her "with some level of respect and deference."
Deference? That's a word used in monarchies or aristocracies. Democracies don't give "deference" to politicians. When have McCain, Obama, Biden or, for that matter, Hillary Clinton asked for deference?
A few hours later came the announcement that Palin would grant an interview to ABC News's Charlie Gibson. Recall that Gibson was the co-host of an ABC News debate last April during which Obama faced a relentless pounding. Here's hoping that a sense of fairness will lead Gibson to be comparably tough on Palin this week. If he treats her more deferentially than he did Obama, we will know that McCain's war on the media is working.
From the moment Palin was picked, reporters immediately began to ask questions, a lot of them. Because she was so little known outside Alaska, her views on many issues, particularly foreign policy, are a mystery. Voters also need to know how McCain went about reaching what will probably be the most important decision he makes during this campaign.
A week ago, Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times cited McCain sources questioning "how thoroughly Mr. McCain had examined her background before putting her on the Republican presidential ticket." She reported that Palin had been selected "with more haste than McCain advisers initially described." (She also mistakenly reported that Palin belonged to the Alaskan Independence Party. It was her husband, Todd, who had been a member.)
McCain's people trashed Bumiller, saying she had opted to "make up her own version of events." Steve Schmidt, McCain's chief strategist, said the Times had written "an absolute work of fiction" about the vetting process while Karl Rove told his Fox News viewers that the Times "got it wrong."
It turned out that the McCain side misled journalists. Bumiller was right about the vetting. The lesson is that McCain's counselors are not interested in fair treatment, and they are certainly not interested in the truth.
If the media cave to McCain's pressure, it will be the third time this decade that conservative attacks led reporters to tilt to the right.
During the 2000 battle over Florida, Al Gore's perfectly defensible efforts to win a hand recount ran into a buzz saw of criticism from nonpartisan commentators, many of whom urged Gore to withdraw "gracefully." In the buildup to the Iraq war, the Bush administration and its supporters savaged the patriotism of many who raised questions about its strategy and its plans. Now, McCain hopes Palin will skate through the next two months without any real scrutiny or questioning.
It is hugely unfortunate that the first big story about Palin -- other than questions raised about whether she fired the head of the Alaska state police for refusing to dismiss her former brother-in-law -- concerned her 17-year-old daughter's pregnancy. It's not just that Bristol Palin should be left alone, but also that the intense interest in this story gave McCain's bullies an excuse to push aside legitimate questions about Palin's record and knowledge.
Of course, Palin's handlers are being hypocritical: They want to focus on her family life and her identity as a hockey mom when doing so helps them and to push aside any story that mars this perfect picture. Conservatives are always against identity politics until they are for it.
Nonetheless, what matters is not Palin's personal life but whether she is prepared to assume the presidency if called upon. The actions of McCain's lieutenants suggest that they know the answer. And they are doing everything they can to keep the media from finding it.
postchat@aol.comRed Christmas stockings and green garlands hang from several stalls in the Jets locker room, but little cheer remains for a team rendered irrelevant by its record.
Still, there is a game to be played Sunday at MetLife Stadium against the Chargers, a team crossing the country with a 5-9 record and, like the Jets (6-8), no remaining playoff hopes. From quarterback Greg McElroy to defensive coordinator Mike Pettine, the Jets insist they will play to win while exploring their depth chart's potential in front of a home crowd that has hidden behind brown paper bags in recent weeks.
"There's an element of that but we're still expected to put a lineup out there to stop an opponent," Pettine said when asked about using reserves. "It's not going to be a wholesale thing."
The Jets left their playoff chances in Nashville on Monday night — gone in a Chris Johnson sprint to the end zone (plus a flurry of Mark Sanchez turnovers). The Jets were exposed for the final time, and left to pick up the fragments in the days since; Rex Ryan hesitated to name a backup quarterback after McElroy supplanted Sanchez as the starter. McElroy maintained that little has changed for him.
"Every week I've tried to prepare like I was going to be out there," said McElroy, who is in his second season. "I felt good (this week). I felt comfortable going in."We’re just a few days away from the start of training camp, and the Washington Wizards have finally set the roster heading into camp this month. After signing free agents Josh Childress and Xavier Henry to training camp deals, Washington’s brass has also added Pops Mensah-Bonsu and D’or Fischer to the roster, according to reports.
With 15 players under guaranteed contracts, the Wizards might not appear to be the most welcoming landing spot for NBA free agents hoping to latch on in the league. Despite long-shot odds of making the team, Pops Mensah-Bonsu, Xavier Silas and D’or Fischer have all joined Josh Childress in accepting training camp invitations, according to league sources with knowledge of the situation.
–via Michael Lee of the Washington Post
The English native, Pops Mensah-Bonsu, is best known for his time at George Washington. The undrafted big man has played for numerous NBA teams throughout the years including, the San Antonio Spurs, Houston Rockets, Toronto Raptors, and most recently the New Orleans Hornets. Mensah-Bonsu has a career average of 3 points and 3 rebounds per game in the NBA.
On the other hand, D’or Fischer is a bit of an unknown prospect out of West Virginia. Although he hasn’t spent any time in the NBA, Fischer has played professional ball overseas with plenty of clubs.
Needless to say, neither Mensah-Bonsu nor Fischer have much of a chance making the Wizards roster, given the fact that Washington already had 15 players under contract, which is the maximum allowed. All of the players under training camp deals, including Josh Childress and Xavier Henry, are essentially auditioning for the rest of the teams around the league.
I’ll be interested to see if we hear about any of those names mentioned during the course of the season, especially if an unexpected trade leaves the Wizards with an open roster spot.
Neither Chris Singleton or Emeka Okafor are expected to play during the preseason, so I’d expect these new faces to get an opportunity to showcase themselves.Is the next Jonestown or Waco tragedy primed to explode somewhere in America, led from behind bars by a pedophile-polygamist cult leader? That’s the loaded warning looming not-so-subtly beneath the surface in documentary Prophet’s Prey, a chilling deep dive exposé of convicted child rapist Warren Jeffs and his Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS Church).
First formed as an unsanctioned offshoot of the Mormon church, the polygamist FLDS sect reportedly has thousands of devotees and several remote compounds dotting the American West. The infamous Jeffs, now 59, is currently serving a life sentence plus 20 years for two felony counts of child sexual abuse in which he impregnated a 15-year-old girl and assaulted another of his child brides who was only 12 years old at the time.
An audio recording of the violation of the 12-year-old, used as evidence during Jeffs’ 2011 trial, helped a jury swiftly convict him. It plays over a simple black screen in Prophet’s Prey, leaving viewers to fill in the horror of the scene in one of several skin-crawlingly effective moments that makes the latest from Oscar-nominated Amy Berg (Deliver Us From Evil, West Of Memphis) one of the more disturbing films in recent memory.
But the victims named in that case represent just two of many heinous sex crimes Jeffs allegedly committed against children during his pre-incarceration reign as the self-appointed prophet of the FLDS flock.
The women of the FLDS, forbidden from wearing anything other than conservative prairie dresses, were already programmed from birth to obey the church and its men. The men, in turn, were encouraged to take a minimum of three spouses each, a practice that gave way to widespread marital rape and led to rampant underage pregnancy, particularly among Jeffs’ reported 70-plus wives.
Jeffs officially took control of the sect after jockeying to become successor to his father, FLDS leader Rulon Jeffs (and marrying all but two of his father's widows). Even before then, Warren Jeffs was violating young members of the church with impunity, according to the film.
A key witness in Jeffs’ trial was his own nephew, Brent Jeffs, who first appears in Prophet’s Prey explaining the blind obedience that is hammered into every FLDS member from birth so that no one is willing to question the authority of church leaders.
Later, Brent reveals that he was sexually abused by Warren Jeffs from the age of five in the basement of a former FLDS school. There, he says Warren kept an office overlooking the playground, using its god’s eye view of youngsters at play to pick victims he’d molest under the guise of monitoring dress code.
Adapted from Sam Brower’s 2011 book of the same name, Prophet’s Prey also extensively taps author Jon Krakauer (Everest) as an expert investigator, utilizing research he gathered for his 2003 bestseller Under The Banner Of Heaven. With Brower and Krakauer as her guides, Berg recaps the slow-building efforts of state and federal government forces to track and capture Jeffs, who went on the lam after making the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list in 2005 alongside high-value targets like Osama bin Laden.
Eyebrow-raising discoveries made by Berg following the film’s Sundance Film Festival premiere link the FLDS to several mainstream industries and companies, including Reliance Electric, NewEra Manufacturing, and other holdings whose massive manufacturing profits have helped make the FLDS organization reportedly worth more than $100 million. (One conspiracy theory leap even suggests that an FLDS-owned aerospace manufacturer may have been responsible for the Challenger disaster.)
But it’s the personal experiences of ex-FLDS members, including Jeffs’ own siblings and relatives, which provide the most damning testimonies in Prophet’s Prey.
Former FLDS member and onetime Rulon confidante Ron Rohbock, who was excommunicated in 2003, reveals how he learned that his own daughter was raped by Jeffs, two years after it occurred. Most heart-wrenchingly, Rohbock relates how he rescued his daughter from the church only to watch helplessly as she was kidnapped back five days later and reportedly sent to an FLDS compound in Mexico.
He also shares his suspicions that Jeffs impregnated one of Rulon’s wives shortly before Rulon died in 2002. Jeffs’ own estranged brother Wallace Jeffs also shares that suspicion, and more. “The fact that [Warren] always felt that he could cover up everything he did wrong,” Wallace says, “he definitely would have taken Father’s life to cover that up.”
Janetta Jessop, who was 16 years old when her parents sacrificed her to become Jeffs’ 63rd wife, later made a Hail Mary call from a remote FLDS compound that led to her escape. Still visibly shocked by the ordeal, she sits for Berg and describes the trauma in plain terms: “It took away my entire life.”
These personal stories and more piece together a portrait of a megalomaniac opportunist who managed to gradually transform the FLDS sect into his own twisted fiefdom, in which the women and children of the church became his sexual property and the faithful were required to line his coffers with their life savings.
Those savings, along with profits tithed from business-owning FLDS members, have helped to pay for the construction of several FLDS compounds across America, including rural townships in Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and Texas where FLDS communities can essentially operate in seclusion away from the prying eyes and laws of the outside world.
After years on the lam, Jeffs was eventually and accidentally caught during a traffic stop outside Las Vegas, Nevada while traveling with one of his wives and her brother. State troopers discovered the fugitive cult leader in the backseat of an Escalade, calmly eating a salad. They also found several laptops, burner cell phones, disguises, and over $50,000 in cash.
During an ensuing legal circus that saw a Utah appeals judge overturn a 10-year conviction before he was sent away on separate charges by a Texas court, Jeffs consistently pled the fifth, when he wasn’t warning that God would take revenge on his oppressors. His eerily placid disembodied voice is heard via recordings, hypnotically issuing missives to his flock like, "Perfect obedience produces perfect faith." Adding to the mounting sense of unease and a palpably menacing score is surveillance camera footage of Jeffs’ erratic demeanor in prison, from where he’s believed to still be leading the FLDS.
Disturbing as Jeffs’ sex crimes are, those who have been tracking Jeffs’ activities the closest tell Berg that they fear he will next instigate an act of mass violence, although the film offers no evidence to suggest that FLDS leaders have hidden stockpiles of arms à la Waco or are plotting the next Jonestown.
The most pointed warning comes from author Krakauer, who’s one of six executive producers on Prophet’s Prey alongside Hollywood veterans Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, and Oscar-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black.
Incarceration has, in many ways, only strengthened Jeffs’ hold over his hardcore followers and reinforced the notion that he’s being martyred for his faith, Krakauer argues. “I worry most of all that [Jeffs] is going to incite some bloodshed, intentionally or not intentionally,” the author cautions. “Intentionally, probably.”Something strange is happening in the gold market. It used to be the first place investors rushed to in a crisis, but that's changing.
An analyst note from Barclays shows investors pulled money from financial derivatives based on the gold price, even as the Greek debt crisis reached its peak in June.
Barclays said $480 million (£310 million) was pulled from the market that month, putting total outflows in the past two months at over $1 billion (£640 million)
"There are limited signs of safe-haven demand for gold," Barclays said |
talked about the upcoming album, his new "perspective" on religion, his status in Leftover Crack, and the very nature of drug addiction.
The new album is called Poets Were My Heroes. Can you tell us a little bit about why you chose that title?
I wanted to pick a track that represented the record as a whole, the overall message, and where I was at musically and lyrically in my life. Originally it was going to be called "Another Way", after the third track on the record, which talks about the largely self serving attitude we have in western societies, going against the grain, and a hope for an alternative -another way of existence.
But the title itself, "Another Way", seemed a little too accessible, and too broad- Too blanket-like. Too pablum, like Nevermind. It's a good title, but it's meant for mass consumption. It's not offensive, moving, or thought provoking, just sorta all encompassing and vague. It has meaning but not in any real direct sense.
I felt like using "Another Way" would have been a little insulting to some of the audience, though it would probably sell more copies. In the end, I chose Poets Were My Heroes as the title track. It was more personal and basically saying the same thing only with more detail and interest. The record touches a lot on a malevolent world and a strong desire for alternatives to this sort a selfish and singular attitude we all have or are confronted with on the streets.
It's not exactly literal. Saying that poets were my heroes is like saying I look to the gays, or I look to the writers, or the intellectuals, or to the philosophers. It's not looking up to war heroes, generals, well educated men who grease wheels, or the heavy movers and shakers that do all the decision making in our world, whom we are so prone to uphold in our society. It's taking a cue from the peace makers, the thoughtful, the revolutionaries of heart and mind, and at the same time it's a protest and a "fuck you" to authorities, our national attitude, and the way the world is going in general.
What's the background behind the title Poets were my heroes?
"Poets Were My Heroes" is actually a song I wrote for my friends JP and Jamie Toulon, two brothers that started the punk band Old Skull back in the late 80s or early 90s when they were just little kids. JP was my best friend, and I was close with Jamie as well. They both died last year in very tragic manners, and so I wrote this requiem for them.
I've heard that the new album actually has a full orchestra in part. Why did you make the decision to pay for a full pit?
The song has an entire orchestra on it. I had a string quartet and a horn section come in and I multi-tracked them into a huge orchestra. There were 4 different string lines and two horn lines, and each group line broke down into individual lines for the cellos, violas, and violins. I had to sing or play each musician their part for each line on the piano since I am not a classically trained musician.
I let them all know before they agreed to play that they would have to be patient with me as all the lines were in my head and there was no written sheet music. They were all extremely good sports about it and most everything was done in the first few takes. It was a new experience for me. I probably could have played it all on a keyboard or hired a single string player who could have tracked each line one at a time, but I really wanted to do it right, so I spent the extra money to have a whole group quartet in. It was not cheap, but it was fully worth it.
There is no substitute for real live sounds! And that was my attitude for every session. There are no artificially or digitally reproduced sounds on the entire record.
In addition to being about what I talked about earlier, "Poets" is about all the wasted talent in the world. It's also about lack of support. How life can become exponentially difficult when you feel like no one believes in you⦠A feeling I had throughout the last year.
A little support goes a long way. Sometimes just one person saying they believe in what I'm doing will be enough for me to follow through and finish what I'm doing. But without that knowledge it gets very hard. So it's important to let people know you love and support them while they're still here. I'd like to think JP and Jamie would have liked this song. They were just a few of the world's poets that inspired me and are gone too soon.
As I interpret the song "Another way," it seems that you are expressing the concept that pop music and manufactured art doesnât truly express the human condition, or at least as how you see it. Do you think we are at the end of music as a source of fantasy or escapism?
That is one aspect of the song. To explain it further I must make a confession: When Leftover Crack took a break from touring last year i took a job as a freelance stagehand. One of the places I ended up working a lot was the Clear Channel owned IHeartRadio Theater in Tribeca. It plays host to all the bands that the 4 or 5 major radio stations in NY promote⦠Clear Channel owned stations broadcast from the second floor of the same building.
So yeah, I work for Clear Channel occasionally. I load gear for bands and set up camera equipment and lights. It's a very exclusive venue. It only holds 150 people, standing room only. You can only get in by winning your tickets on the radio, or if you're a "VIP." I saw so many big commercial radio bands come thru and play to a room full of record executives, CEOs and their mistresses, and a few screaming teens.
But it was when one of the American Idol season's winner performed last year that I first wrote some of lyrics to "Another Way." Sitting despondent in the corner, gagging at the spectacle of the meet-and-greet. The whole thing was so disgusting, I can't even tell you. It was this schmooze-fest of big wig executives and radio hosts, glad handing each other and congratulating themselves on their own successes, catapulting their latest pawn to the top of the charts. It was everything you imagine that sort of shit to be. A total cliche. It was all so fake and substance-less. It didn't have anything to do with music.
I don't even remember the music, except that the artist was using a live Auto-tune effect to correct his bad pitch. It was cookie-cutter music for mass consumption. A machine in which you could interchange the singer a year from now. We pluck these people from obscurity and make them famous simply by putting them on TV. Today we can manufacture fame. You can make anyone famous with a small investment and see a big return. And people are so willing, so desperate for fame and money, that they'll sell themselves at any price. It's sad and says something about the state of the world.
I'm so glad not to be a part of that world of entertainment, at least not beyond being a stagehand, because letâs face it: if John Lennon or Jimmy Hendrix were alive today they wouldn't stand a chance of "making it" in today's music industry. Not that I'm a huge fan of either of them, but they were certainly more talented than the singers that television shows like American Idol are making famous now. At least they wrote their own songs. I have no respect for singers that don't write their own songs. Song writers, poets… they're the ones connected to things we're not. So that was one aspect of "Another Way"- Me sitting in Clear Channel scribbling in my note book.
After that I made a point not to use any Auto-tune on the new Morning Glory record. Not even as an effect⦠it can make vocals sound more "soaring" and clear. Auto-tune is the most over-used software of the 2000s. But I've even heard crust bands use it!
Then, do you think this concept of manufactured fame has student musical growth?
Just because some of the music industry sucks doesn't mean that I think there's no good music anymore, or that music is dead⦠quite the opposite actually. There's never been more good music than there is now. Since music is accumulative. Every day more songs are added to the worldâs library of tunes and expression. There's always gonna be great music and music that is total crap in every genre. But we're certainly not at the end of music as escapism. Music takes me away more than ever. It'll always be my favorite drug⦠Chemically it produces the same dopamine as heroin, and the Olympics have now outlawed the use of music in their sports since it can produce up to a 10% increase in performance!
I find it fascinating that Choking Victim and Leftover Crack often used "Satanic imagery," but the new song, "Another Way" uses more traditional Biblical imagery as metaphors with the lines referring to "Edenâs walls." Of course, the name Ezra itself is considered a Talmudic and Biblical name. Does this shift have significance, or have I peered too deeply?
This is a good question. I am not religious but I really enjoy the imagery of religious art. I don't know why. It's so cathartic and always deals with these grandiose concepts like good, evil, sacrifice, and perdition. It's always inadvertently gory and often gaudy, full of hidden messages, and usually it's just so bad that it's good.
Most of the artists who were commissioned by the Church were staunch dissidents and rebels. Dante even put the Pope himself in one of the seven layers of his Inferno hell. And while "Eden" is a Christian concept, I used it in "Another Way" because, although I am not a Christian, I felt like that image best described what I was trying to portray in the song.
But, some people will always read into things too deeply. I was doing an interview for someone recently and at the end I played an organ song on the new record called "Touch", about Mother Mary, if she had been a junkie, pleading for help to get off the drug. It shows her in a human condition⦠a woman who could've struggled with all the issues we deal with as humans, as a human suffering, not as the divine.
I sang the entire song, a song I see as very sad. After I finished it, all the interviewer, who was videotaping the whole thing, could say was "What's with the Jesus thing? Did you find Jesus or something?" People are so fucking stupid. They don't listen to the words. All they hear is "Mother Mary" or "Jesus". I can't spend my life explaining or defending my music. Everyone is going interpret it their own way. If people wanna think I've become a born again Christian, let them. What do I care? Ezra is a biblical name, but I didn't choose that name. I just had hippie parents.
And to answer what I believe your question is more directly⦠I have become a more "religious" person in the last few years, having lost a number of people very close to me. Not religious in the sense of organized or institutionalized religion, but personally… spiritually maybe. I'm the most nonspiritual person in the world, but I think the pain of the loss of my friends Nick and Brandon and JP and Jamie, cut too deep for me, and the only thing that would lessen it was the thought, no matter how absurd, that maybe these people were still with me somewhere, perhaps waiting for me, happy somewhere, at very least in my heart.
Something had to give. I've dealt with so many deaths over the years. I think I've lost well over 10 close friends and twice as many acquaintances in the last 5 years alone. There were 3 suicides last year alone. One was my best friend. Most of my closest friends and people I consider family are dead now. I can't even count anymore. Suicide is an epidemic. I've always been a devout atheist, but so much death has made me question it. It has turned me agnostic!
Along those lines, you have a number of references to suicide in your music, such as the song "You make me wanna die young" and "Suicide for Jennicide." Is suicide something that correlates to your life directly, or is it used in your music as more of a metaphor?
Suicide has had a direct impact on my life. It's a horrible, devastating, and sad thing that I can't say enough bad things about. I've sung a lot about suicide in the past for that reason.
Suicide is still one of the largest killers of youth in America, and around the globe. It's a painful and disillusioning thing when young people feel there is no hope.
Having said that, I try to keep a sense of humor about the whole thing and think of what the people that I knew who have passed on would have wanted me to do. I'm sure they would have wanted me to continue to talk about it, not to be too grim, and even laugh a little. You have to laugh and try not to take it too seriously. Its way too enveloping otherwise.
Both those songs you mentioned don't have anything to do with suicide actually, but at least one song on the new record was written in response to a suicide, and in the liner notes I plan on providing suicide prevention information. Mainly what we need to know about suicide is that when someone tells you they are going to hurt themselves, it's important that we do something, or say something. Don't ignore these types of threats, no matter how often they may be made. It just may be the time they decide to go through with it, which was the case with Jamie… My other friend Zakk, who died in November also told people he was planning it.
Will the demos that you made available for streaming in 2008 be included on the new Morning Glory album?
No. There are a few songs old songs like "Divide By" and "Summerburst" which I re-recorded specifically for this record, but that's it. They fit the vision of the record. I did re-record some of those other demos during these sessions, but they'll be going on to The Whole World Is Watching EP, making it into a full studio LP. Most of those demos were horrible, very poor quality recordings, and I'm glad they'll be taken off the "market", so to speak. The studio versions will be replacing them. But Poets will be almost entirely new material.
Will there be any special guests on the new album?
No. It's just me and the band. Mostly just Early (on drums), and myself. The other members who make up the live band, Adam and Chris, played some guitars and bass, but mainly for posterity. Lucky Strano (ex-Morning Glory, Ex-World/Inferno Friendship Society) played some of the solos I really couldn't pull off. Adam and Chris added chemistry that didn't exist. But I played almost all of the instruments on the record, mainly because of budget restraints, including the piano, guitars, bass and percussion instruments.
I learned to play piano last year when I got clean because someone told me that when you get clean you should learn a new instrument. So there ended up being a lot of piano on the record⦠and strings.
My hat's off to Early, who learned most of the tracks overnight. Some of the songs were written on a Friday, learned on Saturday, and recorded on Sunday. I owe a lot to my band. Adam, Chris, and Early all stuck with me. That means more to me than I can express. At a time in my life when I reached out and found no one there, they stood with me, humored me, and acquiesced when it came to the making of the record.
Studio time was expensive and it was just easier for me to play all the instruments. Plus a lot of it I wrote on the spot, in the studio, or while tracking. Sometimes I would change entire choruses while I was in the middle of them⦠luckily the drums worked for completely different melodies and riffs. I think Adam and Chris realized that it was the only way the recording was going to get done. But all the more credit to them for understanding. I'm lucky to have some of the most talented musicians in New York playing with me.
Apart from my band, I had a really hard time garnering support for this record. One record label had been bugging me for years to make this record. So, I called them up and said I was ready to do it. They then offered me $800 to record it with! You gotta laugh at the absurdity of that! These days $800 won't even get you the tape to record on. I was really insulted and pissed off that they didn't believe in me, so I told them to forget it. More than anything their lack of confidence in me hurt and caused me to doubt myself.
That was the pretty much the attitude I was up against all year. No one wanted to help me make this record. I ended up paying for the entire record myself because I couldn't get any decent label support, and certainly no "big name" artists were going to take time out of their busy schedules to come down to the studio and contribute. So, I sort of went into it with an attitude of "well, fuck you all then, I don't need you anyways." And it's for the better since debut records don't really need guests anyhow.
Guesting and cameos on records is really overdone and has just become a way for labels and artists to sell more records using names. It's so ridiculous. My friend Yula Berri did come and sing on one song, "Born To December". And Jimmy from InDK sang backups on "Touch", but it was strictly because the song called for their voice. And they're both so talented I was lucky to have them on. I really struggled this year with a feeling of no support from labels and other artists. Some of that feeling went into the songs, like the title track for instance. Now I hope this record does well.
Youâve stated that you are looking forward to moving away from the "Crack Rock steady" sound. Do you feel that youâve expressed all that you can within the confines of that genre?
Well, not necessarily. Punk is a genre that will always have something to say. At least, I'll probably always have something to say in punk rock, but the music may be different this time around. I hear a lot of music in my head and not all of it falls into the punk genre, though it's usually within the spectrum.
I love punk, I grew up on it, but I'm not going to ignore all the other music when I'm hearing just to please an audience. Music is in my brain and sometimes its symphonies, pianos, white noise solos, wah wah distorted bass sounds, and epic contrasts and sing-a-longs⦠and I try not to be confined by the restraints of labels.
Anything that comes from the heart is good music, and I don't care what type of music it is. Music either feels right, or it doesn't. Every genre of music contains some crap and some brilliant material. I would say Morning Glory is largely influenced by the concept of sing-a-longs. The image of a room of people all singing together is one of the most powerful ideas to me. I want to create that situation somehow. Some of the greatest, happiest moments in my life have been singing in a group or choir when I feel like I am sharing and contributing in something greater than myself. It can be almost religious.
Something about the joining of melodies, the unity of people of all backgrounds, and a momentary shared singular emotion by so many small folks making one collective sound, is a statement about humanity and creation itself. That we are all a part of something bigger and together we can do amazing things that we could never do by ourselves. It's my main influence in song writing and the reason I've always liked Noel Gallagher's writing.
But while the music on this record may fall to the rock side of the spectrum, the lyrical content is "punk" by any standard. It covers borders, thanatopsis, addiction, existing against the grain, orphanage, hope, change, anger, etc. Some of it is uplifting. Some of it is sad. Some of it is political. All of it is personal.
Where there be any ska tunes on the new record?
There is no ska. I don't even like ska and it's a genre I can definitively say I want to no longer be associated with. I definitely wanted to move away from that. I'm tired of being pigeon-holed into a type of music that I never listen to. And while I still enjoy playing ska music live, it's not me in the writing anymore. But otherwise it wasn't a conscious decision to move away from punk rock. It's not even a huge shift, it just feels like a natural progression to me.
If you are interested in moving away from those types of sounds, is Morning Glory still a punk band?
Morning Glory is still a punk band in my opinion. We always will be. But while it fits my definition of punk, it may not fit into others' definition of punk. Writing music is an exorcism and I was just writing what I was hearing in my head, trying to exorcise the insomnia demons. Since I tracked 19 songs I ended up having the choice of sequencing it as a punk record or a rock record.
I ended up making a rock record in the end, because that is what felt right to me. I'm sure some die hard punks won't like it. But that's nothing new. That'll always happen.
I remember losing fans to the No Gods/No Managers album who said it just wasn't as fast enough as the old Choking Victim. Is No Gods a punk record? Only to some. But if some people don't approve of what I simply see as creative evolution, that doesn't bother me. Whether the record does well or not is purely inconsequential. Of course I want it to do well, but ultimately I wrote this record for myself, and it couldn't have come out any other way without being a lie.
I think it's a great record and I'm proud of it. Life is broad and there's a lot more out there than punk rock. There's a lot more to me than punk rock. I hear so much music it keeps me up at night. I can't sleep. And in the end this record comes from the heart… and that's all that matters to me.
Morning Glory records sporadically, but it seems that fans of the band like everything the band has put out. Do you purposefully only record when you feel that youâve written your best material?
No, I've released a lot of crap. Back then I didn't realize people might actually go and buy it. Now I pick songs that I think are good and then track them. But 3 out of 10 times they don't come out as I was hearing them in my head, which is why I tracked 19 songs this time. I chose the best 13 songs for the final sequence. At least 2 or 3 of them didn't come out as I was originally hearing them. I may never use those tracks for anything.
Lots of musicians and producers do that now. I've heard that many big name hip hop artists like Snoop Dogg, Jay-Z, or even Gwen Stefani will record 300 tracks and pick the very best 15 for their record. That way every song is a hit. This is a new concept for me. I used to release everything I tracked. Big mistake!
Now there's a bunch of crap floating around out there with my name on it. Ugh. I have a saying now, "Say it, forget it. Record it, regret it!" It's the artist's curse to hate everything they've ever done. I suppose you can't discredit it, but I feel everything I've done up until now is juvenile and just plain bad. Let me put it this way⦠I would never go out and buy one of my old records. With this new stuff I was recording shit that I thought the world could use. A record i would actually go out and buy. To this day i have never put on a record I've made and listened to it. Not even one song. The last time I heard [Leftover Crack's second LP] Fuck World Trade was in the studio in Chicago with Steve Albini. But who knows? A year from now I may hate this record too.
Are you still in Leftover Crack?
Well… yes and no. I'm taking a leave of absence until the band is ready to write some new material. We played some show over the holidays and although they were fun, I have to put my foot down and make a stand for some new material.
Somehow, I get roped into playing every time because I love playing music and touring, and ultimately I love everyone in the band… in different capacities. Somehow, for better or worse, we have come through a lot together and our fates are intertwined. We've toured the world together and I think I've spent more time with those four guys than anyone else in my life.
You know we've been playing music together for the better part of 15 years now. Alec [LoC bass player] and Sturgeon [LoC Vocals] and myself now span 3 decade of creativity together! Life is long and unpredictable, but I'd like to think we'll be old punkers still rocking out together when we're old and grey. But we're an implosive band and there's always a sense that things could fall apart at any moment.
That being said, this year I am taking just for Morning Glory. I don't know if Leftover Crack knows that yet. We have communication problems. I've tried to tell them. I may play a show here or there with L.O.C., we'll see. But Morning Glory comes first right now. And whenever they are down to write, I'll be waiting. I already have a few tunes that I'm saving just for L.O.C. It's really hard to say what will happen with that band. Many factors come into play.
It's interesting that you point out communication problems in Leftover Crack. Some of my very favorite bands, including Black Flag, the Ramones, and Crass, were composed of members who didnât really get along that well and were at times extremely dysfunctional. Do you think personal conflict is one of the elements that make Choking Victim, Leftover Crack, INDK, and Morning Glory so unique, or is that an overly romantic view?
A lot of what makes a band a great band is the creative push and pull of multiple creative forces. It's all about chemistry. If you change one member out, the formula changes too. And especially in the punk genre where conflict is an integral and very necessary part of the energy. Most of Leftover Crack's best shows were when we hated each other the most. Sometime we'd go for days or weeks without speaking, locked in a van or hotel, on the road, despising each other, but we'd play for one hour at night together and it would be magic on stage. I still haven't figured it out yet.
A year or so ago found people accusing you of having substance abuse issues. Were those claims true? If they were, are you still dealing with those issues?
It's no secret that I have battled drug addiction from a young age. It been very public and all the harder for me⦠Especially as I am a private person by nature. Everyone has their demons to fight. Mine happens to be heroin addiction.
Sometimes when I think I've gotten the better of it, it will creep up on me again. It's an insidious disease. I must always be on my guard. But I'm determined not to let it get the best of me. When I fall down now, I just get back up again and keep trying. I will not let this thing take me. A few tracks on the new record deal with drug addiction in its different capacities. Some of it sad, some of it regretful, some of it hopeful. None of it is romantic.
It has been a constant struggle for me. Being able to write songs about it, sing about it, and tell people about it is very important to me, and I try to be honest and forthright. Almost everyone has been affected by addiction or alcoholism at some point in their life, whether it's them or someone they know. This time around, I had a lot to write about. Much has transpired since Fuck World Trade. I won't go into war stories, but I know I am notorious for missing shows, sometimes entire tours, due to my addiction problems. At times I wonder how many kids have paid to see me at my worst. I'm genuinely trying to put that all behind me.
And music may be the one good thing that has come out of addiction for me. Some people have accused me of being a cliche musician, but the truth is I was an addict a long time before i was a cliche! Genetics, experience, upbringing, and personality traits like preferring solitary to social situations, made the perfect storm for me.
I was a predictable candidate for addiction long before I was in any bands. Alas, we all have to do the best with the cards we are dealt. And, I hope ultimately that with Morning Glory, somehow, I've been able to inspire and help other people, other addicts, to get off and stay off of drugs. I know I've been very candid about addiction in the past, but I feel it's not something to tip-toe around, and that being open and honest about it is the only way to help solve the problem.
I think some people felt that I was somehow condoning drug use in the past, because I would talk openly about it. Perhaps I wasn't being very clear. Perhaps the message was misunderstood, or the tone wasn't right. Sometimes sarcasm or tongue and cheek content is lost in the delivery. Like the song "Gimme Heroin" which was an anti-drug song, by all means, talking about the horrors of being strung out. But people don't always read the lyrics, they just see the title. But that's a consequence I have to deal with now.
If I ever lead anyone down a path of this destructive behavior, it was not my intent, and I hope i can redeem myself of any misguidance. You also have to remember I was very sick⦠If things seemed unclear, it's because I could not say them clearly myself.
There is no hope in addiction and it's a long and painful path from which no good can arise. It's hard to make people who have never been addicts understand it. They think it's a life style choice. They don't understand the concept of no control. They think it's a moral weakness, a character defect, or a lack of will power. In reality it is not. It can affect anyone, anywhere. It can be luck of the draw. Some of the greatest most talented people on the planet suffer from addiction issues. Very smart people. Very creative people. Very talented people. A lot of artists and forward thinkers. I'm sure there's a psychology behind it. I hope Morning Glory's music can offer hope to anyone who feels trapped in the cycle of addiction or alcoholism. And I don't wanna die a rock cliche. I still have so much to give. This record is the beginning of that. I hope for a second chance.
As a point of interest, I recently reconnected with my mother. She sent me a copy of the very first song I ever wrote, when I was just 5 years old. The song is called "Stevie Dinner." It was a play on TV Dinner by ZZ Top, which was popular when I was 5. It's about how "Stevie" drinks too much, to the point that it is his dinner. Steve was my father. So the very first song I wrote was about alcoholism in my family. Of course it was innocent back then and I didn't realize the pain it would cause later on in my life. I used the track as the opener of the new record.
Sorry if this is a prolix answer, but enough can never be said about this issue. I encourage anyone out there who is struggling with these issues to get help and stick around, keep trying until it sticks, and don't abandon those who need you. It does get better and complete recovery is very possible.
I appreciate your openness. Morning Glory is expected to release the new album in the Spring. Should we expect any other activity from the band such as touring, singles, etc?
Yes definitely. We hope to be playing shows by April and touring by August. We're already making preparations for tours in the States and the UK. I'm looking forward to it.
Any last comments?
It took me over 10 months, off-and-on, to track this record. Jesse Cannon and Mike Oettinger, the two engineers that worked on it with me, were absolutely tireless, and put a very piece of their own soul and workmanship into it. I hounded them endlessly to make things right, the way I was hearing things in my head at night, unable to sleep, and they submitted to my insane demands for full orchestration, having a string quartet and a horn section in their studio, plus a string of talent and gang vocalists that contributed, and they always did it with good humor and an extraordinary work ethic.
The final track, "Born To December", which was inspired by two of the most important people in my life, my long time girlfriend, Nico, and my mother, had 139 tracks of instruments and voices to mix, and Jesse tackled it without any complaints. Any other engineer would have laughed at me. Jesse not only tolerated and humored me until everything was just right according to my ear, but contributed a great deal to the outcome and vision of the record. I could not have done it without him.
It sounds as good as anything on the radio today, quality wise. There is a part of me and my soul in this record for the first time ever. Everyone deserves a second chance and I hope the audience will grant me this one time, take it for what it is, just some songs, and maybe even enjoy it. No more, no less. I really tried my best, stayed on track, stayed clean, and put my heart into what I was doing.
I don't have a family, I don't have children, or much hope of any kind at all. But, I do have the greatest job in the world and the most enthusiastic, endearing, and loyal fans that any singer/song-writer could hope to have. Together we are a family and I owe my continued existence to the fact that I have devoted listeners, no matter how few, who have stood by me patiently all along, waiting for me to get my shit together. I'm grateful to be able have this opportunity to give a little back to the world, and I hope that will show up in these songs.A Scarborough father who has previously admitted bilking taxpayers out of $400,000 through a disability scam allegedly ripped off a charitable camp for young cancer patients by lying that his children had leukemia, according to Toronto Police.
Kumar Kothary, 56, is accused of sending his daughter, Jessica, now 24, and his son, Jason, who’s in his late teens, to Camp Quality Canada — a charity camp program for children with cancer — for 10 years, said police. Neither child has ever had cancer.
Kothary was charged with fraud over $5,000 on Wednesday and freed on bail the same day. The allegations have not been tested in court.
This Camp Quality Canada camp is free for cancer patients aged four to 18. The campers can either be undergoing therapy or in remission.
The average cost of sending a child to camp is $4000. The camp is run by volunteers and the costs are covered by sponsors, corporate sponsors, donations and fundraising.
Kothary pleaded guilty to fraud over $5,000 in January, admitting that he plundered the Ontario Disability Support Program for $379,229 from 2011 to February, 2015. Court heard he submitted false invoices and hotel bills until a caseworker discovered the scam.
In order to obtain benefits, he lied that his daughter was deaf, blind and diabetic. He also misled government officials that she could barely speak and couldn’t walk. As part of his scam, Kothary said his daughter had the IQ of an infant and therefore couldn’t undergo testing.
Jessica is able-bodied and was a Ryerson University student. She testified in January at his preliminary hearing that she was never blind, deaf or diabetic.
She never had any trouble walking or talking and has an unrestricted driver’s licence, court heard.
Kothary will be sentenced on Nov. 16.
Kothary and his wife Shefali, 51, — who is also facing disability fraud charges alleging she scammed the province out of more than $100,000 — have moved out of their Wharfside Lane home. They now live in a rented luxury condo near the Scarborough Town Centre.
Police alleged that after the Toronto Sun broke the story about Kothary’s guilty plea in January, Brendan Turner, the executive director of Camp Quality Canada, notified investigators that the man’s children had attended the camp for 10 years, starting in 2004.
Kothary claimed that his two children had leukemia, according to police. Each year Kothary allegedly completed the registration so he could send his children to the camp for free.
The camp is so popular that it runs at full capacity. There is a waiting list of qualified kids, so the Kothary children deprived actual cancer patients from attending, said police.
Over the years, the camp application forms completed by Kothary had different diagnosed dates, said police.
He’s scheduled to make a court appearance on Monday in relation to the latest charge.
Police are continuing their investigation and anyone with information can call Det. Natalie Hegarty at 416-808-7300.
spazzano@postmedia.comNo explosives were found aboard two separate Air France planes that were diverted to Halifax and Salt Lake City due to bomb threats, according to the airline.
Authorities in both cities thoroughly inspected both aircraft, passengers and their luggage, and nothing was found, according to an Air France release.
There were 262 passengers aboard the Air France flight bound for Paris from Washington. The flight was diverted to Halifax's airport Tuesday after a bomb threat. (CBC) The airline said the bomb threat that led to the diversion of Flight 55 to Halifax Stanfield International Airport was a "false alert |
to harvest her's too!
She's scheduled now for the operation, one of you
will quickly harvest her now before the raid makes it here
Two of you will have to distract the raid while we make our escape.
I need some smokeleaf...
My asthma is minor...it helps...
I need to get stoned before I leave this place behind
I swear...
Back on the Glitterworlds, I didn't have to deal with such incompetence.
I just wanted to find an alien woman to give some lovin'
but my ship crashed into this fucked up Rim World
it all went wrong ever since...
I stepped out of that cyptosleep chamber!
You'll be spared, you have high construction.
Pack up all good+ weapons
and the components...
and where did the luciferium go....
Who the fuck has it?
Strip off all your gear...
You all distract the enemy.
GGThe air is crisp, the leaves are donning their autumnal dress, and the Hill is bracing for it’s annual budget fight.
According to Speaker Boehner, “there’s no reason to vote against it.”
But what’s really in the House’s budget proposal?
The Washington Examiner‘s Phillip Klein isn’t so convinced. “This is what Republican surrender looks like,” he wrote:
Republican leaders have agreed to unravel progress they made in hard fought budget battles to pump more money into government in the short-term in exchange for modest reforms, many of which can and likely will be easily undone by future Congresses. After spending much of their time in the minority in 2009 and 2010 poking holes in Obama’s budget gimmickry, they have dug deep into a Mary Poppins-like bag of gimmicks and thrown them all into this deal. The deal, in addition to suspending the debt limit until March 2017, will increase spending in a number of ways. It will undo the limits on discretionary spending put in place by the 2011 budget deal, representing an increase in $80 billion over the next two fiscal years, split between defense and non-defense spending. To help pay for this, they’re theoretically extending the time that sequestration will be in place for two additional years, from 2023 to 2025. On paper, the idea is that spending cuts in 2024 and 2025 will help make up for the increased spending in the next two years. But this is a fantasy. …There will also be an additional $16 billion in defense spending increases into an overseas contingency operations fund and the deal would spend more money by avoiding scheduled increases in Medicare premiums. …”The last thing Congress should do is raid the retirement trust fund,” the GOP’s own budget, released in March, read. As Republicans rightly pointed out, when this trick has been used in the past, all it’s done is delay the problem and worsen the finances of Social Security’s retirement program. But the Boehner deal relies on this kind of reallocation to put off the immediate crisis from 2016 to 2022. Though there are some worthwhile reforms to the disability program in the deal aimed at reducing fraud, in no way do those justify kicking the can down the road in this manner.
The House budget proposal is so good, Senate Republicans are already balking at the idea of passing it.
Sen. Rubio rejected the deal because it contains no deterrent for Washington’s never-ending spending spree:
“I oppose this deal, which fails to seriously address the long-term drivers of our debt, contains no fundamental reforms to stop Washington from spending money it doesn’t have and does not come close to meeting our military needs in a dangerous global security environment. This severely flawed deal punts an opportunity to prioritize defense spending to the levels necessary to protect our nation, irresponsibly increases the debt ceiling through March 2017 and fails to reform Social Security Disability Insurance to ensure its long-term solvency.”
And Sen. Paul is planning to filibuster it to death. The Washington Examiner reported Paul’s remarks in Denver Tuesday evening:
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul promised to filibuster a deal reached by the White House and House Republicans that would keep the government financed through next September while raising the debt ceiling. The Republican presidential candidate told reporters in Denver Tuesday that he will “do everything in [his] power” to stop the Senate’s passage of what he described as a “steaming pile of legislation.” “I will filibuster and I will urge my colleagues to join my effort,” he added. The bill reached by Republican leaders and President Obama Monday evening would increase existing caps on federal spending by $50 billion in fiscal 2016 and by $30 billion the following year in addition to boosting military spending by $16 billion in both years.
The Daily Signal provided a budget breakdown in one handy little chart:
Hide your wallets, it’s going to get ugly.
Follow Kemberlee on Twitter @kemberleekayeAbout: Rupert Hirst "If I can't beg,buy,borrow or find something then I guess I will just have to make it"...TallmanLabs
This headphone amplifier circuit is different to conventional modern construction techniques in that it is air Wired,P2P (Point to Point) or free form wiring just like in the good old Valve days before the intervention of PCB's and the transistor.
Rather than a traditional enclosure, the hole circuit is encapsulated in polyester resin to enhance the internals.
If your reading this and thinking why do you need an amplifier for headphones then click here
Although allot of cMoy headphone amplifiers are designed to be portable this one is designed for the desktop although a battery pack could be made also.
This is a pretty long instructable so "make a brew" as we say in Yorkshire and get comfy.
On the upside there is plenty of pictures :)
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Generating Art with Code
A handbook to "Little Planet Procedural"
Table of Contents
Introduction
This is a handbook meant to explain the concepts and execution behind the "Little Planet Procedural" project, my directed study midterm project.
As some background, the project is meant as a case study of how code can create diverse and infinite art through basic techniques of procedural generation. It is inspired by the likes of No Man's Sky.
Each time the page is refreshed, a new planet is generated. There are night scenes and day scenes.
The project is written entirely with raw HTML5 Canvas.
Concepts
Noise
There is, for the most part, only one concept used throughout the entire project. To see this, let's first consider the following problem. Say we want to generate some hills. How should we go about doing so? We want something that looks kind of like this:
We want there to be some randomness, but we also want an organic nature to the terrain. In other words, we want local similarity, but global randomness. Generating random points is no good, since it gives us too much local variation.
We could mediate this by stretching it all the way out. We call this interpolation.
Technically, with a more complex interpolation that smoothes out the ridges, this method could achieve feasible terrain. In fact, there are an infinite number of ways to generate realistic terrain. However, we will only look at one, called Perlin Noise. The details of Perlin Noise are complex and will not be explored. However, the result is seen in the first image, which is generated using Perlin Noise.
More Dimensions
It turns out we can extend this reasoning to higher dimensions. What if we want to generate three-dimensional terrain? We'd want to achieve the same local similarity and global variance on a two-dimensional input. Rather than representing this as a three-dimensional terrain, we can treat map the third dimension onto the continuum from black to white. This gives us cloud-like patterns.
This might look familiar. It's used in a lot of movies and games to create special effects. In fact, Ken Perlin, the creator of Perlin Noise, won an academy award for his work!
We refer to the "dimension" of Perlin noise as the dimension of the input. So, 2D terrain is 1D noise, generated by a dimension of input and a dimension of output. 3D terrain is 2D noise.
The cool thing is that the third dimension does not have to be physical. We could lift a plane of 2D noise through 3D space to give the impression that the terrain is changing, but we are really just using 3D noise with time as a variable.
With this intuition, we can formally define noise.
N-dimensional noise is a function from Rn to the continuous interval [0, 1]
To manipulate noise, we treat it like we treat sine funcitons. A noise function f of a vector x can take the form af(bx)+c. This will make the amplitude vary from 0 to a, stretch by a factor of b, and offset by c.
In this case, the image on the right is the same noise on the left, but stretched out.
Now that these basic concepts are down, let's get rolling!
Mountains and Hills
The hills and mountains are both generated by one-dimensional Perlin Noise. There are two things to notice. Firstly, the mountains have much more chaotic noise than the hills. Secondly, both have "layers" of color.
Octaves
The variation is generated through what we call octaves. Like any function, Perlin Noise follows the concept of constructive interference. Suppose we have a sine wave. See how smooth it is?
Now suppose we want to introduce some variation to it. One thing we could do is superimpose a smaller sine wave on top - one that has both a smaller wavelength and amplitude.
We can do this again and again to get more and more "noisy" (haha) functions. (If you add them infinitely you get something somewhat bizarre - but that's a different story.)
We call these "octaves" because the first harmonic of a signal, or twice the fundamental frequency, or the wave sin(2x) corresponding to the wave sin(x), corresponds to the musical sound one octave up. For example, the note A4 on a piano is 440Hz, while A5 is 880Hz, A3 is 220Hz, and so on.
We can similarly create octaves for Perlin Noise. Implementation-wise, I write one function for drawing and filling in noise:
function make1DNoise (axis, amplitude, scale, params) { var newNoise = [] ; for ( var i = 0 ; i < CANVAS_WIDTH ; i ++ ) { newNoise. push ( { x : i, y : axis + amplitude * params. noiseFunction (scale * i, params. zaxis ) } ) ; } newNoise. push (LOWER_LEFT) ; newNoise. push (LOWER_RIGHT) ; ctx. fillStyle = params. fillColor ; fillPath (newNoise) ; }
( fillPath is not a default canvas function - it's a function I wrote to make and fill a path from an array of points)
There are a few things to notice here. First of all, I pass in axis, amplitude, and scale as arguments, corresponding very similarly to the constants that manipulate a sine function. Secondly, I pass in a params variable that holds a number of useful things. For instance, I can step through the other dimension of the noise even if I am only using 1D noise, a feature that will become useful soon. More importantly, I reference this thing called noiseFunction. What's that about?
It turns out that in scripting language, Javascript included, everything is pretty much the same. Objects are functions and vice versa. So, I can pass in a function as an argument of a function, and save myself some time. I essentially wrote two noise functions: one for mountains, and one for hills.
function mountainNoise (x, z) { return simplex. noise2D (z, x) + 0.5 * simplex. noise2D ( 0, 2 * x + 0.25 * simplex. noise2D ( 0, 4 * x) + 0.125 * simplex. noise2D ( 0, 8 * x) ; } function hillNoise (x, z) { return simplex. noise2D (z, x) ; }
(Simplex Noise is just a variant of Perlin Noise)
I pass these functions in as parameters of my previous function, and thus can use the same function for drawing mountains and hills. Notice that the mountains have four octaves and the hills one, corresponding to their very different noise shapes.
An Observation
You might also notice that there are bands of color on the hills and on the mountains.
To see how these work, let's first make the following observation. Let's say we have a plane intersecting a field of 2D noise. In otherworse, let's take a slice out of the 2D noise.
If we do this, we're essentially fixing one variable of the input. In other words, we only have one remaining variable. So we've essentially reduced the dimension to 1. If we then project this sliced noise, we will see that it is 1D.
Since 2D noise follows our rule of local similarity, by taking a series of adjacent slices out of 2D noise, we can thus construct a series of similar but not identical noise functions. So, the bands of color on the mountains and hills are generated by setting slightly different fixed y-values as inputs for a 2D noise function.
for ( var i = 0 ; i < 3 ; i ++ ) { make1DNoise ( 430, 200, 0.005, { noiseFunction : mountainNoise, fillColor : toHslString (mountainshade), zaxis : 0.07 * i } ) ; mountainshade. s -= 0.05 ; mountainshade. l -= 0.04 ; }
The z-axis parameter of the draw function changes how much the 1D noise is stepped through, or the position of the slicing plane. In this case, we move the plane by 0.07 each step. The last line just slighly varies the color of each new layer drawn - more on this later.
Rivers
The rivers are pretty much done the same way as the mountains. They are generated starting from the minimum point of the noise. Two sloped lines are drawn from this point. One-octave Perlin Noise extrudes on both sides. This is repeated four times to create four bands of color.
Sky
With the sky, we need to consider color schemes. Recall that we have two types of scenes: night and day.
Color Theory
First, we need to introduce some basic ideas of color theory. We can arrange the primary colors around a circle equally spaced from each other, then add all the in between colors. We call this the color wheel.
One paradigm for choosing aesthetically pleasing color schemes is to choose colors that are as evenly spaced around the wheel as possible in order to maintain a constant relative coloring. For instnace, green, orange, and blue would be a bad choice because blue is farther from orange than it is from green.
We can obtain a number of color schemes by choosing colors this way. Analagous schemes choose one color and other similar colors.
Complementary schemes choose one color and other similar colors.
Triad schemes choose three evenly spaced colors.
There are many other schemes, but we won't delve into them here. In our case, we use analagous schemes for night scenes, and complementary schemes in day scenes.
Color in Detail
Most colors in the program are processed as hsb values rather than as rgb. Most computer colors are in the form of three bytes: one value each for red, green, and blue, coorresponding to the range from 0 to 255.
However, I process colors as a hue, a saturation, and a brightness. This is a much easier way to describe what a color "looks like" instead of tinkering with rgb values. Hue describes the angle position on the color wheel, with 0 = 360 degrees referring to red. Saturation describes how much color there is, with 0 being grayscale, and 1 being entirely colored. Brightness describes how much white there is, with 0 being totally black, and 1 being totally white.
I wrote a function that converts an hsb (sometimes known as hsl) color input to a usable string for canvas.
function toHslString (color) { return "hsl(" + ( color. h % 1.0 ) * 360 + ", "+(color.s%1.0)*100+" %, "+(color.l%1.0)*100+" % ) "; }
Notice that taking the hue mod 1.0 makes the wheel into a circle.
The details of the colors are mostly tinkered with through experimentation. There are two different schemes - one for day, one for night. I've left the full code here.
if ( data. time == "night" ) { baseColor = randomColor ( { brightness : "dark" } ) ; mountainColor = { h : baseColor. h + Math. random () * 0.2-0.1, s : baseColor. s + Math. random () * 0.2-0.1, l : baseColor. l + Math. random () * 0.1+0.15 }; hillColor = { h : mountainColor. h + Math. random () * 0.2-0.1, s : mountainColor. s + Math. random () * 0.2-0.1, l : mountainColor. l + Math. random () * 0.1+0.15 }; riverColor = { h : baseColor. h, s : baseColor. s - Math. random () * 0.1-0.05, l : baseColor. l + Math. random () * 0.1-0.05 }; skyColor2 = { h : baseColor. h, s : baseColor. s, l : baseColor. l -0.2 }; cloudColor ={ h : baseColor. h, s : 0.4, l : 0.2 }; treeColor ={ h : baseColor. h +0.5, s : 0.4, l : 0.2 }; leafColor ={ h : treeColor. h +0.5, s : 0.8, l : 0.6 }; planetColor ={ h : hillColor. h, s : 0.4, l : 0.4 }; } else if ( data. time == "day" ) { baseColor = randomColor ( { brightness : "medium" } ) ; mountainColor = { h : baseColor. h +0.4 + Math. random () * 0.1, s : 0.2 + Math. random () * 0.2, l : baseColor. l + Math. random () * 0.1-0.05 }; hillColor = { h : mountainColor. h + Math. random () * 0.2-0.1, s : 0.4 + Math. random () * 0.2, l : baseColor. l + Math. random () * 0.1 }; riverColor = { h : baseColor. h, s : baseColor. s - Math. random () * 0.1-0.05, l : baseColor. l + Math. random () * 0.1+0.2 }; skyColor2 = { h : baseColor. h, s : baseColor. s, l : baseColor. l -0.2 }; cloudColor ={ h : baseColor. h, s : 0.3, l : 0.9 }; treeColor ={ h : baseColor. h -0.25, s : 0.6, l : 0.4 }; leafColor ={ h : treeColor. h +0.5, s : 0.8, l : 0.6 }; planetColor ={ h : treeColor. h +0.5, s : 0.8, l : 0.6 }; }
Triangulation
You'll notice the sky is partitioned into triangular cells. This is done with an algorithm called Delaunay Triangulation. A Delaunay triangulation, informally, is a triangulation of a set of points that makes every triangle as close to equilateral as possible. It's a way of triangulating points to make them look "nice and even."
(I took this image from Wikipedia.)
For the sky, I generate a gradient. Then, I generate a bunch of random points, and also add some points on the edges. I throw all of this in to a Delaunay triangulation algorithm to get a set of triangles. For each triangle, I fill the entire triangle with the color at the pixel at the center of the triangle.
var grd = ctx. createLinearGradient ( 0, CANVAS_HEIGHT, 0, 0 ) ; grd. addColorStop ( 0, colors. skyColor ) ; grd. addColorStop ( 1, colors. skyColor2 ) ; ctx. fillStyle = grd ; ctx. fill () ; var trianglePoints = [] ; trianglePoints. push ( [ 0, CANVAS_HEIGHT], [ 0, 0 ], [CANVAS_WIDTH, CANVAS_HEIGHT], [CANVAS_WIDTH, 0 ]) ; for ( var i = 0 ; i < 15 ; i ++ ) { //add some stuff on top and bototm trianglePoints. push ([ Math. random () * CANVAS_WIDTH, 0 ]) ; trianglePoints. push ([ Math. random () * CANVAS_WIDTH, CANVAS_HEIGHT]) ; } for ( var i = 0 ; i < 10 ; i ++ ) { //add some stuff on the sides trianglePoints. push ([ 0, Math. random () * CANVAS_HEIGHT]) ; trianglePoints. push ([CANVAS_WIDTH, Math. random () * CANVAS_HEIGHT]) ; } for ( var i = 0 ; i < 50 ; i ++ ) { //add some stuff in the middle trianglePoints. push ([ Math. random () * CANVAS_WIDTH, Math. random () * CANVAS_HEIGHT]) ; } for ( /* do this for each triangle */ ) { var center ; center. x = (newtriangle[ 0 ]. x + newtriangle[ 1 ]. x + newtriangle[ 2 ]. x )/ 3 ; center. y = (newtriangle[ 0 ]. y + newtriangle[ 1 ]. y + newtriangle[ 2 ]. y )/ 3 ; var centercolor = ctx. getImageData ( center. x, center. y, 1, 1 ). data ; var fillcolor = "rgb(" + centercolor[ 0 ] + ", "+centercolor[1]+", "+centercolor[2]+" ) "; ctx. fillStyle = fillcolor ; fillPath (newtriangle) ; }
Clouds
The clouds are also generated using Perlin Noise. We essentially use a threshold function to chop off the noise past a certain point. To see this, imagine we intersect the field of noise with a plane, like before, but this time on the outputs.
If we take this and view it from the top, we see our cloud patterns.
You'll also notice that the noise in this image seems to be much cleaner than the real clouds. That's because we also introduce an element of variation on the threshold. Also, in order to simulate actual clouds, we stretch out the noise horizontally by 10x. Also, we draw the clouds at 40% opacity.
function makeClouds (threshold, offset, variance) { ctx. globalAlpha = 0.4 ; ctx. beginPath () ; for ( var i = 0 ; i < CANVAS_WIDTH ; i ++ ) { for ( var j = 0 ; j < CANVAS_HEIGHT ; j ++ ) { var noiseValue = simplex. noise2D (i * 0.001 + offset, j * 0.01 + offset) ; if (noiseValue > params. threshold + Math. random () * params. variance ) { drawPixel ( { x : i, y : j }, colors. cloudColor ) ; } } } ctx. globalAlpha = 1.0 ; }
Celestial Objects
There are a number of celestial objects in the scenes. At day, a sun is generated. At night, a planet and stars are generated.
Stars
We generate a bunch of stars at random points in the sky. Most stars are just little cirlces, but each star has a random chance of being a "big star." The big stars are meant to simulate twinkling, and are modelled as an intersection of two thin rectangles, with a gradient fill.
//5% chance to make a big star if ( Math. random () < 0.05 ) { ctx. beginPath () ; var starwidth = Math. random () * 7+3 ; ctx. rect (starx -1, stary - starwidth, 2, 2 * starwidth) ; ctx. rect (starx - starwidth, stary -1, 2 * starwidth, 2 ) ; var grd = ctx. createRadialGradient (starx, stary, 3, starx, stary, starwidth +5 ) ; grd. addColorStop ( 0, "white" ) ; grd. addColorStop ( 1, "rgba(1, 1, 1, 0.0)" ) ; ctx. fillStyle = grd ; ctx. fill () ; }
Planet
The planet is pretty much hard-coded in. In future work I may add some variance. For now, I just generate a circle and a bunch of ellipses at an angle to simulate light. I use a method very similar to that I used for the clouds to introduce some texture, as well.
function makePlanet (position, radius, params) { ctx. beginPath () ; ctx. arc ( position. x, position. y, radius, 0, 2 * Math. PI ) ; ctx. fillStyle = colors. planetColor ; ctx. fill () ; ctx. save () ; ctx. clip () ; //in a square around the planet var xposmax = position. x + radius ; var yposmax = position. y + radius ; ctx. globalCompositeOperation = 'overlay' ; for ( var xpos = position. x - radius ; xpos < xposmax ; xpos ++ ) { for ( var ypos = position. y - radius ; ypos < yposmax ; ypos ++ ) { if ( simplex. noise2D (xpos, ypos) > 0.1 + Math. random () * 0.2 ) { drawPixel ( { x : xpos, y : ypos }, 'rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.05)' ) ; } if ( simplex. noise2D (xpos * 0.03, ypos * 0.03 ) > 0.1 + Math. random () * 0.2 ) { drawPixel ( { x : xpos, y : ypos }, 'rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.05)' ) ; } } } ctx. fillStyle = "rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.1)" ; ctx. beginPath () ; ctx. ellipse ( position. x +60, position. y -60, 60, 40, 45 * Math. PI / 180, 0, 2 * Math. PI ) ; ctx. fill () ; ctx. beginPath () ; ctx. ellipse ( position. x +40, position. y -40, 80, 60, 45 * Math. PI / 180, 0, 2 * Math. PI ) ; ctx. fill () ; ctx. beginPath () ; ctx. ellipse ( position. x +20, position. y -20, 100, 80, 45 * Math. PI / 180, 0, 2 * Math. PI ) ; ctx. fill () ; ctx. globalCompositeOperation ='source-over' ; ctx. restore () ; }
Sun
The sun is just a circle with another circle around it.
function makeSun (position, params) { ctx. beginPath () ; ctx. arc ( position. x, position. y, params. innerradius, 0, 2 * Math. PI ) ; ctx. globalAlpha = 0.95 ; ctx. fillStyle = toHslString ( { h : baseColor. h, s : 0.3, l : 0.8 } ) ; ctx. fill () ; ctx. arc ( position. x, position. y, params. outerradius, 0, 2 * Math. PI ) ; ctx. globalAlpha = 0.5 ; ctx. fillStyle = toHslString ( { h : baseColor. h, s : 0.3, l : 0.9 } ) ; ctx. fill () ; ctx. globalAlpha = 1.0 ; }
Trees
The trees have two components. The program has two canvas components. The first shows the scene. Whenever a tree is clicked on, the second shows a fractal tree.
Little Trees
We should first consider the goal in making trees. We model the trunk as a rectangle, and the leaves as a blob. So, what exactly is a blob? How can we create one? Essentially, we'd like the blob to look random if you see it from a distance, but still maintain its local circular structure. Sound familiar?
Turns out, all we do is take a loop of Perlin noise. In the past, we've been inputting lines to the noise function. However, nothing stops us from putting in a circle.
Essentially, we make a circle out of a bunch of vertices. Then, for every vertex on the circle, we input its coordinate into a noise function and extrude it by that much.
var pointcount = 30, radius = 10, blobpoints ; for ( var j = 0 ; j < pointcount ; j ++ ) { //map points onto a circle var prepos = { x : leafcenter. x + radius * Math. cos (j * ( 2 * Math. PI )/pointcount), y : leafcenter. y + radius * Math. sin (j * ( 2 * Math. PI )/pointcount) }; newradius = radius + 5 * simplex. noise2D ( prepos. x, prepos. y ) ; var newpos = { x : leafcenter. x + newradius * Math. cos (j * ( 2 * Math. PI )/pointcount), y : leafcenter. y + newradius * Math. sin (j * ( 2 * Math. PI )/pointcount) }; blobpoints. push (newpos) ; } fillPath (blobpoints) ;
Big Trees
Clicking on the trees is supposed to simulate "zooming in" on the tree. So, clicking on the same tree twice gives the same "zoomed" tree. This is done through an L-system. We're not going to go into L-systems in depth. However, we can describe one as a type of recursive drawing function. In this case, we write a function where a line segment is drawn (the "trunk" of the tree), followed by two additional segments that sprout off towards either side. However, each call of this function sets off two new calls of the function, resulting in a constant branching.
In order to achieve variation while making the same tree translate to the same L-system, we introduce an angle variation that is seeded by the position of the tree.
function makeBigTree (newseed) { resetCanvas () ; setRandomSeet (newseed) ; branch ( 50 ) ; } function branch (len) { var theta = random () * ( Math. PI / 3 ) ; drawLine ( { x : 0, y : 0 }, { x : 0, y : len }, ctx2) ; ctx2. translate ( 0, len) ; len *= 0.66 ; if (len > 2 ) { ctx2. save () ; ctx2. rotate (theta) ; branch (len) ; ctx2. restore () ; ctx2. save () ; ctx2. rotate ( - theta) ; branch (len) ; ctx2. restore () ; } } canvas. addEventListener ('mousedown', doMouseDown, false ) ; function doMouseDown (evt) { var mousePos = getMousePos (canvas, evt) ; for ( var i = 0 ; i < clickboxes. length ; i ++ ) { if ( mousePos. x > clickboxes[i]. left && mousePos. x < clickboxes[i]. right && mousePos. y > clickboxes[i]. top && mousePos. y < clickboxes[i]. bottom ) { clickboxes[i]. action (i) ; } } }
We use the same property of Javascript functions as objects as before here. clickboxes is an array that stores rectangular bounding boxes of each tree. Each bounding box has a corresponding action, which is a function property. The action is created by the L-system drawing function seeded by the clickbox index.
Conclusion and Future Work
Overall, this has been a fun project. It's showcased the ability for a relatively small set of techniques to generate some really cool looking stuff. There are still many, many techniques that I learned about that did not make it into the final project, including fractals and cellular automata.
If I do additional work on this, I'd like to:President Trump continued his drive to promote an “energy dominance” policy Wednesday by meeting with state and tribal leaders and energy industry association heads on the subject.
“I’m confident that, working together, we can usher in a golden age of American energy dominance and the extraordinary financial and security benefits that it brings to our citizens, not only the Native Americans, but all over the country,” Trump said during brief remarks in front of reporters before the meeting.
In his prepared remarks, Trump spoke repeatedly about the need to end restrictions on drilling, mining and other energy production activities. Trump also promoted his administration's roll back on environmental regulations that he said got in the way.
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“Many of your lands have rich natural resources that stand to benefit your people immensely,” Trump said to the American Indian leaders assembled at the White House for a discussion.
“These untapped resources of wealth can help you build new schools, fix roads, improve your communities and create jobs, jobs like you’ve never seen before. All you want is the freedom to use them, and that’s been the problem. It’s been very difficult, hasn’t it? It’ll be a lot easier now, under the Trump administration.”
Turning to the mostly Republican group of governors and other state government representatives present at the meeting, Trump said they have confronted similar issues.
“Many of our states have also been denied access to the abundant energy resources on their lands that could bring greater wealth to the people and benefit to our |
Addendum: Updated performance can be found here.
When most people receive the latest top-end graphics card from AMD or NVIDIA, they get straight to testing its gaming performance. Me? Well, I’m not most people. I am hoping that there is some method to my madness, though. Hear me out.
AMD’s Radeon RX Vega is one of the worst-kept secrets in the history of the industry. Well before embargo-abiding press could release details, leakers around the globe told us everything we need to know. That includes relative performance to NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1080, the fact that it’s going to run hotter and draw more power over the competition, and that overall, it’s not the launch AMD was hoping for.
As we were allowed to reveal a couple of weeks ago, the $499 USD RX Vega 64 is designed to go up against NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1080, also priced at $499 USD. At the moment, though, the least expensive GTX 1080 I can find on Amazon is ~$539 USD. It’s not expected that Vega 64 (and 56) will launch with their SRPs in tact (current listings have had Vega at well over $1000), so the sad reality is, you’re going to be paying a premium on any GPU solution right now, unless you happen to get lucky.
Back to the story at hand, based on the myriad leaks that occurred surrounding RX Vega, which have made it sound like Vega 64 will never actually be able to beat the GTX 1080 at gaming, I decided to take a look at this card first from a workstation / compute perspective, to see if any unexpected advantages could be seen. Perhaps surprisingly, there are indeed some, and some of those are downright impressive.
Note: You can check out our preliminary gaming results here, more will come later when we get the full article prepared.
Admittedly, another reason I decided to take a look at the compute performance first is because our respective test rig was still hooked up and wrapping up testing conducted since I posted my look at AMD’s Radeon Pro WX 3100. In that review, six GPUs were tested in total; for this one, that’s been bumped to ten.
This is going to be the first of at least three articles surrounding workstation and gaming performance of RX Vega. This article sees the Vega 64 tackle the usual gauntlet of workstation tests, whereas the next article will took an in-depth look at gaming performance in our apples-to-apples tests. For those wanting quick and dirty gaming results, I have published a couple here. You can have a look at the reviewer’s kit we received right here.
AMD Radeon Series Cores Core Base MHz Core Boost MHz FP32 (TFLOPS) FP16 (TFLOPS) Memory Bandwidth TDP Radeon RX VEGA 64 LCE 4096 1406 1677 13.7 27.5 8192 MB 484 GB/s 345W Radeon RX VEGA 64 4096 1247 1546 12.66 25.3 8192 MB 484 GB/s 295W Radeon RX VEGA 56 3584 1156 1471 10.5 21 8192 MB 410 GB/s 210W Radeon R9 Fury X 4096 1050 – 8.6 4096 MB 512 GB/s 275W Radeon R9 Fury 3584 1000 – 7.16 4096 MB 512 GB/s 275W Radeon R9 Nano 4096 1000 – 8.19 4096 MB 512 GB/s 175W Radeon RX 580 2304 1257 1340 6.17 8192 MB 256 GB/s 185W Radeon RX 480 2304 1120 1266 5.83 8192 MB 256 GB/s 150W Radeon RX 570 2048 1168 1244 5.1 4096 MB 224 GB/s 150W Radeon RX 470 2048 926 1206 4.94 4096 MB 211 GB/s 120W Radeon RX 560 1024 1175 1275 2.61 4096 MB 112 GB/s 80W Radeon RX 460 896 1090 1200 2.15 4096 MB 112 GB/s 75W Radeon RX 550 512 1100 1183 1.21 4096 MB 112 GB/s 50W
I mentioned at the outset that Vega’s higher-than-desired power consumption hasn’t been a secret, and the rated spec of 295W TDP for Vega 64 confirms that (RX 580 is 185W, by contrast). This unfortunately leads me to the first major complaint about Vega 64, or at least this particular Vega 64. The “reference” cooler (if you want to call it that) looks nice, but it’s far from being an ideal solution. The card will run hot, as 295W would suggest, but to the point where throttling can take place.
The fact that the liquid-cooled version of Vega 64 exists highlights the fact that the GPU itself can achieve far greater performance than this RX 480-style cooler can complement. Sometimes, AMD and NVIDIA release new GPUs to reviewers without a reference version; companies like ASUS, GIGABYTE, MSI, PowerColor, or others, will send us custom designs. The GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti were sampled like this, and I truly feel Vega 64 should have been, too.
A collector’s Vega die given to press
The fact of the matter is, reviewers can’t show Vega 64 or 56 in the light they should actually be shown. Some reviewers may have received the liquid-cooled version of the card, and I’d expect to see huge gains in performance there. And, better still, the card is sure to run cooler, with reduced chance of ever throttling. If these reference designs mimicked an ASUS STRIX, with three large fans, I am sure that would have aided in performance as well.
The moral of the story is, at some point soon, we need to look at vendor cards once they begin to hit the market, and hopefully at that time, drivers will be even better optimized, giving us a nice overall uptick in performance overall. Still, this acts as a good first test – just don’t treat the performance as gospel. Flat out, I would not recommend buying a Vega card with this reference cooler. It can’t handle the heat, and as a result, throttling can occur, and dBAs will raise.
Testing AMD’s Radeon RX Vega 64
Alright, from the get-go, a couple of things need to be made clear. The performance seen on RX Vega 64 is not meant to be representative of AMD’s workstation and compute performance on Vega in general. The upcoming WX 9100 and the preexisting Vega Frontier Edition are going to be equipped with Pro-specific optimized drivers, so while some performance will be expected here, some won’t be.
AMD didn’t send out Vega FE review samples, so this is my very first look at Vega in this context. I will be able to add some Vega FE results to our charts in the weeks ahead, nonetheless, and likewise, a Quadro P5000 is currently en route to help complete the overall look at current WS GPU options.
On the following pages, I’ll be putting AMD’s Radeon RX Vega 64 through a gauntlet of real-world and synthetic tests, utilizing apps from Autodesk, Adobe, SPEC, SiSoftware, and a handful of others (including light gaming tests for good measure).
All tests are run at least twice to produce an accurate result, and if for some reason an odd result creeps up, I do a third run. In the case of this particular review, no tests had to go that route, as most of the benchmarks are very good at delivering similar results with each repeated run.
The Windows 10 Pro (Creators Update) install used for testing has a couple of things disabled: User Account Control, Firewall, Search Indexer, OneDrive, and all notifications. During the install, everything on the Customize screen was disabled. All testing is conducted at 2560×1440 resolution (with the exception of 4K 3ds Max testing), with driver Vsync options left default.
Techgage’s workstation GPU test PC is built to be reflective of a high-end desktop that rules out as much as it can of bottlenecks. Intel’s top-end Core i9-7900X is used here, giving us a ton of breathing room on the CPU side. Kingston’s super-fast KC1000 M.2 SSD and 64GB of its HyperX FURY DRAM gives us the same breathing room on the storage and memory side.
Here’s the full list of specs:
The benchmark results are categorized and spread across the next six pages. On page 2, AMD’s ProRender plugin is used in Autodesk’s 3ds Max 2017 to render two scenes, while two de facto benchmarking tools, as well as a newbie, wrap it up: Cinebench, LuxMark, and V-Ray Benchmark. Page 3 is home to an encode and CAD test, thanks to Adobe’s Premiere Pro CC 2017 and two 4K projects, and also Autodesk’s AutoCAD 2016, exercised through the use of the excellent Cadalyst benchmark.
SPEC produces so many benchmarks worthy of inclusion in our workstation GPU content, that it’s earned itself its own page. So on page 4, SPECviewperf helps us gain an understanding of viewport performance across 9 different applications. SPECapc 3ds Max 2015 and Maya 2012 finish things up with exhaustive tests in their namesake Autodesk products.
Like SPEC, Sandra’s test suite is large, so page 5 is dedicated to four of its tests: Cryptography, Financial Analysis, Scientific Analysis, as well as memory bandwidth. Two quick and dirty gaming benchmarks are featured on page 6: Futuremark’s 3DMark, and Unigine’s Superposition. Finally, the last page includes power results (sadly, no temperatures this go around), as well as the final thoughts.
So without further ado, let’s get this train moving.So far Chase the Ace has created 2 new millionaires on Cape Breton Island. It's a pretty exciting time, and it seems many establishments would agree with me, with every Legion and boat club from here to New Glasgow having a Chase the Ace event once a week. I've even seen some Chinese restaurants getting in on the action.
And it's great, right? I mean, a few weeks ago an Alberta laborer won $3 million at the same time the province was burning to the ground. You couldn't hire Disney to write a more uplifting tearjerker.
Unfortunately, I'm about to do something stupid. See, while all this excitement was going on, it seems nobody was keeping track of the consequences of this hugely successful, windfall producing, Cape Breton inspired money-pit. Personally, I don't know where I stand, but I'm willing to give it some thought.
So here are some pro's and con's as I see them. As always, feel free to call me names in the comments.
Pro #1: It Raises a Boatload of Money for Charities
Fancy car not included.
The first pro is pretty straightforward. I challenge anyone to find a more effective fundraising method than Chase the Ace. The Inverness Chase the Ace, now a thing of legend, raised about $2.8 million for the Inverness Legion and Inverness Cottage Workshop. This is most likely more than the entire gross domestic product of Inverness. Also, the winning $1.7 million went to a woman with a husband fighting cancer. Why am I criticizing this again?
The more recent Sydney Chase the Ace raised an even more spectacular sum of almost $5 million for the Ashby Legion and the Horizon Achievement Centre. The picture above is Horizon's design for a new location near Open Hearth Park. As someone who has had the priviledge of touring the Horizon Achievement Centre, I can tell you that what they do there is beautiful, and they've been trying to raise the funds for a new location for years, making incremental progress, until a giant pile of money dropped in their laps.
Who could possibly criticize something that makes such amazing things happen? Well, me I guess...
Con #1: It's the only Way to Raise Money
Lively downtown Sydney.
There's no denying that these nonprofits would never have raised that amount of money without Chase the Ace. But if we're going to celebrate certain charities and nonprofits making millions of dollars at random increments, we also have to accept the fact that there are also many other charities and nonprofits that aren't. These giant windfalls are creating a "have and have-not" landscape for charities in Cape Breton, and at a pretty random pace, seeing as nobody can predict when one of these is going to blow up.
And it's not just charities. It's estimated that $10 million was spent on the Sydney Chase the Ace. How much disposable income do you think Cape Breton has? The median household income for this island is a little over $41,257. That's a total of 242 household incomes going to a fundraiser, on an island with a population a bit over 147,000 people.
I actually heard a rumour that The Mayflower Mall stopped selling Chase the Ace tickets because of rampant theft going on in their stores. I'm no expert on crime or anything, but when you're stealing jeans because you just spent all your money on dreams, it seems something is out balance.
I'm not saying the money is going to a bad place, but when our businesses can't keep their doors open, while a select few charities are rolling in dough, maybe it's time we rethink of our priorities.
Pro #2: It Brings in Outside Money
Can Paramount sue you if it's a metaphor?
Now the argument I just made isn't entirely accurate, so never trust me again. Not all of the $10 million dollars came from the pockets of Cape Bretoners. I think we all heard the stories of the towns in New Brunswick pooling money and sending one driver up to bulk buy tickets. I think some of the money came from as far away as Ontario. That's good news.
That money is going to be spent on local construction, employing nonprofit and charity workers, and probably a couple lunches at some point. This all contributes to the local economy, and what did New Brunswick and Ontario get in return for all those tickets they purchased? Absolutely nothing. Suckers!
At a time when it's getting more and more difficult to keep money from leaving this island, and most of the money coming in is from the government, it's awesome to see the mainland shoveling money at us, and then not picking their ticket every Friday.
Con #2: It Sugarcoats a Vice
Why would I sugarcoat that vice? Way too literal, Google image search.
Listen, I have no problem with vices. My personal vice comes in the form of a bottle of rum on Friday night. Here's the thing though; I can't buy my rum from the girl scouts and pretend like I'm contributing to a nonprofit.
Vice, by its very nature, is indulging in the present, and paying in the future. When drinking, it comes in the form of a super fun Friday night, at the price of a super awful Saturday morning. It's an investment in your future misery.
And much like drinking, gambling is indulging in possibilities now, while having an empty wallet tomorrow.
Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against gambling. I think allowing people to spend their own money however they want is a fundamental freedom of Western Civilization. I just think that if you're going to spend your money on irresponsible luxuries, there's got to be some equivalent exchange there.
In Chase the Ace there is not. You gamble, and when you lose, you feel good about donating to a charity. Even when you can't pay rent next week, you can feel great knowing the Horizon Achievement Centre can.
You can gamble all you want. Just be real about it. It kind of feels like a weird sense of denial.
Pro #3: It's a Community Event
The legion hasn't been this popular since 1957.
I think we can all agree that we get entirely too much bad news here on Cape Breton Island. I'm sorry I might be contributing to that right now. But in a time of island wide recession, and steady population decline, it's super cool to see people's dreams come true every month or so.
And while more and more people are glued to their phones and computer screens, Chase the Ace gets people out of the house, and packs the entire community in one sizable room, sharing jackpot dreams. I've heard there was a time when communities used to come together all the time for stuff like fairs, parades, and bake sales. I wouldn't know anything about that. My generations nearest equivalent are Facebook groups.
Some of these Chase the Ace pulls have music, entertainment, and giant piles of tickets. It's been a while since a lot of these small towns had must-attend events, and if it takes millions of dollars to do that, so be it.
Con #3: May the Odds Be Never in Your Favor
I did not photoshop this picture. Somebody honestly thought it was a good idea to make a picture of lottery winners getting hit by lightning.
Humans are an optimistic species. When you tell us we have a 20% chance of getting cancer, our minds think about the 80% who aren't going to get cancer and we merrily go on with the rest of our lives. When you tell them there are only 8 cards left in Chase the Ace, we figure we just have to be there, because somebody might win, and that somebody could be me.
Here's the thing about the odds. I'm not a mathematician. I couldn't figure out the odds before the draw. I would rely on our resident Math PhD, Shannon Ezzat for that, but what I do know is that it took $10 million to finally pick the winning Ace in the Sydney Legion draw. I heard it was about $1 for one ticket for Chase the Ace, and you could get more by bundling. That means that more than 10,000,000 tickets were bought before someone eventually won.
That's a 0.00001% chance of winning. That's bonkers low, but that's now how our minds work. When we hear there are only 6 cards left, our brains automatically jump to picking out the card, totally skipping the incredibly unreasonable selection process beforehand. That's how a 0.00001% chance looks like a 17% chance to the reptilian part of our brain. This is not because we're dumb. It's just a peculiar hiccup of the human brain.
And since when is the fact that "someone might win" an attractive quality to an event. Would you go to a hockey game because someone might win. What if there was a 50/50 draw where somebody might win. You know what's another way of saying "Somebody might win?" "Everybody is probably going to lose." But Chase the Ace brilliantly lasts months, steadily increasing the drama and excitement every week, and investing us deeper and deeper into the draw, like a bad movie sequel you have to go see because you saw all the other movies.
Conclusion
Honestly, this article is probably coming a bit late. All the cons of Chase the Ace point at the fundraiser being a victim of its own success over anything. It would carry almost no baggage if we were talking about $50,000 draws at your local legion, and I don't really see these huge pots happening for much longer.
Chase the Ace carries all the features of an exploding fad. As I said above, every Legion, boat club, and even some Chinese restaurants are jumping on the Chase the Ace bandwagon, and just like miniskirts and pogs, it's just not cool anymore when everyone is doing it. More and more, the question of the weekend on Cape Breton Island is going from "Are you going to Chase the Ace?" to "Which Chase the Ace are you going to?" The market is oversaturated.
In the end, even with all the cons of Chase the Ace, I'm glad it happened. A lot of money was donated to some great causes, and that would have never happened without it.
The only question I have left is "How long is it going to last?"Racist Facebook post - student suspended
Johannesburg - A student of the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) has been suspended for allegedly posting a racist message on Facebook, the university said on Tuesday.
"[Ken Sinclair] was suspended yesterday [Monday] and won't be attending classes," said spokesperson Thami Nkwanyane.
This was pending the outcome of a disciplinary process.
The City Press website reported that Sinclair posted a message two weeks ago in which he said black people were "fucking brain dead monkeys [who] always skinner [gossip] in their retarded language".
Nkwanyane said CPUT condemned Sinclair's actions in the "strongest possible terms".
The matter was an isolated event and not representative of the mindset of Cput students, he said.
It was not clear how long the disciplinary process would take to complete or what penalties Sinclair could face if found guilty.
Racism on social networks made headlines recently when two models, Jessica Leandra dos Santos and Tshidi Thamana, apologised after public condemnation of racist Twitter posts.Course features:
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Welcome to the land of learning Japanese online! Our conversational Japanese course is designed to help you master the Japanese language. Each lesson will revolve around our resources, textbook, or any topic you desire to learn. Expect to be speaking Japanese on your very first lesson. Don’t be alarmed, you will find after the first couple of lessons that you actually understand and can even speak a lot more than you thought you could. Good luck!Nobody who's been watching the goings-on in places like Scott Walker's Wisconsin, or Pat McCrory's North Carolina, or the independent failed state of Brownbackistan out there just south of Nebraska for the last few years could seriously have believed we would find 37 Republicans at the state level around the country whose political principles contained sufficient iron to allow them to stand up against the onrushing catastrophe.
So Monday's voting among the various presidential electors was as much a formality as it ever has been, even though the current president-elect fits every single criterion set down by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 68—low character, foreign influence, etc. etc.—as a reason for electors to go into business for themselves. If there is a modern parallel, it's the attempt to recall Walker in Wisconsin back in 2013. That effort failed, despite having gathered over a million signatures, largely because, faced with the opportunity to be full-grown citizens, the people of Wisconsin thought that the recall cost too much and that removing Walker from office was just going to be too…much…bother.
So it was on Monday. There were people who braved the cold to hoot and holler; in Wisconsin, there was even a protest inside the room where the state's electors were meeting. The vote lasted 15 whole minutes.
On Sunday, on CNN, host Michael Smerconish argued that electors should ignore the criteria for actual presidents set down by Hamilton this time around because the electors themselves didn't meet that Founder's exacting standards, either. But running through all the commentary was a sense of terror that, one day, the country might actually decide to live up to its founding principles, rather than simply slapping on the old tricorn and yelling about taxes. There are terrible truths about this nation that the public cannot be allowed to know, lest it act on them in ways that disturb the horses.
It was this terror out of which the Warren Commission was formed. It was this terror that kept Lyndon Johnson from revealing Richard Nixon's treason to the world and to Hubert Humphrey. It was this terror that engendered Nixon's pardon. It was this terror that allowed the Reagan campaign to dodge how it may have fudged the release of the hostages in Iran, and it was this terror that allowed Reagan himself to skate on Iran-Contra. It was this terror that welcomed the meddling of the Supreme Court in the Florida recount of 2000.
Drew Angerer Getty Images
It was this terror that allowed the Bush administration to elude its accountability regarding the events of September 11, 2001, or to be called to account entirely for how and why it ran the country into war in Iraq. It is this terror from which comes the impulse to look forward and never back. (On that same show, it should be noted, Smerconish hosted Bill Mitchell, the man who designed the "enhanced interrogation" techniques on behalf of the Bush administration. The torturer is on a book tour these days, instead of decorating his cell at The Hague.) And, I suspect, it is going to be this terror that will soften the findings of whatever "special" committee of the Congress is empaneled to look into Russian ratfcking and any other curiosities arising from the 2016 campaign.
If we really were who we say we are, politicians wouldn't be so quick to decide on our behalf that we're not ready to learn the truth about who sank the Paris Peace Talks, or that we're not ready to hold a criminal presidency accountable, or that we're not ready to learn the entire truth about the murder of a president in broad daylight. (LBJ had to blackjack Earl Warren into chairing that commission, and he put Senator Richard Russell on it before telling Russell he'd been named.) They would feel so safe in doing so. But we put our self-governing impulses into a blind trust so long ago that we don't even remember doing it anyway, and thus does Donald Trump become the 45th president of the United States, god help us all.
Editor's Note: Charles P. Pierce regrets transposing Kansas and Nebraska. He has stayed after school and bought a map.
Click here to respond to this post on the official Esquire Politics Facebook page.We’re underway with the development of our client side (front end) application with React.js after the last episode in this series covering the set up with Webpack. Now it’s time to create an application server with Express and structure the code to run as an isomorphic application. An isomorphic application is one where we share the application logic on both the client and the server. In this case that is the React.js components which will be rendered on the server using Express. The benefits of this reach beyond just code sharing as it helps us with Search Engine Optimisation, improving page load times and providing a richer user experience.
If you followed the first article in this series then you will already have Express installed. If not you should work through that article first or install it before continuing. Alternatively you can get up to speed by downloading the code for the last project. If doing this you will need to run npm install to get the dependencies installed.
We start by creating a new directory in the project folder named server. Add a new file inside the server directory named index.js with the following code.
Create an express server import express from 'express'; const app = express(); app.get('/', (request, response) => { response.send('Hello world from Express'); }); app.listen(3000, () => console.log('Server running')); 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 import express from 'express' ; const app = express ( ) ; app. get ( '/', ( request, response ) = > { response. send ( 'Hello world from Express' ) ; } ) ; app. listen ( 3000, ( ) = > console. log ( 'Server running' ) ) ;
Here we import express and call it to create a new application named app. Next we define a route for the application which is ‘/’. What this means is that when we visit the application without specifying a specific page or section the function we pass as the second parameter will be called to handle the request and provide an appropriate response, the text that is sent back to the client/browser. We use an arrow function that receives two arguments, the request object being received and the response object we will be sending back. For now we send back the message ‘Hello world from Express’.
Before we can run this file and test our server we must install the Babel CLI (the command line tools for Babel). We need to install these as we are writing the Node.js server code in the ES2015 syntax which, at the time of writing, is not fully supported in the most recent version of Node.js.
Install the babel-cli tools npm install babel-cli -g 1 npm install babel - cli - g
We install the babel-cli globally like we did with Webpack but the core babel library that the CLI tools will use was installed locally to our project in the last article. Once installed we need to create a configuration file for babel in./.babelrc (note the file name starts with a dot). We do this to tell babel which presets we require to build our code and to ignore packages in the node_modules folder.
.babelrc { "presets": ["react", "es2015"], "ignore": "node_modules" } 1 2 3 4 { "presets" : [ "react", "es2015" ], "ignore" : "node_modules" }
Run the server from the root of the project directory using the babel-node command.
Run the server using babel-node babel-node server 1 babel - node server
This command will compile the./server/index.js file using Babel and start the server. After a few seconds you should see the message ‘Server running’ in the terminal window. When you see this message visit http://localhost:3000 in your browser where you should be greeted with the message “Hello world f rom Express”.
We have a server running with very minimal effort thanks to Express! Kill the server now by hitting Ctrl-C in the terminal window where it is running.
Building React components for Express
Now that we have a server we need to look at how we will share our React.js components between the server and the client. There is going to be code outside of the components themselves that we won’t be sharing such as the code to fetch data as this will be handled differently in the two environments. What we do want to share is our React.js components and the data flow to update and render those components with Redux (we’ll be introducing Redux and RethinkDB in the next article).
Webpack enables us to build code for both the client and server environments. On the client we will build the entire application from the index.js entry point but for the server we will build the code in chunks from the top level (smart) components. We currently only have a single component./client/components/app so lets set up Webpack to build this chunk for the server. Make the following changes to the existing webpack.config.js file.
Webpack split configuration for client and server const path = require('path'); const CLIENT_DIR = path.resolve(__dirname, 'client'); const SERVER_DIR = path.resolve(__dirname,'server/generated'); const DIST_DIR = path.resolve(__dirname, 'dist'); const loaders = [{ test: /\.js$/, include: CLIENT_DIR, loader: 'babel-loader', query: { presets: ['es2015','react'] } }, { test: /\.less$/, loader:'style-loader!css-loader!less-loader' } ]; module.exports = [{ name: 'client', target: 'web', context: CLIENT_DIR, entry: './index.js', output: { path: DIST_DIR, filename: 'bundle.js' }, module: { loaders: loaders }, resolve: { alias: { components: path.resolve(CLIENT_DIR, 'components') } } }, { name:'server', target: 'node', context: CLIENT_DIR, entry: { app: 'components/app/index.js' }, output: { path: SERVER_DIR, filename: '[name].js', libraryTarget: 'commonjs2' }, externals: /^[a-z\-0-9]+$/, module: { loaders: loaders }, resolve: { alias: { components: path.resolve(CLIENT_DIR, 'components') } } }]; 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 const path = require ( 'path' ) ; const CLIENT_DIR = path. resolve ( __dirname, 'client' ) ; const SERVER_DIR = path. resolve ( __dirname,'server/generated' ) ; const DIST_DIR = path. resolve ( __dirname, 'dist' ) ; const loaders = [ { test : / \. js $ /, include : CLIENT_DIR, loader : 'babel-loader', query : { presets : [ 'es2015','react' ] } }, { test : / \. less $ /, loader:'style-loader!css-loader!less-loader' } ]; module.exports = [{ name: 'client', target: 'web', context: CLIENT_DIR, entry: './i ndex. js ', output: { path: DIST_DIR, filename:'bundle. js'}, module: { loaders: loaders }, resolve: { alias: { components: path.resolve(CLIENT_DIR,'components ') } } }, { name:'server ', target:'node ', context: CLIENT_DIR, entry: { app:'components /app/i ndex. js'}, output: { path: SERVER_DIR, filename:'[ name ]. js ', libraryTarget:'commonjs2'}, externals: /^[a-z\-0-9]+$/, module: { loaders: loaders }, resolve: { alias: { components: path.resolve(CLIENT_DIR,'components') } } } ] ;
Added here is a second set of configuration that targets node. This means that the code to be built is for use with Node.js. We define the entry point in the server configuration as an object which contains the names of the chunks we want to build. For now this just contains the app component. In the output section we specify that files should be saved in the directory./server/generated and that each file be named according to the name given in the entry section using the ‘[name].js’ placeholder. We also specify that the output library type of the files should be commonjs2 the module system used in Node.js.
Running webpack now will show the build status for both sets of configuration. The client code is now saved into the file./dist/bundle.js so you can delete the old./bundle.js file from the previous tutorials if it exists. The server code is saved into the./server/generated/app.js file ready for use in our Express server. We have an issue though, if we try to import and use the App component as it is now then we will receive an error. This error is due to the import of ‘./style.less’ which makes no sense to be importing in server side code. To deal with this issue we will extract the generated CSS into a separate file so that it can be included from our index.html page. To do this we install and configure the the extract-text-webpack-plugin to remove the output of the style-loader and save it into an external CSS file.
npm install the extract text plugin npm install extract-text-webpack-plugin --save-dev 1 npm install extract - text - webpack - plugin -- save - dev
Add the extract text plugin for CSS const path = require('path'); const ExtractTextPlugin = require('extract-text-webpack-plugin'); const CLIENT_DIR = path.resolve(__dirname, 'client'); const SERVER_DIR = path.resolve(__dirname,'server/generated'); const DIST_DIR = path.resolve(__dirname, 'dist'); const loaders = [{ test: /\.js$/, include: CLIENT_DIR, loader: 'babel-loader', query: { presets: ['es2015','react'] } }, { test: /\.less$/, loader: ExtractTextPlugin.extract('style-loader', 'css-loader!less-loader') } ]; module.exports = [{ name: 'client', target: 'web', context: CLIENT_DIR, entry: './index.js', output: { path: DIST_DIR, filename: 'bundle.js' }, module: { loaders: loaders }, resolve: { alias: { components: path.resolve(CLIENT_DIR, 'components') } }, plugins: [ new ExtractTextPlugin('bundle.css', {allChunks: true}) ] }, { name:'server', target: 'node', context: CLIENT_DIR, entry: { app: 'components/app/index.js' }, output: { path: SERVER_DIR, filename: '[name].js', libraryTarget: 'commonjs2' }, externals: /^[a-z\-0-9]+$/, module: { loaders: loaders }, resolve: { alias: { components: path.resolve(CLIENT_DIR, 'components') } }, plugins: [ new ExtractTextPlugin('[name].css') ] }]; 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 const path = require ( 'path' ) ; const ExtractTextPlugin = require ( 'extract-text-webpack-plugin' ) ; const CLIENT_DIR = path. resolve ( __dirname, 'client' ) ; const SERVER_DIR = path. resolve ( __dirname,'server/generated' ) ; const DIST_DIR = path. resolve ( __dirname, 'dist' ) ; const loaders = [ { test : / \. js $ /, include : CLIENT_DIR, loader : 'babel-loader', query : { presets : [ 'es2015','react' |
them you will have to drill and tap. The stock is all wood and the ergonomics are excellent. The price they are asking is so low it's ridiculous, you would be nuts to pass it up.
what is LOP (length of pull) from end of butt pad to trigger?What do you think of the scope?Can open sights be mounted on this using a shrouded or ramped front and notched rear sights?Real wood stock and fore grip?Thanks very much,Scott SurgnerBurlington, VT
By lanos from orlando FL on December 13, 2011 could the scope be taken off?
By Staff on December 29, 2011
Answer: yes. you can swap it out for any scope. By Conor from Sunnyside, WA on January 28, 2012
Answer: It can be taken off, but there is no open sights.....so how would you aim? By Mac_Daddy from Mendon, MI on May 13, 2012
Answer: keep both eyes open and focus on you target over the barrel By Chevota from CA on July 31, 2012
Answer: You can use open sights if you really want to. You'd need to drill/tap two holes in the breach block for the rear sight. The front sight you'd need to remove the muzzle brake, then glue/silicone on a regular plastic sight, both front and rear are available from Crosman for cheap. The barrels of guns with a muzzle brake are slightly smaller in diameter, that's why the need for glue. Guns with open sights also have a notch cut on the end of the barrel so the sight only goes on one way. The inside of the sight matches to fit, so you'd either need to grind out the extra plastic in the sight, or simply install it as far as it goes and call it good. Another option is to buy a whole new barrel for it. It'll probably cost about $15, plus another $10 for misc parts and sights, then $4 shipping, all direct from Crosman.
You could also put a smaller home made sight directly on the muzzle brake, glue or weld your piece directly to it. Or you could cut a groove in the brake with a saw, then glue in a flat piece of plastic or metal in it and cut to shape and height. Or make or buy something that can bolt to the brake once holes are drilled/tapped. I think keeping the brake and adding a small sight to it would be much cooler than the big ugly oem front sight. I prefer scopes myself, so the way it is perfect imo.
could the scope be taken off?
By Johnny from Detroit, MIchigan on June 15, 2012 How many pounds does this air gun take to pump? Could a 12 year old do it? Does it get easier to cock if it is broken in?
By Staff on June 15, 2012
Answer: Hello Johnny,
The cocking effort of this particular gun is roughly 31 lbs. My 13 year old brother can cock this rifle, however, he finds it somewhat difficult. The cocking doesn't necessarily get any easier once the air rifle is broken in. Please let me know if you have any further questions!
Sincerely,
The Airgun Depot Customer Care Team By taylor from pc, Utah on July 12, 2012
Answer: Yes, a twelve year old could do it, however, it would take some getting used to. And its refubished so its already broken in. By david from new England on July 12, 2012
Answer: i would say not for a 12 year old.
You put rifle but on hip, tap the end, and the barrel pivots - you insert pellet and close. Not multiple pumps.
It does take some strength and technique. I would guess 35-40 lbs. By Chevota from CA on July 31, 2012
Answer: Mine takes a peak of 28lbs to cock. It takes 8lbs just after you crack it open, climbs to 24lbs at 90 degrees, then 28 a few inches before it catches the trigger. I write it down as 8-24-28. Guns with coil springs are easier to cock so you might consider those. For example I have several coil guns (otherwise identical), the hardest one to cock is 3-19-26, the easiest is 3-16-21. The difference is between the two coil guns is primarily friction, the heavy one is as-is out of the box, the lighter one is after I tuned it. Tuning is fairly easy, especially if reducing friction is your goal. Use will also reduce friction, but it takes a lot of shots to do it. I guess it all depends on how strong the kid is.... The coil guns are also cheaper if that's a factor. Something like a referb Quest or Phantom can be had for $60-70 or so. You'll probably want to get one with a scope too, they're only about $10 w/ the gun, and totally worth it imo. I don't use open sights on any of my break barrel guns, only my Daisy Red Ryder...
How many pounds does this air gun take to pump? Could a 12 year old do it? Does it get easier to cock if it is broken in?
By Adam Ellison from Provo, Utah on March 15, 2012 Is this different from the Crosman Titan GP - Lower Velocity? I"m trying to find out if the velocity is actually 950 FPS: the same gun is advertised on PyraMyd Guns website with the label "lower velocity" and is advertised at 695 FPS. Any ideas?
By Staff on March 16, 2012
Answer: This is the higher power version of the Titan not the lower velocity version. However, I think you will get around 750 FPS max with a normal lead pellet.
We have the Titan lower velocity gun on sale this weekend only for $74.99. A lot of our customers prefer this because it's easier to cock, has a smoother action and still has plenty of knock down power for hunting. You will get around 650 FPS with a normal lead pellet and around 700 FPS with alloy.
http://www.airgundepot.com/crosman-titan-gp-c7m22np.html
Is this different from the Crosman Titan GP - Lower Velocity? I"m trying to find out if the velocity is actually 950 FPS: the same gun is advertised on PyraMyd Guns website with the label "lower velocity" and is advertised at 695 FPS. Any ideas?
By Harry from Bismarck, AR on February 10, 2012 If you buy a [pre-order] rifle how long will it take to get it
By Staff on February 10, 2012
Answer: When we receive the item we ship it out same day and then it takes about 3 days in transit to get from our location (Utah) to Bismarack, AR, so about 3 day after the 13th.
If you buy a [pre-order] rifle how long will it take to get it
By Erik from Albuquerque, NM on February 11, 2012 On average how many times do you pump per shot? Is it a single pump or several pumps?
By Staff on February 20, 2012
Answer: This is a single pump break barrel rifle.
On average how many times do you pump per shot? Is it a single pump or several pumps?
By Peter from New York on November 17, 2011 How long does it take to reload this gun?
By Howard from Illinois on November 23, 2011
Answer: Reloading is quick, even with my fat fingers.
Break barrel, pick up pellet, place pellet in barrel, close barrel. By Sidney from Cleveland, Ohio on November 23, 2011
Answer: 4-5 seconds if your ammo is handy
How long does it take to reload this gun?
By taylor from pc, utah on July 12, 2012 How is the refurbishment on this gun.
By Chevota from CA on July 31, 2012
Answer: Don't worry about it being a referb, it's not someones old gun they traded in or anything like that, it's most likely because of something simple like a damaged box or a new return because the customer didn't like something. Many guns are returned because they're used to firearms and they don't know how to sight it in or shoot it to get accuracy from it. Also many complain about the trigger as with most all Crosman/Benj/Rem guns, but it is easily fixable. The scope usually needs a couple adjustments too, again very easy fixes, but many expect everything to be perfect and as easy to shoot as a firearm. So they're basically new guns that people didn't want and are in new condition and everyone will tell you the same thing too. They're probably better than new because they've been given a good look-see by Crosman to be sure it's ok vs the original QA dept in China...
How is the refurbishment on this gun.
By Mark Riggs from mesa, az on June 22, 2012 I see this gun advertised as a 'GP' @ 43, & 43.5" and 'NP @ 43.5 & 47". What is it? A friend bought an 'NP' but the box showed 'GP'!?
By Chevota from CA on July 31, 2012
Answer: I'm not sure what the GP stands for, probably just part of the model name, but the NP means it has a Nitro spring vs the usual coil spring. I've never seen or heard of one with a coil spring, so as far as I know they're all Nitro.
Mine is 44", the 43 or 43.5 might be who/how they measured it. Longer like 47" would be the Trail XL version. And of course typo's are common too.
I see this gun advertised as a 'GP' @ 43, & 43.5" and 'NP @ 43.5 & 47". What is it? A friend bought an 'NP' but the box showed 'GP'!?
By James from midlothian va on February 15, 2012 can you buy sights for this gun even though it has none
By Staff on February 23, 2012
Answer: A scope or other optics are the only sights you can mount on this gun.
can you buy sights for this gun even though it has none
By Walter Dube from La Marque, Texas 77568 on March 22, 2012 Just what is...and how does a Nitro Piston work? Are there any gas cartriges/cannisters involved?
Could you provide a phone number so that I could speak with someone? Thanks
Walter Dube
wadube@sbcglobal.net
By Staff on March 23, 2012
Answer: Feel free to call our customer service line at 866-477-4867
There is a sealed chamber of nitrogen in place of the spring chamber that compresses and decompresses just like the spring chamber. Nitro piston chambers are easier to cock and keep there power in cold weather better than spring chambers.
Just what is...and how does a Nitro Piston work? Are there any gas cartriges/cannisters involved?Could you provide a phone number so that I could speak with someone? ThanksWalter Dubewadube@sbcglobal.net
By John from Mesa, AZ. on February 18, 2012 Where does it get Nitrogen from??
By Staff on February 24, 2012
Answer: It is a sealed chamber of gas that compresses like the spring in other rifles, when the piston is released it pushed air (normal air) and the pellet out the barrel. As the chamber is only compressed and then uncompressed, staying sealed, no gas is used and thus wont need refilling.
Where does it get Nitrogen from??
By Andrew from Green Bay, WI on July 18, 2012 Would this take down rabbits?
By Chevota from CA on July 31, 2012
Answer: Absolutely! Even if it was half the power it would, although this power level is more humane. This is an excellent gun any way you look at it, great looks, great performance, comes with a scope, and the price is outstanding for what you get. I love mine! Don't worry about it being a referb, it's most likely because of something simple like a damaged box or a new return because the customer didn't like something. Many guns are returned because they don't know how to sight it in or shoot it to get accuracy from it, spring guns are very different than a firearm so you have to know a few things first. The trigger is a problem with most all Crosman/Benj/Rem guns, but it is easily fixable. The scope usually needs a couple adjustments too, again very easy fixes. So they're basically new guns and everyone will tell you the same thing. This gun is also the most powerful in it's class thanks to the nitro piston. You'll probably see around 10% to as much as 40% more power than similar guns with coil springs. It's basically like a coil gun that has been tuned, not just for power, but smoothness and quiet. It cocks and shoots much nicer and quieter than a typical coil spring gun. You really can't go wrong with it, especially at this price. Feel free to ask owners here or in the review section about it, most are happy to share and have great things to say about the Titan. Complaints are usually what I mentioned earlier, but those are all easy fixes.
Would this take down rabbits?
By mike from ny on February 2, 2012 will this rifle be enough to take care of some pesty squirrels?
By Josh from Gainesville, FL on February 27, 2012
Answer: Definitely on the squirrels. I would think it would take out larger varmits like raccoons or possums. This gun packs a serious punch. By Maurice from Doral, Fl on July 5, 2012
Answer: Yes, this rifle can take care of squirrels and pigeons at distance, in my experience, 50 yds max. But large varmints as raccoons you must be closer, at least 25 yds
will this rifle be enough to take care of some pesty squirrels?
By shep from buford ga. on February 20, 2012 how loud is this gun,can i use in a subdivision.
By Mike from Los Angeles on February 27, 2012
Answer: I am using it in the middle of Los Angeles, and nobody has complained. I don't think that it's very loud, considering the power of the rifle. It is no louder than someone hammering a nail, IMO. By Matt from Kalamazoo, MI on February 27, 2012
Answer: It seems relatively quiet because of the short shot cycle. The sound of the pellet hitting a squirrel is about as loud as the gun itself. I shoot it an apartment complex without complaints, but my neighbors are all fairly lax. Depends o your neighbors, their proximity, sound conditions and local laws. I shoot it from inside typically, so the noise has nowhere to go. That way all that is heard outside is the whack of the big.22 pellet on your target. In summary, probably a little too loud with up tight, close neighbors; otherwise, you should be fine. I do recommend the gun though, especially for the price. Hope this helps. By Jim from Birmingham, Alabama on February 27, 2012
Answer: This gun is extremely quiet I would definetly use it in a subdivision By Stephen from St Clr Shores, MI on February 27, 2012
Answer: I too live in a subdivision. It is the perfect environment for a gun like this. Powerful enough to easily take care of squirrels, but quiet enough so no one notices.
It is not exactly whisper quiet, but I think the loudest part about shooting is the pellet hitting the target. I was shooting from inside my attached garage & my wife who was right inside the house had no idea.
It is a beautiful gun for the money. The scope is mediocre, but the gun is great. Powerful, quiet, & very well built. I have had mine for under a week & I can't stop shooting it. By robert from East stroudsburg, PA on February 27, 2012
Answer: I brought Titan and a stoger x20 with the silencer on it, after shooting both I was surprised to hear the stoger was much loader (and it has a built in silencer) I have noticed that the heavier pellets the quiter it gets. I think you will be ok with this rifle. I love mine and the price is good too. By Robert from Lawrenceville, GA on February 28, 2012
Answer: The gun is not very loud at all. Other reviewers have said that it becomes less noisy once it is broken in. The only sound heard with my Crosman Nitro is when the pellet hits the target with a "plink" sound. I use my gun in a subdivision where the neighbors are within 20 feet. No concerns from the neighbors have been voiced.
how loud is this gun,can i use in a subdivision.
By jim from hartford ct on June 29, 2012 is this a single pump or a multi pump weapen
By Staff on July 2, 2012
Answer: Jim,
The Crosman Titan Nitro Air Rifle is a break barrel rifle. that requires absolutely no pumping.
Sincerely,
The Airgun Depot Customer Care Team
is this a single pump or a multi pump weapen
By John Clark from yucca valley, california on February 21, 2012 Does it have warranty?
Lets say I buy one and It doesnt work properly of course I want to return it. So, could you specify the warranty?
By Staff on February 28, 2012
Answer: We have a 30 day return policy, so if it does not work properly then yes you are covered.
Does it have warranty?Lets say I buy one and It doesnt work properly of course I want to return it. So, could you specify the warranty?In times past, getting your photograph taken with an elected official such as the vice president of the United States would usually be looked upon with celebration and respect.
But in the vitriolic political climate in today’s age of President Donald Trump, one college student is finding out firsthand how reverse the world has become.
McKenzie Deutsch, an incoming junior at Scripps College in Southern California, posted a photo of herself on Facebook standing between Vice President Mike Pence and U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., for whom she had served as a congressional intern.
That’s when all hell broke loose as she was pummeled with a nonstop deluge of toxic comments including “B-tch.”
“According to my peers, taking a photo with Vice-President Pence is anything but neutral. In fact, it constitutes direct violence and oppression against marginalized groups,” Deutsch wrote in a column for the Claremont Independent.
“I began receiving vicious comments and private messages accusing me of not caring about LGBTQ rights and attacking me for getting anywhere near the Vice-President. Close friends and distant acquaintances alike lashed out in fury, subjecting me to lectures, rants, and name-calling – all while ignoring the photo’s plainly apolitical context.”
Finally, a bright light is shining on the growing obsession with diversity, victimization and identity politics on today’s college campuses. Read “No Campus for White Men.”
“One person accused me of ‘ignoring the plights of marginalized people to achieve personal gain,’ saying I was a person who ‘smiled with [their] oppressors.’ Some took to mockery, inquiring, ‘Did you manage to ask him why he thinks women are second-class citizens?’ and ‘How many LBGTQ folks do you need to help send to conversion therapy in exchange for reproductive rights from Pence?’ A friend asked me why I would stand next to someone who is ‘a threat to human rights everywhere.’ A classmate simply commented, ‘B-tch.’ Many others ‘liked’ these comments, endorsing this shameless harassment.”
Deutsch wondered out loud how America has come to this point:
How did we get to the point where taking a photo with someone is an act of violence? How will we ever be able to have adult conversations if no one is ever willing to listen to those who have opposing philosophies? How can we coexist when we write off our political opponents – as well as those who dare to take photos with them – as morally bankrupt? A mere “I saw you got to meet the Vice-President; what was that like?” to begin a friendly conversation would have been enough – or simply saying nothing at all. But instead, my peers thought the best way to respond was to confront, accuse, and lecture. No one seems to remember what their teachers have taught them since Kindergarten: Be respectful of others. Apparently, when it comes to those with whom they disagree, many of my peers are only capable of disrespectful engagement. For them, there is no value in one of their classmates working for a member of Congress if that member is a Republican. They are horrified that someone in the Scripps community would take a photo with the current Vice-President, a man with whom they disagree. It is as if every student must follow an understood uniform code of conduct and speech – as if I must share the liberal politics of my peers in order to be treated with respect or considered a decent person. Their lecturing about diversity apparently does not extend to diversity of thought. This is not as it should be. We need a genuine dialogue – now more than ever. While division clearly exists between Republicans and Democrats serving within our government, many members of Congress recognize the importance of engaging with individuals across the aisle.
Like the reporting you see here? Sign up for free news alerts from WND.com, America’s independent news network.
Leaning to the political left is nothing new for many on the Scripps College campus.
According to the College Fix, during last year’s presidential campaign, the student president at the school notified police when “#trump2016” was found scrawled on a dorm room door, calling it “racist … violence.”
In February, a flyer posted on campus suggested students of color charge their white colleagues for “emotional labor” inflicted upon them, an allusion to the effort they spend correcting white students on any given matter.
And in 2015, the college reportedly provided female students a collection of eight different gender-pronoun options, thinking professors and other individuals would use those options.
Follow Joe Kovacs on Twitter @JoeKovacsNewsOutdoor Gear Coach
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is to produce product/garment eBooks and training materials, independently of brands, for the broader outdoor community, whether enthusiasts, instructors, sales or design, retail or manufacturing.
which:
Are based on sound scientific principles and textile technologies Is created through extensive dialogue with industry experts who verify our information is correct, unbiased and useful. Use verified timelines of who invented what and when to create a memorable narrative. Embrace the issues of sustainability and social responsibility in a brief and understandable way. Recognise that well how it’s used can be as important as the garments or products themselves and hence we record best practise by experts from around the world.
WHY HAVE WE DEVELOPED Outdoor Gear Coach?
Mike Parsons:
“Developing products is rewarding but my teaching at Lancaster University Management School, with Mary, showed me how special it is to help people, young and old to develop, grow and learn. If this initiative succeeds and helps people new to the industry, as well as the experienced, to develop personally and contribute better to their company, it will be a suitable final career project”.
Mary Rose:
“Outdoor Gear Coach was a natural progression for me, after so many years stimulating teaching, researching and running innov_ex with Mike. It feels like the perfect opportunity to put something back into the outdoor trade and into the outdoor community at large.”
The challenge is to provide useful, informative, scientifically accurate and unbiased information which is coherent across all garment segments and which can be used by all sectors of the outdoor community from users to designers, to brands to retailers to bloggers to journalists to outdoor instructors to consumers. In addition to this base information we hope to provide infographics posters and other tools. What emerges are the common principles of how all products work and how to get the best performance out of them.
The online learning system will form the basis of a CPD program for employees if this is desired and could even be taken to certification levels if that was the wish of the outdoor industry.
Although we retain editorial control, OutdoorGearCoach is being developed in collaboration with outdoor retailers in UK and USA, plus manufacturing brands who are licensees of the major fabric brands, outdoor professionals and outdoor journalists. OutdoorGearCoach focuses on the principles of how all outdoor gear works, and is non-comparative at the fabrics and product level.
HOW OTHERS ARE DOING IT
Here is the wider context of our publications and training system: We have not found any independent product training for outdoor products within the western world. Click here to see details of training programmes in mountain leadership and cycling.
WHO OWNS OUTDOOR GEAR COACH?
OutdoorGearCoach is independently owned, and at present self funded by Mike Parsons and Mary B Rose who are also currently the group leaders.
FIRST PRODUCTS
We are now working with a team of people to produce the first of a series of books, See Keeping Warm and Staying Dry our first bookGeometric backgrounds are quite popular today, since they usually play quite well with flat and simplistic UIs that dominate current user experiences. If you are not sure what I am after here, just Google this term with Bing and you will get the idea.
Since I am currently working an a Windows Phone App, where this type of background fits in nicely, is decided to create a custom control for it. Here are a couple of screenshots of what this control looks like in action.
The control is basically configured by one parameter of type Color.
<n:FancyBackground Color="OrangeRed" />
Another property which can be set is the LineThickness of the triangular shapes. It’s default value (like in the screenshots above) is “0”, but here is how a line thickness of “3” looks like:
<n:FancyBackground LineThickness="3" Color="Brown" />
The geometric background effect is basically created using a couple of triangular shapes that are placed bottom to top together with a random displacement. The triangles’ color is calculated from the given base color property and made lighter, the further we come to the bottom of the control. “Lightening” the color is achieved by simple linear interpolation (aka lerping) between the given color and the “White” color (#FFFFFF).
Lerping
Here is the code in form of an extension method that performs linear interpolation (lerping) between two colors. If the color we interpolate towards is “White” we achieve the nice lightening effect our custom control is using.
public static Color Lerp(this Color fromColor, Color toColor, double amount) { var r = (byte)Lerp(fromColor.R, toColor.R, amount); var g = (byte)Lerp(fromColor.G, toColor.G, amount); var b = (byte)Lerp(fromColor.B, toColor.B, amount); return Color.FromArgb(255, r, g, b); } private static double Lerp(double start, double end, double amount) { var difference = end - start; var adjusted = difference * amount; return start + adjusted; }
Easing
Even though the color interpolation is linear, I figured that the actual percentage of the lightening factor (the amount argument) looks better if we apply exponential easing to it.
In other words: The triangles becoming darker from bottom to top does not happen on a linear but on a exponential scale.
The easing function I am using is taken from Golan Levin’s website Flong and is a double-exponential seat. I am currently using a control parameter of 0.40, but feel free to modify and play with this value. Here is the C# code for this easing function.
double ExponentialEase(double x, double a) { var epsilon = 0.00001; var minA = 0.0 + epsilon; var maxA = 1.0 - epsilon; a = Math.Max(minA, Math.Min(maxA, a)); var y = 0.0; if (x <= 0.5) { y = (Math.Pow(2.0 * x, 1 - a)) / 2.0; } else { y = 1.0 - (Math.Pow(2.0 * (1.0 - x), 1 - a)) / 2.0; } return y; }
The rest of the code just deals with creating triangular shapes and randomly placing them on the control starting on the bottom up to the top. Here is all the source code for it:
using System; using System.Windows; using System.Windows.Controls; using System.Windows.Media; using System.Windows.Shapes; namespace Newport { public class FancyBackground : Control { private Canvas _canvas; private bool _isInitialized; public FancyBackground() { DefaultStyleKey = typeof(FancyBackground); Loaded += (_, __) => CreateItems(); } public override void OnApplyTemplate() { _canvas = (Canvas)GetTemplateChild("canvas"); _isInitialized = true; base.OnApplyTemplate(); } private void CreateItems() { if (_isInitialized) { _canvas.Children.Clear(); const int steps = 10; steps.Times(i => { var div = ActualWidth / 2; CreateTriangle(div * 0, div * 1, i, steps); CreateTriangle(div * 1, div * 2, i, steps); }); } } private void CreateTriangle(double w0, double w1, int i, int steps) { var stepX = (ActualHeight * 0.1) * (steps / (steps + i)); var stepY = ActualHeight / steps; var xM = RandomData.GetDouble(w0, w1); var yM = ActualHeight - i * stepY - RandomData.GetDouble(1.5 * stepY); var xTL = xM - (yM + RandomData.GetDouble(-stepX, stepX)); var xTR = xM + (yM + RandomData.GetDouble(-stepX, stepX)); var yT = 0; var p = new Path(); p.Data = new PathGeometry { Figures = new PathFigureCollection() { new PathFigure { IsClosed = true, StartPoint = new Point(xM, yM), Segments = new PathSegmentCollection() { new LineSegment { Point = new Point(xTL, yT) }, new LineSegment { Point = new Point(xTR, yT) }, } }, } }; var l = 1 - (i + 1.0) / steps; // lightness percentage l = ExponentialEase(l, 0.40); var col = Color.Lerp(Colors.White, l); p.Fill = new SolidColorBrush(col); p.Stroke = new SolidColorBrush(Color); p.StrokeThickness = LineThickness; _canvas.Children.Add(p); } public static readonly DependencyProperty ColorProperty = DependencyProperty.Register( "Color", typeof(Color), typeof(FancyBackground), new PropertyMetadata(Colors.Green, OnColorChanged)); public Color Color { get { return (Color)GetValue(ColorProperty); } set { SetValue(ColorProperty, value); } } private static void OnColorChanged(DependencyObject sender, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs args) { ((FancyBackground)sender).CreateItems(); } public static readonly DependencyProperty LineThicknessProperty = DependencyProperty.Register( "LineThickness", typeof(double), typeof(FancyBackground), new PropertyMetadata(0.0, OnLineThicknessChanged)); public double LineThickness { get { return (double)GetValue(LineThicknessProperty); } set { SetValue(LineThicknessProperty, value); } } private static void OnLineThicknessChanged(DependencyObject sender, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs args) { ((FancyBackground)sender).CreateItems(); } } }
Since I implemented this control as a custom control, the XAML resides in a Generic.xaml file in the Themes folder. Here is what it looks like:
<ResourceDictionary xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/client/2007" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:n="clr-namespace:Newport"> <Style TargetType="n:FancyBackground"> <Setter Property="Template"> <Setter.Value> <ControlTemplate TargetType="n:FancyBackground"> <Canvas x:Name="canvas" Background="WhiteSmoke" /> </ControlTemplate> </Setter.Value> </Setter> </Style> </ResourceDictionary>A two-year FBI probe of Nassau County Sheriff Tommy Seagraves and his agency has branched into dual investigations of civil rights violations and corruption, including obstruction of cases, altered police reports and theft, a Times-Union investigation has found.
A key to the investigations is a Nassau narcotics detective turned FBI informant whom authorities asked to secretly tape more than a dozen meetings with Seagraves and others. Brandon Smith, 31, said he did so often with a recorder stuck in a front pants pocket, sometimes sitting only feet from Seagraves.
Smith, speaking publicly for the first time, told the Times-Union he has also given the FBI firsthand accounts, documents and video of what he says are crimes and other wrongdoing by deputies and misconduct by Seagraves and some staff.
Read part 2 of this Times-Union report
Authorities haven't charged anyone and wouldn't say when they expect the investigations to end. Seagraves denies doing anything wrong.
Smith described the most serious allegations as separate attacks on two handcuffed drug suspects by veteran cop William "Monty" Wettstein Jr. The two suspects, and co-defendants in one case, confirmed the incidents for the Times-Union. The St. Johns County Sheriff's Office also documented the accounts in an independent investigation.
Wettstein, 43, declined to comment. Seagraves suspended him with pay this year after one incident. But the sheriff said he reinstated him as sergeant over the narcotics unit after he apologized, passed a fit-for-duty exam and got a written warning to watch his temper. He remains on the job.
Local FBI head Jim Casey said his agency, with Seagraves' cooperation, is investigating potential civil rights violations by police in Nassau. Casey declined to elaborate. He wouldn't acknowledge the existence of the corruption case.
Smith said he turned to the FBI because he had no confidence that Seagraves would act on his concerns. He described the sheriff as a power-hungry leader who played favorites among the employees and hindered investigations to avoid bad publicity for the county and Sheriff's Office.
"I was to that point where I was just like something needs to be done because the sheriff obviously has too much control," said Smith, who quit in September after 10 years on the force.
Seagraves said he has no thirst for power, treats everyone fairly and doesn't shun bad news.
He blames the ongoing scrutiny largely on a political feud that has pitted him against State Attorney Angela Corey for his repeated criticism of chief Nassau prosecutor Wes White. Seagraves said he believes Smith is fueling the overall probe in cahoots with White and FBI agent Byron Thompson. He believes the group dislikes him and his management style.
White and Thompson, the lead investigator, declined to comment. Corey and Casey said none of their investigations are politically driven.
"Allegations that any FBI agent in Jacksonville is conducting an investigation based on anything other than facts is false," Casey said Wednesday.
Seagraves said the tedious FBI probe, combined with the state attorney strife, played into his decision to forgo a third term and retire in January 2013 after 30 years.
"I was hoping to end my career not being shot. Now I'm being shot. It's not being shot by bullets. It's being shot at by the scrutiny of persons saying how they want it to end for me," said Seagraves, 50. "I guarantee you there's a lot more people who have a whole lot of better things to say about Tommy Seagraves."
The sheriff said he has delayed any further investigation of Wettstein to avoid interfering with the FBI. Corey said she also is holding back on investigating any potential wrongdoing at Seagraves' agency for the same reason.
The Federal Case
The FBI began investigating in late 2009 after receiving tips about corruption at the Sheriff's Office, including allegations of misused funds. The probe intensified in late 2010 as the FBI subpoenaed records of Yulee businesses trying to determine whether Seagraves got any favors, including gifts and price breaks on hunting trips.
Seagraves expressed confidence in January that the FBI would find no wrongdoing. Newly hired Undersheriff Gordon Bass and other brass appeared before a federal grand jury two weeks later. Details of the secret session remain unknown. Agents collected 11 boxes of documents from Seagraves in February, including records on federal grant expenditures.
Smith already had been working for the FBI for nearly a year by that time. He said he first went to the FBI after he recorded another narcotics detective talking about steroid use. Smith told the FBI that he and co-workers suspected that detective was tipping off drug dealers to investigations and committing other crimes. Smith said he didn't believe Seagraves would do anything if he told him because the detective and his father, a Callahan preacher, were favorites of the sheriff.
The FBI began its civil rights investigation after Smith's tip that Wettstein attacked drug suspect Felder Youman in February. Seagraves said Smith also told him about the attack and other misconduct among fellow narcotics detectives, which included suspicions of theft.
Seagraves shuttered the unit in mid-March and asked St. Johns County Sheriff David |
to be a woman called Nikki. 'Nikki' would then tell them they could make tens of thousands of dollars by being an 'adult model' in videos which would be shown in private accounts in foreign countries.
He would then invite them to his house, where he would tell them having sex with him was part of the audition process. He would show the women faked, but convincing-looking documents, including cheques and IRS documents.
Credit: Fox News 4
When his victims complained about not receiving payment he would send the footage to their employers and partners.
According to the Kansas City Star, his crimes began back in 2011, when he contacted a woman and told her she could make $1,000 (£775) for each sex tape she made with him, they went on to produce several tapes. She never received payment. In 2015, it's alleged Antoine told the woman she must pay $9,000 (£6,982) or have sex with him to stop him from distributing the tapes. She is believed to have had sex with him, to stop him releasing the videos.
Credit: Missouri Department of Corrections
He used videos and images of his first victim to target his second one, by telling her the woman in the footage had earned thousands of dollars after making just a few movies. He is alleged to have offered her $2000 (£1,551) to 'audition' with him.
Authorities believe there may be even more victims.
Source: New York Post & Kansas City Star
Featured Image Credit: PAPittsburgh Steelers running back Le’Veon Bell believes the AFC Championship Game would have played out very differently had he been fully healthy.
With Bell hobbled by a groin injury, the New England Patriots easily dispatched the Steelers 36-17 to advance to Super Bowl LI. Speaking Friday on ESPN’s “First Take,” the Pro Bowl running back said his injury basically cost Pittsburgh the game.
“I think we beat them,” Bell said when asked how the game would have transpired had he been at full strength. “I think the first time we played them in the beginning of the year, we kind of gave that game away. We were playing with our backup quarterback. We didn’t even have Ben (Roethlisberger). I think when we were playing them in the AFC Championship Game, when I was out there, I wasn’t feeling well at all.
“But the fact that I was out there, (the Patriots’) game plan was so different just because I was out there. I think if I go out there healthy and we go out there and do what we normally do, the way that we’d been doing it the whole season, especially in the playoffs, like running the ball, opening play-action, leaving (Antonio Brown) 1-on-1, leaving Sammie (Coates) 1-on-1, Jesse James — all the receivers — our O-line blocking the way they do, I think the outcome is really different.
“We’ll get back to that next year, but I think we win that game.”
Bell, who ranked fifth in the NFL with 1,268 rushing yards this season, played just 11 snaps in the AFC title game, carrying the ball six times for 20 yards.
Thumbnail photo via Geoff Burke/USA TODAY Sports ImagesFor our Northern Hemisphere readers the chill winds of winter are fast approaching, so it seems appropriate to feature a weather station project. Enjoy your summer, Southern readers!
[Fandonov] has created a weather station project with an Arduino Uno at its heart and a Waveshare e-ink display as its face to the world, and as its write-up (PDF) describes, it provides an insight into both some of the quirks of these displays, and into weather forecasting algorithms.
The hardware follows a straightforward formula, aside from Arduino and display it boasts an Adafruit sensor board and a hardware clock. Software-wise though there are some tricks to give the display a scalable font that other tinkerers might find useful, drawing characters as a matrix of filled circle primitives.
The write-up gives an introduction to forecasting based only on local readings rather than on the huge volumes of data over a wide area used by professional meteorologists. In play here is the Zambretti algorithm, which takes the readings and information about whether they are rising or falling, and returns a forecast from a look-up table.
As we’ll all be aware, even professional weather forecasting is fraught with inaccuracies, but this is nonetheless an interesting project that is very much worth a second look. Meanwhile we’ve covered huge numbers of weather stations in the past, a couple of interesting ones are this one using a classic TI99/4A home computer, and more relevant here, this one using an e-paper badge.
Thanks [Phil] for the tip!Cheri Jacobus speaks to CNN (screen grab)
A GOP consultant who was once asked to head up communications for now-President Donald Trump tweeted out a laundry list of suggestions to the media Saturday morning on how to best push back at a White House administration that continues to threaten them.
According to writer and media consultant Cheri Jacobus, “The days of pretending” what is happening under Trump isn’t “serious” is over and it is time for a concerted push-back.
At the top of her Twitter feed, Jacobus proves her bonafides as a conservative in good standing, providing a screen-shot of a message from former Trump adviser Jim Dornan, asking her to work for the, saying ” We need a top notch communications director.”
As Jacobus’ tweets reveal, she not only is not a part of the Trump team but that she is appalled at what has transpired during the presidential campaign and how the Trump White House has conducted itself.
What she has done is call on those who are under attack by Trump and his advocates, to “unite” with others to stop the bullying.
You can read her tweets below:
1. One of the positive aspects of Trump/Bannon extremism in the first 2 weeks is that it's harder to deny the trouble we're in & can act — Cheri Jacobus (@CheriJacobus) February 4, 2017
2. The days of pretending that this isn't serious are over. It is worse than what was warned about during the campaign. The press must unite — Cheri Jacobus (@CheriJacobus) February 4, 2017
3. When Trump tries to shut down one media outlet, the rest must resist. When Trump tries to bully a judge, the rest must be louder. — Cheri Jacobus (@CheriJacobus) February 4, 2017
4. When Trump/Bannon overreaches, all must call them out. When they lie, all must expose them. When they are treasonous, say so. Loudly. — Cheri Jacobus (@CheriJacobus) February 4, 2017
5. When a Trump family member is in a meeting they should not be in, question it immediately. — Cheri Jacobus (@CheriJacobus) February 4, 2017
6. Interviews with Trump and his people should be pre-taped and fact-checked at the time they are aired. — Cheri Jacobus (@CheriJacobus) February 4, 2017
7. Ignore & block Trump twitter trolls. Don't engage.They give media & lawmakers false impression of Trump support by viewers & constituents — Cheri Jacobus (@CheriJacobus) February 4, 2017
8. emails & tweets media and Cong get showing massive support for Trump are FAKE. Do not make programming or policy decisions based on these — Cheri Jacobus (@CheriJacobus) February 4, 2017The neo-soul singer described the award, previously won by Adele and Sam Smith, as ‘such a special way to end the year’
The Brits critics’ choice award, typically a bellwether of pop music success, has been won by Jorja Smith.
The Walsall neo-soul singer has already been featured on two tracks by Canadian rap superstar Drake, and scored a club hit with On My Mind, a collaboration with grime and garage producer Preditah. Her solo singles Beautiful Little Fools, Teenage Fantasy and Where Did I Go? have all earned millions of streams and YouTube views. The chairman of the Brit awards, Jason Iley, said she had “a huge future ahead of her”.
Smith said it was “such a special way to end the year … it’s been an unforgettable 2017 during which I’ve fulfilled so many of my dreams.”
The award, voted for by figures in the music industry from major labels to the media, is designed to “highlight and identify future British recording talent”, and has previously been won by Adele, Ellie Goulding and Sam Smith. 2017’s winner, Rag’N’Bone Man, went on to score the second-fastest selling album in the UK this year.
From Adele to AlunaGeorge: how Brits Critics' Choice nominees have fared Read more
Also nominated for this year’s award were rapper Stefflon Don, who has already hit the Top 10 with her track Hurtin’ Me, and soul singer Mabel, daughter of Neneh Cherry, whose slow-burn hit Finders Keepers also recently reached the Top 10. It was the first all-female shortlist, and Smith ends a run of five years of solo male winners.October 6, 2011 in Lifestyle (E)
[prMac.com] Barcelona, Spain - Keemeo has released SexBooth 1.0, a very special booth app for iPhone and iPod touch. SexBooth is free for a limited time, and is available in the Lifestyle category of the App Store. There are some crazy apps on the iPhone, but SexBooth really pushes the limits even further.
Indeed, SexBooth claims that it can change the sex of a person in a picture. The truth is, SexBooth does not allow for perfect sex change, as the best solution for that remains surgery (or a lot of makeup). What it does really is that it makes a face look more masculine or more feminine. Because of facial hair and other factors, SexBooth works better from female to male than from male to female. Still, the transformations are pretty fun and quite realistic!
SexBooth gives acceptable results when used on pictures taken with the built-in camera of the iPhone and iPod touch. In order to create great transformations, it is better to use high quality pictures taken with an external digital camera and imported from the photo album.
Get SexBooth while it's free!
Device Requirements:
* iPhone and iPod touch
* Requires iOS 3.2 or later
* 11.4 MB
Pricing and Availability:
SexBooth 1.0 is $0.99 (USD), and is free for a limited time! SexBooth is available worldwide through the App Store in the Lifestyle category. Review copies are available upon request.
Keemeo creates magical apps for the iPhone. Copyright (C) 2011 Keemeo. All Rights Reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, iPhone, iPod, and iPad are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries.
###Clearly, your Government is feeling a little ashamed of itself and, sir, it has much to be ashamed about. It is not for nothing that just about every leading Indian newspaper and magazine has deplored the ban as, for example, ''a Philistine decision'' (The Hindu) or ''thought control'' (Indian Express).
It is not for nothing that such eminent writers as Kingsley Amis, Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard have joined International PEN and India's association of publishers and booksellers in condemning the decision. The right to freedom of expression is at the foundation of any democratic society, and at present, all over the world, Indian democracy is becoming something of a laughing-stock.
When Syed Shahabuddin and his fellow self-appointed guardians of Muslim sensibilities say that ''no civilized society'' should permit the publication of a book like mine, they have got things backwards. The question raised by the book's banning is precisely whether India, by behaving in this fashion, can any more lay claim to the title of a civilized society.
Let us try to distinguish truth from falsehood in this matter. Like my zealous opponents, you will probably not have read ''The Satanic Verses.'' So let me explain a few simple things. I am accused of having ''admitted'' that the book is a direct attack on Islam. I have admitted no such thing, and deny it strongly. The section of the book in question (and let's remember that the book isn't actually about Islam, but about migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death, London and Bombay) deals with a prophet - who is not called Mohammed - living in a highly fantastical city made of sand (it dissolves when water falls upon it).
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.
He is surrounded by fictional followers, one of whom happens to bear my own first name. Moreover, this entire sequence happens in a dream, the fictional dream of a fictional character, an Indian movie star, and one who is losing his mind, at that. How much further from history could one get?
In this dream sequence I have tried to offer my view of the phenomenon of revelation and the birth of a great world religion; my view is that of a secular man for whom Islamic culture has been of central importance all his life.
Can the finance ministry really be saying that it is no longer permissible, in modern, supposedly secular India, for literature to treat such themes? If so, things are more serious than I had believed. From where I sit, Mr. Gandhi, it looks very much as if your Government has become unable or unwilling to resist pressure from more or less any extremist religious grouping; that, in short, it's the fundamentalists who now control the political agenda.
You know, as I know, that Mr. Shahabuddin, Mr. Khurshid Alam Khan and their allies don't really care about my novel. The real issue is the Muslim vote.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
I deeply resent my book being used as a political football; what should matter to you more than my resentment is that you come out of this looking not only Philistine and anti-democratic but opportunistic.
Mr. Prime Minister, I can't bring myself to address finance ministries about literature. In my view, this is now a matter between you and me. I ask you this question: What sort of India do you wish to govern? Is it to be an open or a repressive society?
Your action in the matter of ''The Satanic Verses'' will be an important indicator for many people around the world. If you confirm the ban, I'm afraid I, and many others, will have to assume the worst. If, on the other hand, you should admit your Government's error and move swiftly to correct it, I will be the first to applaud your honorable deed.Wednesday, November 15th, 2017
Tight security @Stanford for Robert Spencer speech on campus pic.twitter.com/wT1HK46OUh — Lisa Amin Gulezian (@LisaAminABC7) November 15, 2017
Room is mostly empty now pic.twitter.com/tcOq1MslQK — Lisa Amin Gulezian (@LisaAminABC7) November 15, 2017
Large group outside not able the get in to listen to @jihadwatchRS even though room is almost empty. @Stanford stating security protocol — Lisa Amin Gulezian (@LisaAminABC7) November 15, 2017
PALO ALTO, Calif. (KGO) -- Minutes after author Robert Spencer started to speak, the packed room cleared out."You are all little totalitarians and neo-grouchers, a stain on Stanford University and academia in general," Spencer said, directing his attention to students in the audience.It was an orchestrated move by students who opposed Spencer's presence on campus. The university's Young Republicans sponsored the event.Many students expressed outrage that Spencer, the director of the website Jihad Watch, was invited."Racism, bigotry isn't welcome. Those espousing hatred can't have a platform on this campus," said student Jana Kholy.When asked if he was racist or Islamophobic, Spencer responded with laughter. "I'm neither one. Islam is not a race. Mass murder is not a race."Though Bruin Hall was nearly empty after the walkout, Spencer supporters weren't allowed in. Organizers insisted that Spencer was invited to create a dialogue."This isn't about preaching to the choir," said Amy Lutz of the Young America's Foundation. "It's about educating students on another perspective on the issue."In the meantime, 200 or so students gathered nearby in support of what they say the true Stanford is about."I will not continue hate speech on this campus," said one student.Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, is under investigation for involvement in an alleged plot to kidnap a Turkish dissident cleric living in the US and fly him to an island prison in Turkey in return for $15m, it was reported on Friday.
Flynn ally sought help from 'dark web' in covert Clinton email investigation Read more
The report in the Wall Street Journal is the latest of a string of allegations facing Flynn, a retired general and former head of the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA).
Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian manipulation of the 2016 US election, has already indicted Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and another senior fundraiser on charges including money laundering. A former foreign policy adviser has pleaded guilty to perjury.
Mueller is now reported to have gathered sufficient evidence to bring charges against Flynn and his son, Michael Flynn Jr, which would bring his investigation another leap closer to Trump.
The fact that no indictment has been made public may only increase concerns for Trump’s legal team. Flynn has expressed interest in an immunity deal and Mueller, in his dealings with former foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, has shown himself ready to negotiate.
The former national security adviser’s company, Flynn Intel Group, is allegedly under scrutiny for failing to register work it did for interests linked to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Flynn is in legal jeopardy for his statements to investigators about his contacts with representatives of the Turkish and Russian governments.
The new allegation, that Flynn and his son engaged in a conspiracy to arrange the rendition of Fethullah Gülen to the Erdoğan government – which accuses the cleric of plotting an abortive coup in July 2016 – could if confirmed result in even more serious charges.
In September, the Wall Street Journal reported a meeting about the plan, in which former CIA director James Woolsey is said to have participated. Friday’s report describes a second meeting involving both Flynns at the 21 Club restaurant, a prohibition-era New York speakeasy patronised by Trump, in mid-December. According to “people familiar with the investigation”, it was at this encounter that the $15m payment was discussed.
One source said Gülen would be seized and flown by private jet to the Turkish prison island of Imrali. It is not clear if any money changed hands or if any preparatory steps were taken.
The timing of the 21 Club meeting is significant. The White House has distanced itself from the men charged by Mueller – Papadopoulos, former campaign manager Paul Manafort and his business associate Rick Gates. But by mid-December Trump had named Flynn national security adviser and he was playing a central role in the transition.
That period is a grey area when it comes to paid work for foreign interests, but if the arrangement was carried through past inauguration in January, Flynn could face bribery charges on top of questions of whether the New York conversations represented a conspiracy to carry out a forced extra-judicial rendition of a legal US resident.
“If the facts involving Flynn and his son are true, or even mostly true, it indicates an incredible propensity for outrageously illegal conduct,” said Ryan Goodman, a New York law professor and former Pentagon counsel. “Evidence that Flynn was prepared to act in such an unlawful way could help prove a case against him in other activities as well involving his ties to Russia during the campaign.
“If Mueller has sufficient evidence that Flynn and his son were involved in this audacious plot to kidnap the cleric, the special counsel can use that to pressure the former Trump campaign associate to flip and tell the FBI everything he knows of relevance to the Russia investigation.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Robert Kelner, Stephen Anthony and Brian Smith, attorneys for Flynn, said that so far, out of respect for the various investigations into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 US election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign, they had avoided responding to “every rumor or allegation raised in the media”.
“But today’s news cycle has brought allegations about General Flynn, ranging from kidnapping to bribery, that are so outrageous and prejudicial that we are making an exception to our usual rule: they are false,” they said in a statement.
Barry Coburn, representing Flynn’s son, said he had no comment.
The Alliance for Shared Values, a group representing Gülen supporters in the US, said: “The US justice system should be commended for not giving in to the Turkish government’s campaign against Mr Gülen, no matter how nefarious a plan the Erdogan regime could concoct nor how much money it could offer people who might entertain such plans.”
Flynn is one of the more intriguing figures at the centre of the Trump-Russia investigation. He came to prominence as an intelligence chief in Afghanistan, from where in 2010 he published an open critique of the way the war was fought. Instead of focusing exclusively on fighting the Taliban, Flynn and his co-authors argued, the US should be more sensitive to the general population.
However, by the time he appeared at Trump’s side as an early supporter, he had become an outspoken Islamophobe.
“Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL,” he tweeted in February 2016. According to some accounts, it was his forced retirement from the DIA under the Obama administration in 2014, apparently as a result of his abrasive management style, that left him with an enduring grudge against Democrats. On Hillary Clinton, Flynn led chants of “lock her up” at campaign events and the Republican national convention.
Flynn’s attempt to build a business empire appears to have got him into deeper controversy. He appeared on the Russian state channel, RT, and attended an RT-sponsored dinner in Moscow, sitting alongside Vladimir Putin.
In August, the Flynn Intel Group signed a deal with a Dutch firm, Inovo, owned by Ekim Alptekin, chairman of the Turkish-American Business Council and a close associate of Erdoğan, according to documents filed with the Department of Justice. Flynn’s firm was paid more than $530,000 to dig up information about Gülen and make a film about him, according to the documents. On election day, 8 November, Flynn published a commentary in The Hill, describing Gülen as “a shady Islamic mullah” and “radical Islamist”.
It was his Russian ties that caused his initial downfall, however. Flynn lasted only 24 days as national security adviser, being forced to resign after it emerged he misled officials over the extent and nature of his contacts with the former Russian ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak.The first time I tried the Oculus Rift it was in a small room in the middle of the show floor at E3, the annual gaming expo. It was 2012 and I was sat with John Carmack, a game programming icon and early virtual reality engineer. After being hit with some very technical chat about how this headset that looked like it had been put together in a garage was going to be one of the biggest things to happen to gaming, I spent a couple of minutes playing Doom 3 in VR.
It blew me away. I was convinced even in that short space of time that this was the future. I felt the immersion Carmack said the prototype Rift headset would deliver. But I also felt that had the world itself felt a little more realistic it would've done an even better job of fooling the senses.
Fast forward to 2016, the Rift is no longer a prototype and has been joined by our VR Headset of the Year the HTC Vive and its highly commended runner up, the PlayStation VR. I've spent a decent amount of time with all three of these high end headsets now dipping in and out of games, experiences, animated shorts and it's still mindblowing to think that because these headsets are on sale more people can experience just how special it is. It's also hard not to focus on anything that breaks the VR illusion, particularly the virtual environments that cannot be made without a lot of time, resources and money. In short, it still seemed to me that building convincing worlds was crucial to my enjoyment of VR.
That perception changed when I, along with several members of the Wareable team discovered a little PlayStation VR game by the name of Headmaster. The indie title is as basic as a game you can find on VR right now but it is the absolute king of repeat plays in the office.
You've probably got something similar tucked away in an app folder on your smartphone or bookmarked on your computer. The premise is simple; head footballs (or a soccer ball for our US friends) towards a series of targets to score points across a host of different environments. Think Flick Kick football but for your head and you get the idea.
There's certainly no jaw dropping visuals to draw you away from your challenge. It's a limited world with decent if not spellbinding graphics but that becomes insignificant as we all quickly found out. I've stayed late in the office many a times to put in game time on Headmaster. Many a lunch time has been lost to it. So, what is the root to our Headmaster addiction? There was a clear consensus why. It wasn't just down to our unified love of football. It was something that can be easily overlooked in the realms of VR: game physics.
If you can't build a beautiful, all encompassing VR world, then focus on working on the element that you can make more lifelike. That's what the folks at Frame Interactive have done and it really does pull it off. You do feel like you're heading a ball (or a ping pong ball or a rubbish bag) and your approach to making contact as it's being fired out you does matter.
Simulating the physics of heading a football in such a sophisticated way served as a reminder of how creating that realism is about more than just fooling the eyes with lifelike visuals. I am not a brain connected to a pair of eyes, I have limbs and muscles and joints. That means it's also about replicating how you interact with that world. And while it might seem like an obvious thing to think about, (and it does depend on the accuracy of controllers/ head tracking) there's only really a handful of experiences so far - VR Fun House, Job Simulator - I can think of that really achieve this.
I realise now that I was consumed by the idea that VR needed to deliver on the visual front to bring things to life. Headmaster has changed that. If you're picking up a VR headset for the first time, my advice is don't dismiss some of the more basic-looking experiences out there. You might just be surprised how well it gives you that immersive feeling.Staff at the Department of Social Protection vigorously opposed the handing over of PPS numbers – particularly of children – to Irish Water, it has emerged.
Emails released under Freedom of Information legislation show Irish Water (IW) was seeking a “data dump” from the department, including information on all children for whom child benefit was paid.
Documents also show the utility failed to engage with the department on the question of accessing the data until weeks after Irish Water started posting application forms to households in September.
These forms sought PPS numbers of householders and any children who were eligible for child benefit.
It said these were necessary in order for it to apply Government allowances for water charges and it expected the department would verify them once customers had handed them over.
Implications questioned However, staff in the department questioned the data protection implications of handing over the PPS numbers and their obligations under official secrets legislation.
Secretary general of the department, Niamh O’Donoghue, told staff the utility was to “get nothing” until it wrote to her formally, which it did not do until September 18th – several weeks after it started media advertising and sending out packs to householders.
As late as October, an internal department email following a meeting with Irish Water said the utility had given the issue “little thought, so this discussion will go on for a wee while”.
It added: “We are making progress as you will see, but DSP objective is to protect its data, its reputation and minimise its commitment while being supportive to IW as directed in the Government decision (on water charges).” Email exchanges There are concerns throughout six months’ worth of email exchanges about “very limited” contact from Irish Water, with one document expressing concern the department “may be blamed for shortfalls in IW performance”.
The department documents indicate it was “pushing back strongly” on Irish Water’s request that it verify a customer was a recipient of child benefit.
Department officials ultimately conceded it seemed “likely” the utility was entitled to get the information it was seeking, but certain information could not be provided unless it was to allow some “fishing”.
The Social Welfare & Pensions Act, signed into law in July, amended the law to add Irish Water to the list of ‘specified’ bodies allowed to ask for PPS numbers.
But the requirement for customers to hand over this information to the utility was eventually dropped when Minister for the Environment Alan Kelly announced a revised package of measures on water charges in November.
Reaction expected Department official Tony Kieran of the child benefit (CB) section in Letterkenny told colleagues in emails he expected a major public reaction and had made it clear to Irish Water in a meeting in June his section would “not be dealing with phone or other queries on this”.
“I have serious reservations about providing a wide-ranging data dump as I believe we (DSP and CB) will be dealing with a lot of fallout and get into arguments that have nothing to do with our schemes. This is without even considering the data protection implications of such an approach.”
By July, Mr Kieran was expressing concern that he was hearing radio ads from Irish Water stating correspondence would issue to the public shortly and that, as yet, it had not been back in touch with the department or drafted up any rules to apply to crediting water allowances.
X REF TO PAGE 2Fresco is an easy to use painting app that features filters, layers and more! Designed for novices and experienced artists, Fresco has everything you need to create digital artwork on your phone or tablet.
"Fresco Pro brings a real drawing experience to Android with a ton of brushes, filters, and support for layers..." - tested.com review (http://goo.gl/E3GkQ)
Featured on "Best New Android Apps" list at androidpolice.com (http://goo.gl/rsruz)
Fresco Pro has the following exclusive features compared to Fresco Lite:
- ad free (versus ad supported).
- 4 layers, 21 filters and 12 brushes (versus 2 layers, 2 filters and 3 brushes).
- export your images to Adobe® Photoshop® format (.PSD) with layers intact.
- brush spacing setting.
★ Feature List ★
LAYERS
- Duplicate, merge, hide/show, reorder, scale, rotate, reposition and mirror layers.
- Alter layer opacity.
FILTERS
- Create interesting effects with filters like blur, sharpen, emboss, grain/noise, scatter, pixelate and vignette.
- Adjust image colors with filters like brightness, saturation, exposure, colorize, threshold and posterize.
INTUITIVE INTERFACE
- Brush and eraser tools with configurable texture, size and opacity.
- Color palette, HSV color picker and eye dropper tools.
- Fast, responsive and easy to use.
- Multi-touch zooming and panning.
- Reverse mistakes with the robust undo system.
EXTRA FEATURES
- Export to Adobe® Photoshop® format (.PSD) with layers intact.
- Import and position photos on the canvas.
- Autosave functionality that keeps your work safe.
- Share images with other apps to upload to Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox and more.
Share your Fresco creations with other users:
flickr.com/groups/fresco
facebook.com/FrescoApp
Requires multi-touch for zooming and panning.
Email android@seanw.org with any problems. It's very difficult to fix issues without knowing the details. Thanks!
Permissions required:
- SD Card: Used to save images to your SD card
- Internet and Access Network State: Used to display ads in the Lite version and to send optional crash reports (Android has built-in crash reporting but it's not available on earlier versions).
Acknowledgements: Thank you to Rick Chandler (studiochandler.com) for the use of his digital paintings (which were created using Fresco) seen in the screenshots on this page.The fiery final presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump drew 71.6 million viewers, the third-highest total ever for a presidential debate, according to data from Nielsen released on Thursday.
The debate did not approach the record-setting first debate on Sept. 26, which had 84 million viewers, but it did surpass the second debate audience of 66.5 million.
By this point, record ratings have become a familiar story line for this year’s election cycle. Wednesday night closed out a 14-month debate season that featured two dozen debates, many of which set records, including:
■ The most-viewed debate ever (the first presidential debate).
■ The highest-rated primary debate and the highest-rated non-sports cable event ever (the first Republican debate, which drew 24 million viewers in August 2015).
■ The highest-rated Democratic debate ever (the first Democratic debate in October 2015 had 15.8 million viewers).08-15-2017 (Photo: 17th Party Congress, Moscow, January 1934) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules Twitter: @BatchelorShow
Russia and memory of Stalin's Great Terror. Stephen F. Cohen @NYU @Princeton PART 1 of 2.
The Great Purge or the Great Terror (Russian: Большо́й терро́р) was a campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union which occurred from 1936 to 1938.[1] It involved a large-scale purge of the Communist Party and government officials, repression of peasants and the Red Army leadership, widespread police surveillance, suspicion of "saboteurs", "counter-revolutionaries", imprisonment, and arbitrary executions.[2] Mobile gas vans were invented to execute people without trial.[3][4][5] In Russian historiography, the period of the most intense purge, 1937–1938, is called Yezhovshchina (Russian: Ежовщина; literally, "Yezhov phenomenon",[note 1] commonly translated as "times of Yezhov" or "doings of Yezhov"), after Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the Soviet secret police, NKVD. It has been estimated that 600,000 people died at the hands of the Soviet government during the Purge.[6][7][8][9]
In the Western world, Robert Conquest's 1968 book The Great Terror popularized that phrase. Conquest's title was in turn an allusion to the period called the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution (French: la Terreur, and, from June to July 1794, la Grande Terreur, the Great Terror).[10]..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_PurgeBrown names immigrant-rights advocate as state attorney general
Rep. Xavier Becerra has been picked by Gov. Jerry Brown to be California's next attorney general. Rep. Xavier Becerra has been picked by Gov. Jerry Brown to be California's next attorney general. Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta, Associated Press Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta, Associated Press Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close Brown names immigrant-rights advocate as state attorney general 1 / 5 Back to Gallery
WASHINGTON — In tapping Rep. Xavier Becerra, a veteran Los Angeles lawmaker and son of Mexican immigrants, to become California’s next attorney general, Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday placed a stalwart defender of immigrant rights at the forefront of anticipated legal battles between California and the incoming Trump administration.
Becerra, 58, the governor’s surprise pick to replace outgoing Attorney General Kamala Harris, who was elected last month to the U.S. Senate, on Tuesday had announced his intention to seek the top Democratic spot on the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees tax and health care law and the nation’s huge entitlement programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, all targets for overhaul by the new administration and Republican-led Congress.
If confirmed as expected by the state Assembly and Senate, Becerra would become the state’s first Latino attorney general, putting him in position to defend California’s far-reaching environmental, health and immigration laws against expected attacks at the federal level.
In a telephone interview, Becerra said “without a doubt” he expects to defend the so-called Dreamers, young immigrants brought to the United States as children by their parents without papers, and given relief from deportation under the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a program that is considered vulnerable under the Trump administration.
Brown’s choice for the elected seat was unexpected. Sacramento insiders had speculated that the governor would appoint a placeholder — perhaps a career member of the attorney general’s staff — to fill out the two remaining years of Harris’ term. Becerra himself said the appointment came as a surprise, following recent phone conversations with Brown.
But his selection drew wide accolades from California Democrats.
State Senate President pro tem Kevin DeLeón, D-Los Angeles, called Becerra’s appointment “a perfect matching of man and moment, given that California’s prosperity and people are currently under threat by a hostile Trump administration.”
California Republicans were less kind. San Francisco attorney Harmeet Dhillon, a Republican National Committee member, called Becerra a poor choice because he lacks recent courtroom experience.
“He hasn’t practiced law for 24 years and that strikes me as not the best choice for attorney general for California,” she said.
Becerra’s law license has been inactive since 1991, according to the California State Bar, but this is not expected to hinder his confirmation because of court rulings that allowed Brown to serve as attorney general from 2007 to 2011, |
most recent year for which information is available, though the increase is partly due to better reporting.
Dozens of federal agents and local police interviewed by the AP said they have identified cartel members or operatives using wiretapped conversations, informants or confessions. Hundreds of court documents reviewed by the AP appear to support those statements.
"This is the first time we've been seeing it -- cartels who have their operatives actually sent here," said Richard Pearson, a lieutenant with the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department, which arrested four alleged operatives of the Zetas cartel in November in the suburb of Okolona.
People who live on the tree-lined street where authorities seized more than 2,400 pounds of marijuana and more than $1 million in cash were shocked to learn their low-key neighbors were accused of working for one of Mexico's most violent drug syndicates, Pearson said.
One of the best documented cases is Jose Gonzalez-Zavala, who was dispatched to the U.S. by the La Familia cartel, according to court filings.
In 2008, the former taxi driver and father of five moved into a spacious home at 1416 Brookfield Drive in a middle-class neighborhood of Joliet, southwest of Chicago. From there, court papers indicate, he oversaw wholesale shipments of cocaine in Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana.
Wiretap transcripts reveal he called an unidentified cartel boss in Mexico almost every day, displaying the deference any midlevel executive might show to someone higher up the corporate ladder. Once he stammered as he explained that one customer would not pay a debt until after a trip.
"No," snaps the boss. "What we need is for him to pay."
The same cartel assigned Jorge Guadalupe Ayala-German to guard a Chicago-area stash house for $300 a week, plus a promised $35,000 lump-sum payment once he returned to Mexico after a year or two, according to court documents.
Ayala-German brought his wife and child to help give the house the appearance of an ordinary family residence. But he was arrested before he could return home and pleaded guilty to multiple trafficking charges. He will be sentenced later this year.
Socorro Hernandez-Rodriguez was convicted in 2011 of heading a massive drug operation in suburban Atlanta's Gwinnett County. The chief prosecutor said he and his associates were high-ranking figures in the La Familia cartel -- an allegation defense lawyers denied.
And at the end of February outside Columbus, Ohio, authorities arrested 34-year-old Isaac Eli Perez Neri, who allegedly told investigators he was a debt collector for the Sinaloa cartel.
An Atlanta attorney who has represented reputed cartel members says authorities sometimes overstate the threat such men pose.
"Often, you have a kid whose first time leaving Mexico is sleeping on a mattress at a stash house playing Game Boy, eating Burger King, just checking drugs or money in and out," said Bruce Harvey. "Then he's arrested and gets a gargantuan sentence. It's sad."
Because cartels accumulate houses full of cash, they run the constant risk associates will skim off the top. That points to the main reason cartels prefer their own people: Trust is hard to come by in their cutthroat world. There's also a fear factor. Cartels can exert more control on their operatives than on middlemen, often by threatening to torture or kill loved ones back home.
Danny Porter, chief prosecutor in Gwinnett County, Ga., said he has tried to entice dozens of suspected cartel members to cooperate with American authorities. Nearly all declined. Some laughed in his face.
"They say, `We are more scared of them (the cartels) than we are of you. We talk and they'll boil our family in acid,"' Porter said. "Their families are essentially hostages."
Citing the safety of his own family, Gonzalez-Zavala declined to cooperate with authorities in exchange for years being shaved off his 40-year sentence.
In other cases, cartel brass send their own family members to the U.S.
"They're sometimes married or related to people in the cartels," Porter said. "They don't hire casual labor." So meticulous have cartels become that some even have operatives fill out job applications before being dispatched to the U.S., Riley added.
In Mexico, the cartels are known for a staggering number of killings -- more than 50,000, according to one tally. Beheadings are sometimes a signature.
So far, cartels don't appear to be directly responsible for large numbers of slayings in the United States, though the Texas Department of Public Safety reported 22 killings and five kidnappings in Texas at the hands of Mexican cartels from 2010 through mid- 2011.
Still, police worry that increased cartel activity could fuel heightened violence.
In Chicago, the police commander who oversees narcotics investigations, James O'Grady, said street-gang disputes over turf account for most of the city's uptick in murders last year, when slayings topped 500 for the first time since 2008. Although the cartels aren't dictating the territorial wars, they are the source of drugs.
Riley's assessment is stark: He argues that the cartels should be seen as an underlying cause of Chicago's disturbingly high murder rate.
"They are the puppeteers," he said. "Maybe the shooter didn't know and maybe the victim didn't know that. But if you follow it down the line, the cartels are ultimately responsible."It's time for the Popehat Signal — the call for pro bono assistance for a blogger threatened with frivolous and censorious litigation. This time the victim in need of help is Stephanie Yoder of www.twenty-somethingtravel.com. She needs your help to face a thoroughly bogus and repugnant threat by multi-level marketing scheme "WorldVentures."
WorldVentures: The Would-Be Censor
WorldVentures describes itself as "the world’s largest direct seller of curated group travel, with more than 120,000 Independent Representatives in over 24 countries and we are still growing." WorldVentures associates recruit other WorldVentures associates, and so on and so on, to sell allegedly well-priced vacations. It costs money — up front and per month — to become a WorldVentures salesperson, but if you recruit enough people, your fees are waived. Of course, if you want to go to one of the WorldVentures training events, or get extra business development materials, those cost more. If you go, you will be treated to slick, well-produced, somewhat creepy and cultish rah-rah speeches about how swell WorldVentures is and how it will let you find success.
But other people describe WorldVentures differently. Some press has been unflattering. Bloggers and commentators openly call it a scam or a scheme. The Better Business Bureau gives it a B-.
Complaints are regarding misrepresentation of the promised savings on travel, slow or non delivery of promised refunds and dissatisfaction with customer service. Specifically, customers complain that paying the company fee and following the company business model does not provide promised savings as stated by company representatives. The company resolves complaints by offering refunds or refering to the agreement for explanation. However, customers complain that the refund was delayed or not received. Additionally, customers indicate that they have difficulty contacting the company.
Moreover World Ventures' own documents show that it's a ridiculously bad deal for the vast majority of their "sales associates." Their 2009 disclosures showed that 72.3% of their associates did not earn a commission, about 7.5% earned a mean of about $550, and less than one percent earned more. The median for all associates was a paltry $100. And that doesn't even take into account the associates' expenses. By 2012 the numbers were worse: more than 80% didn't earn commissions and the median income for commission-earners was $40.
On the other hand, there are plenty of blogs out there arguing that WorldVentures is not a scam. If you write a blog post questioning WorldVentures, you will very likely draw a crowd of very enthusiastic, very intense, somewhat off-putting WorldVenture supporters.
That's what happened to Stephanie Yoder.
Stephanie at Twenty-Something Travel: The Target Of Censorship
Stephanie Yoder writes at Twenty-Something Travel, a travel blog. Back in July 2013, after an unpleasant encounter with a WorldVentures marketeer, Stephanie wrote a post about the company entitled "WorldVentures: This Is NOT The Way To Travel The World." Stephanie described her experience with the marketeer, explained her research into WorldVentures, and offered her opinion about this and other multi-level marketing schemes. She did so with links and references to a story in the New York Observer, WorldVenture's own financial disclosure documents, and links to other commentary on the internet.
Two things happened to Stephanie as a result.
First, she got a flood of 248 comments both criticizing and angrily defending WorldVentures (and MLMs in general.)
Second, last week she got a legal threat from Texas attorney Shawn E. Tuma of Britton Tuma. I've uploaded the threat letter here. I hate to overuse the word "bumptious," but nothing else suits. Blustery? Blowhardish? Meh. Bumptious is le mote juste.
Mr. Tuma asserts that Stephanie has published "in graphical form, false, misleading, defamatory and disparaging statements about WorldVentures." Tellingly, Mr. Tuma does not specify a single, solitary false statement. Say the mantra with me: vagueness in legal threats is the hallmark of meritless thuggery.
Mr. Tuma asserts that the post is "misappropriating, misusing, and disparaging [sic] WorldVenture's intellectual property in violation of state and federal law." Once again, Mr. Tuma utterly fails to specify what property he means or how it is being infringed upon.
Finally Mr. Tuma asserts that Stephanie Yoder is "engaging in unfair competition and deceptive trade practices," because a travel blog is totally in market competition with a multilevel marketing scheme. Lawyer, please.
Mr. Tuma finishes with flourishes typical of meritless and malicious threat letters: a scary demand that Stephanie preserve documents, a statement that WorldVentures is not waiving any rights, and a statement that "this communication is without prejudice to any facts," which is totally true but not in the way I think he means it. Mr. Tuma's demand is also typical: one meeelyeeeon dollars. No wait. He demands that Stephanie not only take down her post, but "immediately cease and desist from publishing any further statements or information about WorldVentures in any form."
Ask yourself: why would a legitimate business demand that a post about it be taken down, but not be able to articulate what is wrong with the post? Why would a legitimate business see fit to demand that a blogger stop mentioning them at all? Should you trust such a company?
Tuma's and WorldVenture's claims are transparently bogus. First, Stephanie's post is an excellent example of a protected opinion based on disclosed facts. Guess what: you're allowed to say that you think WorldVentures is a scam and a shitty deal based on 72% of their associates not making money. Tuma's letter does not specify any specific false statements of fact — as any competent lawyer with a genuine claim would — because there aren't any. Second, WorldVenture's ambiguous IP claims are bogus. To the extent that Stephanie uses WorldVenture's name, it's classic nominative fair use. To the extent Stephanie uses a few pictures from WorldVenture's site to illustrate her point, it's classic fair use, just like it was when someone used a video to question the veracity of Ergun Caner or when a business made shirts critical of DHS and NSA.
But there's a difference between rights and realities. We have a system that too often allows bullying plaintiffs to censor speakers using the threat of meritless but ruinously expensive litigation.
There are three ways to deal with that.
One is for lawyers to step up to offer pro bono assistance in defense of free speech, as a dream team recently did in Texas in response to another Popehat Signal.
The second way is for those lawyers to fight for sanctions and attorney fees when censorious thugs like these file harassment suits — as pro bono lawyers just did in Texas. In addition, lawyers must make aggressive use of anti-SLAPP statutes, as they recently did in another recent Popehat Signal case. Texas, where WorldVentures is apparently based and from whence Mr. Tuma hurls his excremental threat, has a very strong anti-SLAPP statute.
You can all help with the third way. It's the Streisand Effect. When a company makes a frivolous, thuggish, vague threat like this, as many people as possible in as many places as possible should hear about it and read about what upset the company. Please do your part.
Lawyers, please consider helping Stephanie. Readers, please consider letting more people know about WorldVenture's threats. As always, potential pro bono attorneys or other helpers, please email me to connect with the victim. As always, you have my gratitude for standing up for free speech.
Last 5 posts by Ken WhiteThe Structure Sensor gives mobile devices the ability to capture and understand the world in three dimensions.
With the Structure Sensor attached to your mobile device, you can walk around the world and instantly capture it in a digital form. This means you can capture 3D maps of indoor spaces and have every measurement in your pocket. You can instantly capture 3D models of objects and people for import into CAD and for 3D printing. You can play mind blowing augmented reality games where the real world is your game world.
If you’re a developer, Structure gives you the ability to build mobile applications that interact with the three dimensional geometry of the real world for the very first time. You can even launch your app on the App Store!
The Structure Sensor has been designed from the ground up to be mobile. We put a lot of thought into making the Structure Sensor work perfectly with the iPad and other mobile devices. The goal was to make a device that enabled incredible 3D sensing applications, was easy to use, had great battery life, was compact, and looked like beautiful, precision hardware.
Range
The Structure Sensor has a mobile-optimized range that begins at 40 centimeters and stretches to over 3.5 meters. This means it can easily capture anything from a teddy bear to an entire room.
Battery-powered
The Structure Sensor has its own onboard power supply that provides up to 4 hours of active use, and 1000+ hours of standby. That means you don’t have to limit where you go or what you do because of a cord tethering you to one place – and it also won’t drain the battery in your iPad.
Anodized aluminum chassis
The Structure Sensor chassis is machined out of a single piece of high-grade aluminum that serves as both a beautiful exterior and as a thermal core that keeps the precision optics inside at an optimal temperature. It’s also anodized for a high-end finish. At its top, the Structure Sensor has a chemically hardened glass surface that optimizes the depth image quality, while also protecting the infrared emitter and camera inside.
Dual infrared LEDs
Unlike the IR structured light projector, the IR LEDs emit a uniform light that allows you to capture the world in infrared.
What does this mean in plain terms? With Structure Sensor, your iPad has night vision.
iPad camera on left. On the right, Structure IR vision + IR LEDs = night vision!
And you'll also notice that in infrared, the world looks a little different than you expect.
Some materials reflect infrared light in unexpected ways. Look at the brown chair!
You'll have full control over the IR LEDs from the SDK. Maybe you want to have two Structure Sensors invisibly signal each other. Or perhaps you want to create an augmented reality haunted house app where infrared ghosts scare the beejezus out of people as they walk around in pitch darkness. It’s up to you!
Is my iPad supported?
The Structure Sensor was designed to work with the Apple Lightning connector.
As a backer, you will get to choose which model of iPad you would like a bracket for when we ship your Structure Sensor. If you get a new iPad, you can update your selection at any time (until a few weeks before shipment). Don’t worry, you can decide later!
The iPad (4th generation) is officially supported, and will have a corresponding bracket for Structure that quickly and securely connects it with a precision aluminum latch.
We have just announced support for the new Apple iPad Air and Apple iPad mini with Retina display that were launched on October 22nd, 2013.
While not officially supported, the Structure Sensor can stream data to any iOS device that uses the Lightning connector – such as iPad mini, iPhone 5, iPhone 5c, iPhone 5s, etc. Any of these devices can be used to develop applications for the Structure Sensor.
Attach your bracket to your Structure Sensor with 4 screws (included).
Included demo applications.
Note: Demo apps are iOS only.
Our team has been hard at work creating fun, functional demo applications for iOS that will let you experience the Structure Sensor’s capabilities right out of the box.
1. Room Capture: Easily capture a 3D model of a room by simply spinning around with your Structure Sensor and iPad. Then, tap any two points to retrieve distances.
2. Fetch: A virtual pet to play fetch with in the physical world around you.
3. Ball Physics: An augmented reality demo where virtual balls interact with the dense geometry of the world.
4. Object Scanner: Capture models of objects and export them to CAD software or for 3D printing. You can also upload models directly to Shapeways.com for 3D printing.
Scanned using the Object Scanner demo app v0.4 (October 4th)
Click here to see the original objects.
Here's an interview we did with TechCrunch that shows our Object Scanner, Room Capture, and Fetch demos:
Here we have a demo of an augmented reality pet playing fetch - note how virtual elements are occluded by real world elements!
In this augmented reality + physics demo, notice how the balls bounce off each other AND the geometry of the bench.
All of these demos are built on top of the tracking and mapping features in the SDK. If you're a developer, you'll get access to the source code for these demos so you can start hacking right away.
But these demos are really just the beginning. As backers, you’ll get to play with and give us feedback on a steady stream of improvements to our core algorithms, new SDK features, and new demo applications.
Develop with depth.
We know we aren't the only ones who have thought about developing mobile apps using a 3D sensor. We were inspired by seeing the innovative apps and hacks the community has done using other 3D sensors.
iOS Developers
Tap into a 3D sensor on an iOS device for the first time ever. With the Structure SDK, just write your app in Xcode and hit deploy. You can even launch your app on the App Store to quickly reach a wide audience for your app.
Depth image from Structure registered with the RGB image from the iPad.
Hackers & Hobbyists
The Structure Sensor has hackability in its DNA. Four screw holes on the bottom let you mount to almost anything - and we'll provide open CAD models for creating custom brackets. With the USB Hacker Cable, you can connect to almost any platform that supports USB.
We'll also provide open source drivers for multiple platforms including Windows, Android, OS X, and Linux.
How does the Structure Sensor work with Android?
We’re excited that you’re interested in developing on the Android platform! The Structure Sensor will work with many Android devices, but at first, it’s geared toward intrepid developers who want to be among the first to build 3D sensing applications on Android.
There are three important things you need to keep in mind when using Structure with Android:
We are not making attachment brackets for Android devices (there are too many different models!). However, we are providing an open 3D CAD model of a starter bracket that you can customize to your device and then 3D print (CAD experience required).
At this time, we don’t plan to offer the demos or other fully featured apps for Android devices. However, we will provide open source drivers for Android to make it easy for Android developers to create their own apps.
Your Android device must have support for USB Host Mode accessories. For many of our backers, this will be the first USB accessory they’ve used with their devices. So, we’ve created a page at http://structure.io/android where you can find more information on USB Host Mode, and about using the Structure Sensor on Android. Please check it out.
The details.
Why Kickstarter?
Our goal on Kickstarter is to get sensors into the hands of early adopters and developers like you as soon as possible. We want you to be involved, whether to provide feedback on the experience, or to develop new apps that will blow the platform open to wider audiences.
And we’ll be hard at work too, delivering updates and new functionality on a regular basis to add more performance and capabilities to your Structure Sensor.
High level overview of our production plan.
What does the T-shirt look like?
This limited, Kickstarter-only edition T-shirt shows an exploded view of the Structure Sensor.
The Occipital team.
The Structure Sensor is the result of over 1.5 years of intense dedication by our team. Occipital is a 13-person startup based in Boulder, CO and San Francisco, CA. We were one of the first ever TechStars companies (Boulder, 2008), and previously launched the successful RedLaser and 360 Panorama mobile applications.
In November 2011, we conceived of the idea for the Structure Sensor after playing with a Microsoft Kinect 3D sensor plugged into a high-end desktop CPU. We mapped a small indoor environment using the sensor and some prototype software. After tripping over the Kinect’s cord a few times, we realized that needing a high-end desktop CPU meant that this amazing technology was never going to make its way to everyday life. So we set out to create the Structure Sensor, and with it, a new chapter for mobile computer vision.
We hope you are as excited about the Structure Sensor as we are, and we look forward to having you join us as we introduce the first 3D sensor for mobile devices to the world.
A special thank you.
We'd like to thank everyone who took time out of their busy schedules to help support our Kickstarter effort:
The Orbotix Team, creators of Sphero.
, creators of Sphero. The Nekuda team.
Daniel Suarez, Author of Daemon, Freedom™, and Kill Decision.
, Author of Daemon, Freedom™, and Kill Decision. John Underkoffler, Founder of Oblong.
, Founder of Oblong. Aviad Maizels, Founder of PrimeSense.
, Founder of PrimeSense. Dr. Gary Bradski, Creator of OpenCV, and Occipital board member.
, Creator of OpenCV, and Occipital board member. Gadi Amit and the NewDeal Design team.
and the NewDeal Design team. Tim O'Reilly, Founder & CEO, O’Reilly Media.
, Founder & CEO, O’Reilly Media. Josh Levine, VP of Engineering, Shapeways.com.
, VP of Engineering, Shapeways.com. Victor Eruhimov, Co-Founder & CEO, Itseez.
, Co-Founder & CEO, Itseez. Dr. Gerard Medioni, Professor of Computer Vision at USC
Our stretch goal.One of the few surviving episodes of "Queen for a Day", from 1960. One of the strangest shows ever to air on TV.
Please note that most shows of the 60's were MUCH BETTER than this.
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comment Reviews
Reviewer: hennygirl - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - April 11, 2017
Subject: Rights I love this show! Do you know who obtains to the rights of this episode? Or if it public domain? Any info to steer me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated! Thank you! - April 11, 2017Rights
Reviewer: lOvejOyhOpe - favorite favorite favorite favorite - March 7, 2017
Subject: Auntie Bug That was my favorite Aunt. She was a kind and caring soul. She raised my 2nd step dad Max Snyder.
My sister and I were supposed to watch but I forgot and only caught the last few minutes.
I've read a lot of the reviews and have to say: It was an 'Appreciation' Day that these women celebrated. The show wasn't focused on neediness but on celebrating a life. - March 7, 2017Auntie Bug
Reviewer: alittlebit - favorite favorite favorite favorite - November 18, 2016
Subject: Queen for a Day!.. a precusor to many of the hard luck shows today I remember my Mom tuning in everyday. I was really small, but one episode I remember a Lady was given a Washer and Dryer. Wow, getting a brand new Washer and Dryer set, lol, which a lot of People didn't have then. It was a wildly popular show. - November 18, 2016Queen for a Day!.. a precusor to many of the hard luck shows today
Reviewer: lilysim - - August 20, 2015
Subject: Queen For A Day Background Queen For a Day was a game show that became very popular for that time period. It was a part of the craze and obsession of quiz/game shows. This episode has host, Jack Bailey, interview four different women about how horrible their lives are and why they deserved to win the prizes. It is interjected with many advertising breaks during which the sponsors of the show attempted to sell their products to the audience. The commercial breaks and fashion commentary were interjected in between each story. At the end of the episode, the audience dictated who had the saddest story and deserved the items that were being hawked by the sponsors. The decision was made through audience applause and the person who received the loudest applause on the “applause meter” would win all of the prizes and get to wear the red cape and the beautiful glittery tiara. The other contestants received consolation prizes for participating at all. The end of the show would be an unveiling of all of the items that the queen won accompanied by beautiful women and explained by the host.
This was originally a radio show on Mutual Radio Network hosted by Ken Murray and later Jack Bailey when it first began in New York. After April 30, 1945, the show was moved to the television screen and Hollywood. It was created and produced by John Masterson and his production company. Jack Bailey was retained as host for the screen and it aired on NBC originally from 1954-1960 and then it began airing on ABC from 1960-1964.
The show had many sponsors for each of the different episodes and the show’s length increased from 30 minutes to 45 minutes, because each minute of advertising time cost $4,000.
Its competitors included It Could Be You, Strike it Rich, and On Your Way, but it was unique in the sense that it dispensed with the quiz show’s normal “cleverness” requirement. Other quiz shows involved components of intelligence or trivia, but the only thing that this show required was women contestants and an audience comprised of mostly women and those that had the saddest or most tragic situation would be the one who “deserved” the prize and this was dictated by sympathetic female audience members. The sponsors for this particular episode included Pan-American Bureau, Ex-Lax, Starlac, Hartz Mountain, Westinghouse, Hamilton Beach, Hoover, Corday, Johnson and Johnson, Carl florist, Everson Jennings, Brown Derby, Revere, and Spigel catalogue. The original airdate and time for this specific episode is unknown.
(LS/110) - August 20, 2015Queen For A Day Background
Reviewer: ShariD57 - favorite favorite - April 5, 2015
Subject: Bad bad bad ~ But bad shows usually attract viewers.......if for no other reason than "the train wreck factor."
Yes, being the worst, in terms of sad stories to tell, made you the "winner" here, but that was the whole point of the show. You had to write in and tell your tale of woe and what would make you happier or more productive before getting selected to be there. They didn't just pull people in off the street and take a chance they would have a sad story to tell. So, having a "sample" of the Grand Prize wasn't so hard ~ they said when they showed that standard issue hospital type wheel chair that it was a sample from the company. Likely unsuitable for someone with cerebral palsy, even back then. The appropriate type would be furnished, as well as the exercise bIke she asked for from the company they mentioned.
As for picking the winner, they used an applause meter, which they showed at the bottom of the screen to judge audience sympathy for the woman with the most compelling tale to tell. Hard to prejudge the winner before that had been done. As for what the other women wanted, a vacation, and she didn't care where ~ they already had a vacation as part of the Grand Prize, so that was a done deal. Diaper service for triplets? Easy as pie ~ announce a year's worth of diaper service, and bring out a bunch of bags stuffed with anything to represent them. Add the rest of the Grand Prizes. The lady who wanted bunk beds or whatever for her houseguests? Also easy ~ a gift certificate from a furniture store ~ add in the rest of the Grand Prizes which included kitchen items and cookware, also helpful. It's not so hard if you use a little imagination
And the consolation prizes were all brought out and talked about ~ sponsorship demanded it of course ~ before the winner was announced. Since every prize was provided, donated or paid for by the company making it, they had to get their product placements to encourage ALL those devoted viewers to buy them when they went out shopping, or had a need for such items, or places to go.
Seems like everything previously mentioned as a shortcoming was actually already covered ~ you just had to pay attention to the program.
Yes, the show host was a tool ~ but it's likely he was part of the plot to get people to feel even more sorry for those contestants, for having to deal with him first before being able to win their prizes! It's also possible it was the only job he could get, and he hated it so much a few slugs of his preferred poison before going on was the only way he could get through the day. The announcer job for The Price Is Right was already taken, and he knew this show was never going to last 40 some years more, and neither was he.
I remember watching this tripe when I was not yet in school, which I started in the fall of 1963. I remember as a little girl being entranced with the idea of being picked to be a Queen, and getting to wear that pretty crown, but just didn't quite "get" the rest of the thing. Just crowns and a truckload of prizes. I don't think I quite understood how desperate you had to be to tell the whole world your troubles on nationwide TV and beg for relief.
I know this idiot laughed like a chimp at some of the things that were said, but I was just waiting for the crowning bit and the prizes to be awarded, which seemed to have no end. Now, watching it as a grown woman, and as old, or older than the contestants were, what a mess it was. But was it really any worse than the soap operas that sucked up the afternoons of every housewife in the country while she did her ironing, or mending, or bean-snapping for dinner? This was just another version of a soap opera with commercials for all sorts of household goods and personal care products, just the main characters stayed the same and there were different "Guest Stars" every episode. - April 5, 2015Bad bad bad ~ But bad shows usually attract viewers....
Reviewer: solongago - favorite favorite favorite - June 30, 2013
Subject: Winner was apparently known beforehand Interesting that the first of the prizes was the wheelchair. I doubt that they had specifically selected gifts behind the curtain for the other three, also, in case they won. It was fairly obvious from the beginning of the episode who was the most pathetic (other than the host), and was going to win, but that wheelchair sitting there ready to roll makes it all the more obvious that there was never intended to be a competition. - June 30, 2013Winner was apparently known beforehand
Reviewer: ultimatebozo - favorite favorite favorite - February 7, 2013
Subject: Brilliant by today's standards This show screams for a revival, with someone like Maury Povich, or Jerry Springer as the host. This is more compelling, and less condescending than "American Idol" ever could be... - February 7, 2013Brilliant by today's standards
Reviewer: pauls son - favorite favorite - February 7, 2013
Subject: QFAD I barely remember this being watched by my aunt & even as a child I knew it was bad. But---watching it now I see how truly atrocious it was! Yuck! This did bring back one short memory of an episode from way-back. A lady was sobbing about an ill husband, a home fire, & being robbed on New Years Day. That jackass host burst out laughing & yelled, "Happy New Year!!" After seeing this episode I realize he must've been just as clueless and unfeeling in EVERY episode. The show is campy but what crap! - February 7, 2013QFAD
Reviewer: pamalafizer - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - December 12, 2012
Subject: **THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES** **WATCHING TV WITH MY GRANDMOTHER WAS ALWAYS A HIGHLIGHT IN MY YOUNG LIFE**
**SHE WAS**HIP**ON ALL THE SHOWS**
**QUEEN FOR A DAY WAS MY FAV SHOW AND I WAS ALREADY A**JR. QUEEN IN MEMPHIS IN 1960 I WAS 5 YEARS OLD**
**MUCH LOVE** - December 12, 2012**THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES**
Reviewer: hijklmno - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - March 19, 2012
Subject: It was a great show When I was a child, young adult. The lady across the street won Queen For A Day. She was a delightful woman. Their family had a special needs child. She was a grammer school teacher, her husband a postman. It was really a blessing that they won. - March 19, 2012It was a great show
Reviewer: classicscats - favorite favorite favorite favorite - May 29, 2011
Subject: More please!! :) So bad it's good. I loved this show. Yes they win by having the saddest story, but as someone else said, people love Extreme Home Makeover and that IMO is just as campy...a 21st century equivalent.
Please DO add more eps, this is a campy treasure among game shows! - May 29, 2011More please!! :)
Reviewer: Dr. I. N. Stein - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - February 8, 2011
Subject: OMG I remember this show from my childhood. God I'm old. - February 8, 2011OMG
Reviewer: amywah - favorite favorite favorite favorite - May 27, 2010
Subject: Wow Not sure I have ever seen someone look so sad on a game show. Even after winning. I did enjoy the fashion show. - May 27, 2010Wow
Reviewer: dystonia_gene - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - January 24, 2010
Subject: Yeah, Stop Hating! What's so wrong about this. Do you really see much difference between this show and Extreme Home Makeover? Some of you cry every week watching that.
Well... maybe it was the suspiciously tipsy host (don't think it was essential tremors), the random 5yr/old model, or the bob-cut barbie doll display girls.... eh, I don't know. I'm glad the kid got his wc. - January 24, 2010Yeah, Stop Hating!
Reviewer: Chez_When - favorite favorite - December 23, 2009
Subject: Retro fashions, cars, funny commercials. I used to spend the day at the grandmother's when I was a kid. This was one of her must-watch TV shows. What I liked about this show were the prizes and Jean Cagney's fashion commentary. James Cagney's younger sister gave the movies the boot in the fifties, got married, then resurfaced in this little daytime TV stint. If you like looking at vintage fashions or retro appliances and furnishings,and very weird commercials then this is worth a download. You can also catch Jean Cagney in 2 movies here at archive.org. She steals the show in Quicksand with Mickey Rooney, and The Time Of Your Life with brother James. A class act even in this strange TV show. - December 23, 2009Retro fashions, cars, funny commercials.
Reviewer: TheDevilYouKnow - favorite favorite - December 12, 2009
Subject: Geez... It's somewhat interesting (or sad...depending on how you look at it) that even back during the dawn of television, producers were trying to find ways to exploit people's misfortune for the sake of entertainment. Truth be told, I find the commercials from this more interesting than the show. In fact, the show itself just bummed me out.
The host also seems a bit condescending and barely even interested enough to listen. He asked some of the women questions to things that they clearly pointed out. - December 12, 2009Geez...
Reviewer: oldbob51 - favorite - November 9, 2009
Subject: Crap My mother watched this garbage for years, so of course I had to watch it, too! The most pathetic story wins, but what do the runners-up get? Probably a quick hustle out the door! The saddest part is that this dreck dates back to the radio days! - November 9, 2009Crap
Reviewer: grcfl1ofaknd - favorite favorite - June 19, 2009
Subject: I know it's bad but..............it is a tremendous example of what passed for entertainment for the ladies in the early 60's. A museum piece, a rarity, please download more, if for no other reason than for its historic content. - June 19, 2009I know it's |
.[111]
The knowledge revolution [ edit ]
The power of expert systems came from the expert knowledge they contained. They were part of a new direction in AI research that had been gaining ground throughout the 70s. "AI researchers were beginning to suspect—reluctantly, for it violated the scientific canon of parsimony—that intelligence might very well be based on the ability to use large amounts of diverse knowledge in different ways,"[112] writes Pamela McCorduck. "[T]he great lesson from the 1970s was that intelligent behavior depended very much on dealing with knowledge, sometimes quite detailed knowledge, of a domain where a given task lay".[113] Knowledge based systems and knowledge engineering became a major focus of AI research in the 1980s.[114]
The 1980s also saw the birth of Cyc, the first attempt to attack the commonsense knowledge problem directly, by creating a massive database that would contain all the mundane facts that the average person knows. Douglas Lenat, who started and led the project, argued that there is no shortcut ― the only way for machines to know the meaning of human concepts is to teach them, one concept at a time, by hand. The project was not expected to be completed for many decades.[115]
Chess playing programs HiTech and Deep Thought defeated chess masters in 1989. Both were developed by Carnegie Mellon University; Deep Thought development paved the way for Deep Blue.[116]
The money returns: the Fifth Generation project [ edit ]
In 1981, the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry set aside $850 million for the Fifth generation computer project. Their objectives were to write programs and build machines that could carry on conversations, translate languages, interpret pictures, and reason like human beings.[117] Much to the chagrin of scruffies, they chose Prolog as the primary computer language for the project.[118]
Other countries responded with new programs of their own. The UK began the ₤350 million Alvey project. A consortium of American companies formed the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (or "MCC") to fund large scale projects in AI and information technology.[119][120] DARPA responded as well, founding the Strategic Computing Initiative and tripling its investment in AI between 1984 and 1988.[121]
A Hopfield net with four nodes.
The revival of connectionism [ edit ]
In 1982, physicist John Hopfield was able to prove that a form of neural network (now called a "Hopfield net") could learn and process information in a completely new way. Around the same time, Geoffrey Hinton and David Rumelhart popularized a method for training neural networks called "backpropagation", also known as the reverse mode of automatic differentiation published by Seppo Linnainmaa (1970) and applied to neural networks by Paul Werbos. These two discoveries helped to revive the field of connectionism.[120][122]
The new field was unified and inspired by the appearance of Parallel Distributed Processing in 1986—a two volume collection of papers edited by Rumelhart and psychologist James McClelland. Neural networks would become commercially successful in the 1990s, when they began to be used as the engines driving programs like optical character recognition and speech recognition.[120][123]
Bust: the second AI winter 1987–1993 [ edit ]
The business community's fascination with AI rose and fell in the 1980s in the classic pattern of an economic bubble. The collapse was in the perception of AI by government agencies and investors – the field continued to make advances despite the criticism. Rodney Brooks and Hans Moravec, researchers from the related field of robotics, argued for an entirely new approach to artificial intelligence.
AI winter [ edit ]
The term "AI winter" was coined by researchers who had survived the funding cuts of 1974 when they became concerned that enthusiasm for expert systems had spiraled out of control and that disappointment would certainly follow.[124] Their fears were well founded: in the late 1980s and early 1990s, AI suffered a series of financial setbacks.
The first indication of a change in weather was the sudden collapse of the market for specialized AI hardware in 1987. Desktop computers from Apple and IBM had been steadily gaining speed and power and in 1987 they became more powerful than the more expensive Lisp machines made by Symbolics and others. There was no longer a good reason to buy them. An entire industry worth half a billion dollars was demolished overnight.[125]
Eventually the earliest successful expert systems, such as XCON, proved too expensive to maintain. They were difficult to update, they could not learn, they were "brittle" (i.e., they could make grotesque mistakes when given unusual inputs), and they fell prey to problems (such as the qualification problem) that had been identified years earlier. Expert systems proved useful, but only in a few special contexts.[126]
In the late 1980s, the Strategic Computing Initiative cut funding to AI "deeply and brutally." New leadership at DARPA had decided that AI was not "the next wave" and directed funds towards projects that seemed more likely to produce immediate results.[127]
By 1991, the impressive list of goals penned in 1981 for Japan's Fifth Generation Project had not been met. Indeed, some of them, like "carry on a casual conversation" had not been met by 2010.[128] As with other AI projects, expectations had run much higher than what was actually possible.[128]
Over 300 AI companies had shutdown, gone bankrupt, or been acquired by the end of 1993, effectively ending the first commercial wave of AI. [129]
The importance of having a body: nouvelle AI and embodied reason [ edit ]
In the late 1980s, several researchers advocated a completely new approach to artificial intelligence, based on robotics.[130] They believed that, to show real intelligence, a machine needs to have a body — it needs to perceive, move, survive and deal with the world. They argued that these sensorimotor skills are essential to higher level skills like commonsense reasoning and that abstract reasoning was actually the least interesting or important human skill (see Moravec's paradox). They advocated building intelligence "from the bottom up."[131]
The approach revived ideas from cybernetics and control theory that had been unpopular since the sixties. Another precursor was David Marr, who had come to MIT in the late 1970s from a successful background in theoretical neuroscience to lead the group studying vision. He rejected all symbolic approaches (both McCarthy's logic and Minsky's frames), arguing that AI needed to understand the physical machinery of vision from the bottom up before any symbolic processing took place. (Marr's work would be cut short by leukemia in 1980.)[132]
In a 1990 paper, "Elephants Don't Play Chess,"[133] robotics researcher Rodney Brooks took direct aim at the physical symbol system hypothesis, arguing that symbols are not always necessary since "the world is its own best model. It is always exactly up to date. It always has every detail there is to be known. The trick is to sense it appropriately and often enough."[134] In the 1980s and 1990s, many cognitive scientists also rejected the symbol processing model of the mind and argued that the body was essential for reasoning, a theory called the embodied mind thesis.[135]
AI 1993–2011 [ edit ]
The field of AI, now more than a half a century old, finally achieved some of its oldest goals. It began to be used successfully throughout the technology industry, although somewhat behind the scenes. Some of the success was due to increasing computer power and some was achieved by focusing on specific isolated problems and pursuing them with the highest standards of scientific accountability. Still, the reputation of AI, in the business world at least, was less than pristine. Inside the field there was little agreement on the reasons for AI's failure to fulfill the dream of human level intelligence that had captured the imagination of the world in the 1960s. Together, all these factors helped to fragment AI into competing subfields focused on particular problems or approaches, sometimes even under new names that disguised the tarnished pedigree of "artificial intelligence".[136] AI was both more cautious and more successful than it had ever been.
Milestones and Moore's law [ edit ]
On 11 May 1997, Deep Blue became the first computer chess-playing system to beat a reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov.[137] The super computer was a specialized version of a framework produced by IBM, and was capable of processing twice as many moves per second as it had during the first match (which Deep Blue had lost), reportedly 200,000,000 moves per second. The event was broadcast live over the internet and received over 74 million hits.[138]
In 2005, a Stanford robot won the DARPA Grand Challenge by driving autonomously for 131 miles along an unrehearsed desert trail.[139] Two years later, a team from CMU won the DARPA Urban Challenge by autonomously navigating 55 miles in an Urban environment while adhering to traffic hazards and all traffic laws.[140] In February 2011, in a Jeopardy! quiz show exhibition match, IBM's question answering system, Watson, defeated the two greatest Jeopardy! champions, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, by a significant margin.[141]
These successes were not due to some revolutionary new paradigm, but mostly on the tedious application of engineering skill and on the tremendous increase in the speed and capacity of computer by the 90s.[142] In fact, Deep Blue's computer was 10 million times faster than the Ferranti Mark 1 that Christopher Strachey taught to play chess in 1951.[143] This dramatic increase is measured by Moore's law, which predicts that the speed and memory capacity of computers doubles every two years. The fundamental problem of "raw computer power" was slowly being overcome.
Intelligent agents [ edit ]
A new paradigm called "intelligent agents" became widely accepted during the 1990s.[144] Although earlier researchers had proposed modular "divide and conquer" approaches to AI,[145] the intelligent agent did not reach its modern form until Judea Pearl, Allen Newell, Leslie P. Kaelbling, and others brought concepts from decision theory and economics into the study of AI.[146] When the economist's definition of a rational agent was married to computer science's definition of an object or module, the intelligent agent paradigm was complete.
An intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximize its chances of success. By this definition, simple programs that solve specific problems are "intelligent agents", as are human beings and organizations of human beings, such as firms. The intelligent agent paradigm defines AI research as "the study of intelligent agents". This is a generalization of some earlier definitions of AI: it goes beyond studying human intelligence; it studies all kinds of intelligence.[147]
The paradigm gave researchers license to study isolated problems and find solutions that were both verifiable and useful. It provided a common language to describe problems and share their solutions with each other, and with other fields that also used concepts of abstract agents, like economics and control theory. It was hoped that a complete agent architecture (like Newell's SOAR) would one day allow researchers to build more versatile and intelligent systems out of interacting intelligent agents.[146][148]
"Victory of the neats" [ edit ]
AI researchers began to develop and use sophisticated mathematical tools more than they ever had in the past.[149] There was a widespread realization that many of the problems that AI needed to solve were already being worked on by researchers in fields like mathematics, economics or operations research. The shared mathematical language allowed both a higher level of collaboration with more established and successful fields and the achievement of results which were measurable and provable; AI had become a more rigorous "scientific" discipline. Russell & Norvig (2003) describe this as nothing less than a "revolution" and "the victory of the neats".[150][151]
Judea Pearl's highly influential 1988 book[152] brought probability and decision theory into AI. Among the many new tools in use were Bayesian networks, hidden Markov models, information theory, stochastic modeling and classical optimization. Precise mathematical descriptions were also developed for "computational intelligence" paradigms like neural networks and evolutionary algorithms.[150]
AI behind the scenes [ edit ]
Algorithms originally developed by AI researchers began to appear as parts of larger systems. AI had solved a lot of very difficult problems[153] and their solutions proved to be useful throughout the technology industry,[154] such as data mining, industrial robotics, logistics,[155] speech recognition,[156] banking software,[157] medical diagnosis[157] and Google's search engine.[158]
The field of AI received little or no credit for these successes in the 1990s and early 2000s. Many of AI's greatest innovations have been reduced to the status of just another item in the tool chest of computer science.[159] Nick Bostrom explains "A lot of cutting edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without being called AI because once something becomes useful enough and common enough it's not labeled AI anymore."[160]
Many researchers in AI in 1990s deliberately called their work by other names, such as informatics, knowledge-based systems, cognitive systems or computational intelligence. In part, this may be because they considered their field to be fundamentally different from AI, but also the new names help to procure funding. In the commercial world at least, the failed promises of the AI Winter continued to haunt AI research into the 2000s, as the New York Times reported in 2005: "Computer scientists and software engineers avoided the term artificial intelligence for fear of being viewed as wild-eyed dreamers."[161][162][163]
Where is HAL 9000? [ edit ]
In 1968, Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick had imagined that by the year 2001, a machine would exist with an intelligence that matched or exceeded the capability of human beings. The character they created, HAL 9000, was based on a belief shared by many leading AI researchers that such a machine would exist by the year 2001.[164]
In 2001, AI founder Marvin Minsky asked "So the question is why didn't we get HAL in 2001?"[165] Minsky believed that the answer is that the central problems, like commonsense reasoning, were being neglected, while most researchers pursued things like commercial applications of neural nets or genetic algorithms. John McCarthy, on the other hand, still blamed the qualification problem.[166] For Ray Kurzweil, the issue is computer power and, using Moore's Law, he predicted that machines with human-level intelligence will appear by 2029.[167] Jeff Hawkins argued that neural net research ignores the essential properties of the human cortex, preferring simple models that have been successful at solving simple problems.[168] There were many other explanations and for each there was a corresponding research program underway.
Deep learning, big data and artificial general intelligence: 2011–present [ edit ]
In the first decades of the 21st century, access to large amounts of data (known as "big data"), faster computers and advanced machine learning techniques were successfully applied to many problems throughout the economy. In fact, McKinsey Global Institute estimated in their famous paper "Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity" that "by 2009, nearly all sectors in the US economy had at least an average of 200 terabytes of stored data".
By 2016, the market for AI-related products, hardware, and software reached more than 8 billion dollars, and the New York Times reported that interest in AI had reached a "frenzy".[169] The applications of big data began to reach into other fields as well, such as training models in ecology[170] and for various applications in economics.[171] Advances in deep learning (particularly deep convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks) drove progress and research in image and video processing, text analysis, and even speech recognition.[172]
Deep learning [ edit ]
Deep learning is a branch of machine learning that models high level abstractions in data by using a deep graph with many processing layers.[172] According to the Universal approximation theorem, deep-ness isn't necessary for a neural network to be able to approximate arbitrary continuous functions. Even so, there are many problems that are common to shallow networks (such as overfitting) that deep networks help avoid.[173] As such, deep neural networks are able to realistically generate much more complex models as compared to their shallow counterparts.
However, deep learning has problems of its own. A common problem for recurrent neural networks is the vanishing gradient problem, which is where gradients passed between layers gradually shrink and literally disappear as they are rounded off to zero. There have been many methods developed to approach this problem, such as Long short-term memory units.
State-of-the-art deep neural network architectures can sometimes even rival human accuracy in fields like computer vision, specifically on things like the MNIST database, and traffic sign recognition.[174]
Language processing engines powered by smart search engines can easily beat humans at answering general trivia questions (such as IBM Watson), and recent developments in deep learning have produced astounding results in competing with humans, in things like Go and Doom (which, being a First-Person Shooter game, has sparked some controversy).[175][176][177][178]
Big Data [ edit ]
Big data refers to a collection of data that cannot be captured, managed, and processed by conventional software tools within a certain time frame. It is a massive amount of decision-making, insight, and process optimization capabilities that require new processing models. In the Big Data Era written by Victor Meyer Schonberg and Kenneth Cooke, big data means that instead of random analysis (sample survey), all data is used for analysis. The 5V characteristics of big data (proposed by IBM): Volume, Velocity, Variety[179], Value[180], Veracity[181]. The strategic significance of big data technology is not to master huge data information, but to specialize in these meaningful data. In other words, if big data is likened to an industry, the key to realizing profitability in this industry is to increase the “Process capability” of the data and realize the “Value added” of the data through “Processing”.
Artificial general intelligence [ edit ]
Artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science that attempts to understand the essence of intelligence and produce a new intelligent machine that responds in a manner similar to human intelligence. Research in this area includes robotics, speech recognition, image recognition, Natural language processing and expert systems. Since the birth of artificial intelligence, the theory and technology have become more and more mature, and the application fields have been expanding. It is conceivable that the technological products brought by artificial intelligence in the future will be the "container" of human wisdom. Artificial intelligence can simulate the information process of human consciousness and thinking. Artificial intelligence is not human intelligence, but it can be like human thinking, and it may exceed human intelligence. Artificial general intelligence is also referred to as "strong AI",[182] "full AI"[183] or as the ability of a machine to perform "general intelligent action".[3] Academic sources reserve "strong AI" to refer to machines capable of experiencing consciousness.
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn now to “America’s most exciting punk band.” That’s what Rolling Stone called them. Downtown Boys is a self-described “bilingual political dance sax punk party” from Providence, Rhode Island. They are known for their electric, politically charged performances, which take the audience on a frenzied tour through history, from the slave trade to police brutality today.
A Hartford Courant reviewer wrote, quote, “You can make the case—and people have—that Downtown Boys … was the sound of punk rock in America in 2015.” The reviewer compared their performances to, quote, “anarchic backyard barbecues—part political rally, but all danceable, kinetic party; thrash around, if you want, but pay attention.”
This is “Wave of History,” off their latest album, Full Communism.
DOWNTOWN BOYS: riding in on a wave
a wave of history
riding in on a wave
a wave of history
do what we want
on our wave of history
yeah do what we want
on our wave of history
we are the surge
we are the surge
that’s where we’re at
i can’t hear maybes
that’s where we’re at
i can’t hear maybes
necessity
necessity
not one step back
on the wave of history
you can’t look back
on our wave of history
necessity
necessity
necessity
necessity
Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: “Wave of History,” Downtown Boys. I’m joined now by Victoria Ruiz, the lead singer of Downtown Boys, and Joey DeFrancesco, the guitarist.
It’s great to have you both with us. So talk about—first, talk about “Wave of History.” Talk about it, Victoria.
VICTORIA RUIZ: Well, “Wave of History,” we wrote it about a year ago, when there was a lot going on in terms of, you know, our own community in Providence. Black Lives Matter marches were happening all around the country, and in Providence there was a very big Black Lives Matter march. And the police kind of picked seven people to arrest. And so, that was happening. We were both involved in a lot of hotel organizing. We were both also trying to do this music thing. And seeing the way that, you know, we were being treated as musicians and just sort of all of these different paths that we were trying to bring together, and we were like, “Wow! We are truly on a wave of history,” and thinking about how there’s no way to really think about our current moment without contextualizing it in historical background. And in many ways, that’s what can make what we’re doing, you know, a true threat and make it an opportunity to really change what’s happening. So, “Wave of History” is really a call for that change to happen and remembering where we come from, not so much to be shocked by it, but to give us some type of terrifying hope to change where we’re at.
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about the music and the graphics of this video.
VICTORIA RUIZ: Well, a lot of that messaging comes from this concept of land. You know, I think Malcolm X has said it, that it’s never been about a desegregated cup of coffee, it’s always been about the land. Cesar Chavez said something similar: It’s not so much about the price of lettuce, it’s about land. And so we really wanted the graphics to be able to portray that story of land and how taking land and taking back land can really shift power. And so, we really wanted to look at—you know, we’re in a current moment where the current criminal justice system and mass incarceration, which includes raids by ICE, is happening as a continuation of the transatlantic slave trade, where land and ocean were taken by the slave ship. And so, we really wanted to tie that and contextualize that idea through maps, through facts and figures about this connection between our current mass incarceration system and slavery. And then we wanted to contextualize it also in what happens economically, so you’ll see, you know, businesses like Coca-Cola and Aetna that come straight out of the slave trade.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what you mean. Why straight out, Joey, of the slave trade?
JOEY DEFRANCESCO: Well, for example, Aetna and a lot of insurance companies got their start literally insuring slaves and property on slave plantations, so a lot of that capital that these companies began with is coming from the slave trade. It’s not a metaphor. I think sometimes when we say that capitalism is deeply rooted in slavery, people think it’s sort of an exaggeration or, you know, a metaphor. But it’s literally true. Right? All of these companies—not all of them, but a lot of these companies, like Aetna, like JPMorgan, like Lehman Brothers, have direct roots either beginning as companies involved in the slave trade as insurers or literal slave traders, or had some kind of auxiliary part of their initial business. So that capital from that time period obviously carries over and is built into what you have today.
AMY GOODMAN: So this is part of your new album, Full Communism. Why did you call it Full Communism?
JOEY DEFRANCESCO: I think we called it Full Communism—obviously, it’s somewhat of a provocative title. That’s some of what we do. We want to capture attention. But more than that, I think we meant full communism is really kind of a hopeful idea. You know, a lot of our album is angry, and it’s critiquing, but the point of that critique is not that we’re kind of nihilistic and giving up, right? If we were so overwhelmed that we were giving up, we wouldn’t be angry anymore. We would stop talking about this stuff. But we are, in fact, kind of, I think, hopeful and optimistic that we can create something. So, I think we wanted to create some kind of a hopeful message with a title that conveys some kind of utopian idea. So we’re not talking about any kind of like hardcore like Marxism, or like we’re not into any specific like theorists or anything like that, but just this idea of this kind of future better society that we still believe in creating through addressing the things that we talk about on the record.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, Joey, before Downtown Boys, you had gone viral on something totally different. Talk about quitting your job at the Renaissance Hotel. How long ago was this, in Providence?
JOEY DEFRANCESCO: This was in Providence, Rhode Island, 2011. I worked in room service at the Renaissance Providence Hotel. Victoria actually also worked there in the kind of like call desk. So I worked there for like three-and-a-half years. And at the end of that, I made this video of me quitting the job there, where I—
AMY GOODMAN: For real?
JOEY DEFRANCESCO: Yes, for real. It’s real. It’s all real—where I brought in another band I used to play in called the What Cheer? Brigade, which is this kind of a street brass band. And we brought the band in, and, you know, we lured my manager into a hallway, and I told him, “I quit.” And then, when I said, “I quit,” the band kind of played, and we exited out of the building. Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to that clip. “Joey Quits.”
JARED: You guys, all of you, out, right now!
JOEY DEFRANCESCO: Jared, I’m here to tell you that I’m quitting.
WHAT CHEER? BRIGADE: One, two, three, four! [playing “Bubamara”]
AMY GOODMAN: So, Joey, you quit, with a full band—
JOEY DEFRANCESCO: Mm-hmm.
AMY GOODMAN: —a marching band. You march out. That was your boss who came back to say, “Get out of here”?
JOEY DEFRANCESCO: Yeah, he was my boss, who I had a long history with. Right? I mean, the video kind of—I think a lot of people see it and just think it’s this funny thing, but there’s a lot of backstory, where, you know, it’s like a hotel, and like a lot of service jobs, they were treating us like garbage. In room service, we were getting $5.50 an hour, and then they were stealing half of our tip money. Housekeepers are having to clean 17, 18 rooms. We were getting injured.
AMY GOODMAN: How did they steal your tip money?
JOEY DEFRANCESCO: So, a lot of hotels have, in room service, those little things that say service charge on them, where it says 20 percent service charge or whatever it is. A lot of people think that’s going to the person bringing you the food, and so you don’t tip. In reality, or at least in our case, the hotel company itself was taking a portion of that, and then my direct manager is also taking portions, so at the end of the whole thing, we, as servers, were getting less than half of what that service charge said. So, we’re making a sub-minimum wage, $5.50 an hour, and then they’re taking a bunch of our tip money. So, with all these awful working conditions, we were pushing back. We were trying to organize a union there, and that guy in the video, along with a lot of the other management there, was running this really kind of vicious anti-union campaign. They were targeting people to fire them, they were cutting people’s hours, all the usual things. So, you can see in his face he knows we’ve, you know, had some battles before and that something crazy is happening.
AMY GOODMAN: So, this video went viral.
JOEY DEFRANCESCO: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: How many views?
JOEY DEFRANCESCO: I think it’s up—it’s up to a bit over 5 million views now.
AMY GOODMAN: And what was the marching band playing?
JOEY DEFRANCESCO: The marching band was playing a song called “Bubamara,” which is based on an old Serbian folk melody. It’s probably an old Roma song. And so, yeah, it’s this old Serbian song, so the video became very popular in Serbia, in fact, and we ended up going to Serbia to do reality shows and stuff.
AMY GOODMAN: So, wait, you were invite on a reality show in Serbia?
JOEY DEFRANCESCO: Yeah, we ended up going. So, it got all this attention, all the—like, this kind of U.S. media, but then it also got into international media, in the—for whatever reason. Because of the Serbian song, the Serbians really liked it. So we got invited to—I got invited to be on a Serbian reality show and was filming over in Belgrade for maybe a month or so.
AMY GOODMAN: So, soon after, you made—you formed Downtown Boys. How did you form it, and why is it called Downtown Boys?
JOEY DEFRANCESCO: So, we formed it mostly out of people in What Cheer?, the brass band in the video. Our original bass player was in that band, and then Norlan, who’s our current drummer. I was also in that band. And then we had another couple folks—a sax player named Emmett, another sax player named Mariel. And we formed it because I think What Cheer? had a political message, but we wanted to create something where we could speak and have a more explicitly political message and also have a smaller unit to be able to create music. So, that formation had a couple shows, and then, very shortly after that, Victoria, who I was working with at the hotel, joined the band. And that’s when it really clicked. It wasn’t very good before Victoria kind of started.
AMY GOODMAN: And you called it Downtown Boys because?
JOEY DEFRANCESCO: So, there’s a Bruce Springsteen song that has the line “downtown boys” in it. That was one of the motivations.
AMY GOODMAN: And them downtown boys sure talk gritty/It’s hard to be a saint in the city.
JOEY DEFRANCESCO: Yeah. So I always liked band names with “boys” in it, and I think it sounds kind of—it’s like simultaneously sounds—it’s kind of like a cool queer-sounding name, but also sounds like tough and queer at the same time. So we kind of liked the feel of that. There’s no really deep thing, but we do love Bruce Springsteen, so…
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about “100% Inheritance Tax.”
VICTORIA RUIZ: “100% Inheritance Tax” is this idea that, one, you know, the rich in this country aren’t paying the amount of taxes that they need to, and our local community, Providence, gets gutted by big corporations that don’t pay the taxes that they should into the community, and then, at the same time, undocumented people are being told, left and right, that, “Oh, you don’t pay taxes. You don’t contribute to the—you know, some type of budget of this government.” And it’s this idea that, you know, under full communism, when we all have that opportunity to be free, we’re going to have to tax it all. We’re not going to destroy it. We’re not going to get rid of it. We’re going to tax it, and it’ll be for the people.
And it’s really this idea that inheritance comes from history. And so, there is a reason why, you know, black men in this country are three times more likely than a white man to be killed by the police. There is a reason in this country that if you’re a white person with a felony record, you are still more likely to get a job than a black man with no felony record. And that’s because of inheritance—racial inheritance, class inheritance. And so, we need to tax not just money, not just houses and cars, but inheritance of history, to really ever fight for some type of equality.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to “100% Inheritance Tax,” the Downtown Boys.
DOWNTOWN BOYS: el piel no va a contar class
el banco no va a prestar más
por eso, es nuestro
lo trata, te gusta
por eso, es nuestro
lo trata, te gusta
1-0-0
1-0-0
1-0-0
1-0-0
el piel no va a contar class
el banco no va a prestar más
por eso, es nuestro
lo trata, te gusta
por eso, es nuestro
lo trata, te gusta
1-0-0
1-0-0
1-0-0
1-0-0
1-0-0
1-0-0
1-0-0
1-0-0
1-0-0
Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: “100% Inheritance Tax,” Downtown Boys. Our guests are Victoria Ruiz, the lead singer, and Joey DeFrancesco, the guitarist for Downtown Boys. So, the Sex Pistols came out with their first record like 40 years ago, in 1976. Where is punk rock today? And who are your greatest influences, Joey?
JOEY DEFRANCESCO: So, I guess some people today just say, you know, “Punk shouldn’t be done anymore. It was done too long ago. It kind of ran its course.” I think, for us, we’re not like really identifying with some kind of—as a punk band or with punk music. I think punk splintered where it can mean just so many different things at this point. For us, I think we came together as a band and just produced this sound and had these ideas and these musical abilities, which, you know, are somewhat limited maybe, but, you know, we work with it how we can. So, I think, in 2016, for us, at least, it’s not so much about kind of identifying or fighting for a real close, solid punk identity, as much as, you know, producing this thing we as individuals are producing in our band.
As for influences right now, I think it’s mostly kind of outside the punk realm. I think, for example, M.I.A. is one of my biggest influences, and I think is kind of the most important artist of our generation going on right now. So she’s very important. I think Kendrick Lamar put out a record last year that was probably the—the or one of the best records of the year, also very highly political, has a lot of these same attitudes and ideas as punk has for a really long time, but you wouldn’t necessarily call it punk. So I think we’re into drawing from a lot of different influences and ideas, including some in punk, but not necessarily saying we are punk.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Victoria, who are your influences?
VICTORIA RUIZ: I think one of my biggest influences is my family, like my grandma. You know, she was a farmworker, decided to raise this family, move up from the fields in California to San Jose, a bigger city. And when my grandpa passed away, she didn’t move back down with her family. She stayed there and raised the family. I think that that type of history is a big influence and definitely influences what I think of punk. And then, I think like Los Crudos is a really big influence. Selena Quintanilla, who has passed away, was a huge crossover artist, so she was—spoke to a lot of people, both in Mexico and in the United States, and really built a bridge as some type of, you know, cultural ambassador and was this front person, this woman front person, really taking the stage and taking that power. And I think M.I.A., I mean, the way that she speaks about borders, her videos, the way that she just goes out there and is able to speak to—really meet people where they’re at is just so incredible. And then, Bruce Springsteen, I mean, there’s really no one like Bruce Springsteen. And he’s so punk. And, you know, his lyric—
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean when you say that?
VICTORIA RUIZ: When I—he’s talking about the working class. He’s talking about love. Like, his voice—like, I read the very first time that he was reviewed by NME, which is like the British Rolling Stone, they—the first time he played in the U.K., they did not like his show at all. They were like, “This is awful. Bob Dylan’s got nothing to worry about,” you know? And like, this year they actually retracted that statement on the anniversary. And I thought that that was amazing, you know. And he’s also spoken out against Israel. He’s chosen not to play there and chosen to honor the boycott, which is going to help Palestinians hopefully win liberation soon. So, you know, that’s punk. And that’s what makes me want to do this.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you’re known for giving sort of like political speeches in the middle of the songs. Talk about that.
VICTORIA RUIZ: It’s really—you know, I don’t have the best rhythm. Joey’s really had to help me get that together. I’m not the best musician. And |
most popular torrent website, have been cleared of charges alleging criminal copyright infringement and abuse of electronic communications in a Belgian court.
The Pirate Bay co-founders Gottfrid Svartholm, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström were acquitted by a Belgian court located in Mechelse after it was found that they could not be held responsible for the file-sharing website after selling it in 2006.
The Pirate Bay’s founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, the website representative Peter Sunde and the website investor Carl Lundström were facing criminal charges related to their involvement with the torrenting site that has proven to be an elusive hub for illegal copyrighted content.
The Pirate Bay was Sold to other Investors in 2006
However, the case fell apart when the Pirate Bay’s co-founders said that they were not involved in any activity related to the website after they sold it to Reservella, a Seychelles-based company, in 2006, as reported on Friday.
Providing more details about the case Torrent Freak report, "All four defendants deny having had anything to do with the site since it reported the sale to a Seychelles-based company called Reservella in 2006. That has proven problematic since the period in which the four allegedly committed the crimes details in the Belgian case spans September 2011 and November 2013."
Though the foursome is likely to face criminal charges in other courts of law, the Belgian court victory represented a little of good news for the cyber crew.
Prosecution Agreed to Court Decision
After the verdict was dropped, the complainants, which is the Belgian Entertainment Association, agreed with the court decision. "Technically speaking, we agree with the court," said Olivier Maeterlinck, the Belgian Entertainment Association (BEA) director.
The Pirate Bay, founded in 2003, is one of the most popular file-sharing websites in the world predominantly used to share copyrighted material free of charge. Despite the criminal convictions, the site remains functioning today, although it has moved to different Web domains several times.BEIJING/SEOUL (Reuters) - The U.S. military staged bombing drills with South Korea over the Korean peninsula and Russia and China began naval exercises ahead of a U.N. General Assembly meeting on Tuesday where North Korea’s nuclear threat is likely to loom large.
The flurry of military drills came after Pyongyang fired another mid-range ballistic missile over Japan on Friday and the reclusive North conducted its sixth and most powerful nuclear test on Sept. 3 in defiance of United Nations sanctions and other international pressure.
A pair of U.S. B-1B bombers and four F-35 jets flew from Guam and Japan and joined four South Korean F-15K fighters in the latest drill, South Korea’s defence ministry said.
The joint drills were being conducted “two to three times a month these days”, Defence Minister Song Young-moo told a parliamentary hearing on Monday.
In Beijing, the official Xinhua news agency said China and Russia began naval drills off the Russian far eastern port of Vladivostok, not far from the Russia-North Korea border.
Those drills were being conducted between Peter the Great Bay, near Vladivostok, and the southern part of the Sea of Okhotsk, to the north of Japan, it said.
The drills are the second part of China-Russian naval exercises this year, the first part of which was staged in the Baltic in July. Xinhua did not directly link the drills to current tension over North Korea.
China and Russia have repeatedly called for a peaceful solution and talks to resolve the issue.
On Sunday, however, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said the U.N. Security Council had run out of options on containing North Korea’s nuclear programme and the United States might have to turn the matter over to the Pentagon.
In response, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said the most pressing task was for all parties to enforce the latest U.N. resolutions on North Korea fully, rather than “deliberately complicating the issue”.
Military threats from various parties have not promoted a resolution to the issue, he said.
“This is not beneficial to a final resolution to the peninsula nuclear issue,” Lu told a daily news briefing.
U.S. President Donald Trump has vowed that North Korea will never be able to threaten the United States with a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un watches the launch of a Hwasong-12 missile in this undated photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on September 16, 2017. KCNA via REUTERS
Asked about Trump’s warning last month that the North Korean threat to the United States would be met with “fire and fury”, Haley said: “It was not an empty threat.”
Washington has also asked China to do more to rein in its neighbour and ally, while Beijing has urged the United States to refrain from making threats against the North.
FUEL PRICES SURGE
The U.N. Security Council unanimously passed a U.S.-drafted resolution a week ago mandating tougher new sanctions against Pyongyang that included banning textile imports and capping crude and petrol supply.
North Korea on Monday called the resolution “the most vicious, unethical and inhumane act of hostility to physically exterminate” its people, system and government.
“The increased moves of the U.S. and its vassal forces to impose sanctions and pressure... will only increase our pace towards the ultimate completion of the state nuclear force,” the North’s foreign ministry spokesman said in a statement carried by its official KCNA news agency.
Gasoline and diesel prices in the North have surged since the latest nuclear test in anticipation of a possible oil ban, according to market data analysed by Reuters on Monday.
The international community must remain united and enforce sanctions against North Korea after its repeated launch of ballistic missiles, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in an editorial in the New York Times on Sunday.
Such tests were in violation of Security Council resolutions and showed that North Korea could now target the United States or Europe, he wrote.
Abe also said diplomacy and dialogue would not work with North Korea and concerted pressure by the entire international community was essential to tackle the threats posed by the north and its leader, Kim Jong Un.
However, the official China Daily argued on Monday that sanctions should be given time to bite and that the door must be left open to talks.
“With its Friday missile launch, Pyongyang wanted to give the impression that sanctions will not work,” it said in an editorial. “Some people have fallen for that and immediately echoed the suggestion, pointing to the failure of past sanctions to achieve their purpose.
“But that past sanctions did not work does not mean they will not. It is too early to claim failure because the latest sanctions have hardly begun to take effect. Giving the sanctions time to bite is the best way to make Pyongyang reconsider,” the newspaper said.
Slideshow (4 Images)
Pyongyang has launched dozens of missiles as it accelerates a weapons programme designed to provide the ability to target the United States with a powerful, nuclear-tipped missile.
It says such programmes are needed as a deterrent against invasion by the United States, which has 28,500 troops stationed in South Korea. On Saturday, it said it aimed to reach an “equilibrium” of military force with the United States.
The United States and South Korea are technically still at war with North Korea because the 1950-53 Korean conflict ended with a truce and not a peace treaty.Nxt as platform. NXT as tokens of power, not coins. That’s what BCNext imagined when he created the Nxt genesis block back in November 2013, and that’s what he proposed the Nxt Community should follow up, in his plans 1-3. Because in Nxtville: The community decides. And the issue has led to heated discussions from the beginning. Nxt was released as a crypto currency, and many investors wanted it to stay just that. Like any other crypto 1.0 investment, but with killer features to take it to the moon.
Only problem? Nxt just isn’t that. Take it from the horse’s mouth:
BCNext (through Come-from-Beyond):
NXTs r not coins, at least the creator of Nxt didn’t want them to be coins. They r tokens that grant privileges to support Nxt. Deflation is not much better than inflation, “real” coins should be created on top of Nxt and be issued in quantities that keep their value constant. BCNext understands that this is very arguable, the community should decide if it wants to follow the path showed by him or stick to Bitcoin legacy with unchangeable supply of coins in hope to become rich by doing nothing.
But… “real coins in quantities that keep their value constant”? Oh my. What if a NxtCoin really isn’t a coin but a share in a platform which is capable of powering not just other coins, money transactions, smart contracts, asset exchange and now the latest Nxt release: A p2p Marketplace – what if NXTs are real tokens of power, about to renew, decentralize and revolutionize just about everything – even the internet itself? Wah! Not a coin?
But then what about the “mining”/forging part, you might ask, shaky hand hitting the iPad to have another quick look at coinmarketcap, to make sure that Nxt is still there. Well, if you’ve been complaining about the forging algo, that it’s paying you too little, and that the fees are too low to generate real profit, or that the whales are getting more because they own more Nxt…, read on.
BCNext (through Come-from-Beyond):
Selfish miners (those who mine only to earn fees) should be “removed” from the system, they r not interested in success of Nxt and only want to cash-out. (…) True reward for supporting Nxt network comes from services that use Nxt. Someone owns a currency exchange and mine blocks to keep his business running. Another one owns a shop and mine blocks to keep his business running. The 3rd person owns a software company that develops programs for Nxt-based services and mine blocks to keep his business running.
Gulp. Don’t be in it for the “mining” fees. Forge to support the network. Fees will be even lower when the price of Nxt goes higher. The community has decided that. The demand is there. We want our services to use Nxt, and the world too.
You can buy yourself a good read in our NXTER STORE. You can even buy a house with NXT.
But consider the above quote again. It may be time to wrap your head around Nxt.
A new series about 3rd party developers and Nxt businesses will start on nxter.org tomorrow.
It’s called: ON TOP OF NXT.
Stay tuned.
This article is also available in French.Instead, it's their attitude off track and, more importantly, the passing of what could be called a 'crash test', that has left their chief convinced the pair have massively bright futures in F1.
Passion is key
The fight to make an impression at Red Bull's junior F1 team has always left its drivers facing a high pressure situation.
But this year, both Verstappen and Sainz have embraced the opportunity – and a decent chassis – to impress onlookers.
There have been races where the pair have qualified high up the grid, strong race performances and in Hungary, Verstappen took a career best fourth-place to show how much progress he has made.
And although it is Verstappen who has grabbed the headlines thanks to his age, and that big Monaco accident and fallout, Sainz has shone with some very strong performances as well.
Passion and intelligence
For Tost, the performance of both is something to be proud of, although he is taken aback by just how good they are in their approach to the job.
"I must say, both of them really are doing a fantastic job," Tost told Motorsport.com. "Why are they doing a fantastic job? Because they are committed to F1.
"I think both of them have a real positive attitude. F1 is their life, which means also between the races, they are all the time in contact with the engineers, they do concentrated physical training, they go to the simulator, and they are well prepared.
"They are always on time, they ask many questions and I am really quite positive about their way of working.
"You do not need to tell them – you have to do this or do that. They do it already. That is decisive.
"It is their inner wish to be successful. It is their passion, and their passion is one of the most important factors to be successful. They both have the passion."
The crash test
But it is not just in attitude and results that has left Tost raving about his line-up, for he also takes heart from the fact the pair have hit trouble too.
Tost is a great believer that all drivers go through a similar schooling in F1 – and to pass their initiation there need to be some accidents along to way so they know where the limits are.
"It is the usual story when young drivers come into F1," he explained. "The first three/four races they will never crash – because they have the respect to come into F1.
"They always think: 'I must be careful, and I must be cautious. I must not risk much, I must make kilometres and I must make the chequered flag'.
"But the drivers are already nearly on the limit from the physics of the car because of their good education in the younger classes.
"We have now by far the best generation of young drivers I have ever worked with. It is unbelievable how well educated they are coming into F1.
"So, after three or four races, they think F1 is easy. And they think, 'now I will show the people how fast I am really'. And then, what I call 'the crash period' starts.
"This crash period is necessary because it helps the drivers understand the limit of the physics and therefore these crashes are important.
"You can tell to the driver beforehand, 'don't do this or don't do that'. But it is useless. He has to experience it himself.
"F1 is very complicated, like not to be too close in braking areas because you lose front grip with dirty air etc., but he has to learn this.
"For this he has to spin or be in the gravel, or crash. And that is okay. That is always what I calculate and this is always what I say in advance
"And this is the case with these drivers. We saw crashes and spins from both drivers: and that is normal and the price you have to pay if you have young drivers in the team.
"We have two young drivers and it depends how skilled they are to shorten the crash period and see how fast they are learning."
Best Toro Rosso line-up
Tost has no doubt Verstappen and Sainz have come through that crash period well.
And, having seen some bright talent through the Toro Rosso ranks over his time – including Sebastian Vettel, Daniel Ricciardo and Daniil Kvyat – he is well qualified to talk about just how good his current men are.
In Sainz and Verstappen, he is convinced at this stage the pair have delivered more than any other line-up – and that means they have the potential to be the overall best.
"I think at the end it is the most competitive driver pairing up until now," he said. "Now, we must see.
"For me it is always very important how is the gradient of the learning curve. And for me up until now it has been very, very steep.
"If it continues like this, then it is for sure by far the best driver combination we have had."Like all the cool kids — well, all the cool kids in 2001, today it’s completely overblown — NBA Commissioner Adam Silver is in Austin, Texas, for South by Southwest, or SXSW.
And one of the many division of the event now is SXSW Sports, where Silver was a keynote speaker. While there he got asked by a Seattle fan about the possibility of expansion, about the only way that city will get a team in the short-term with new arenas coming in Sacramento and Milwaukee.
Silver shot it down in no uncertain terms, saying it isn’t good for the current owners (who would need to approve expansion). From Ananth Pandian of CBSSports.com.
“We are 30 partners right now. Thirty teams. Each of those teams own 1/30th of all the global opportunities of the NBA. So the issue becomes, if you expand, do you want to sell one of those interests off to a new group of partners? One reason to do it of course, is that if it’s additive. And no doubt, Seattle is a great market. At the moment, like for me as successful as the league is right now, we (are) not in the position, putting even aside profitability, where all 30 teams are must-see experiences. That’s not a secret…. “There are so many great players in the league,” Silver said. “And that’s one of the issues with expansion. Even putting aside the financial notion of selling equity and whether if it’s additive to the league as a whole to add more teams, the question becomes is it dilutive in terms of talent. And that’s something that I’m focused on as well.”
The bottom line is this: owners currently all get 1/30th of the slice of the financial pie from television, global markets, and the rest of the income beyond ticket sales. They don’t want to make that 1/31st. Mark Cuban has said this before, the short-term bump from expansion fees is not worth the long-term hit from giving up part of that income.
What’s more, this would let 15 more players into the NBA. You can make an argument that the next 15 are no better than the last 15 currently on NBA rosters, but does the league need to put more of those guys who are bouncing between the D-League and the NBA into the league? Does that improve the product?
Silver said eventually the NBA will consider expansion again, it’s the way of any business. But it’s not happening anytime soon.
Sorry Seattle.Angelik Caruana claims that the Virgin Mary appears to him at Borg in-Nadur every Wednesday. Photo: Darrin Zammit Lupi
Surveys have been inconclusive but according to religious devotees, the Virgin Mary has the answer to whether the introduction of divorce enjoys majority support: It does.
Angelik Caruana and his followers, who claim the Virgin Mary appears to him at Borg in-Nadur every Wednesday, say Our Lady’s latest message was a stern warning for people not to heed the will of the majority.
“Do not take notice or pay heed to what the majority of the population is saying. They want divorce, my children. It is not the solution to repair the family. It is the deceit of the devil,” the Virgin Mary is quoted as having told Mr Caruana last week.
An appeal is then made for people to stop being taken for a ride by the devil and to return to Jesus.
Her message was uploaded onto the video sharing website You Tube and is the third time this year that divorce has been the subject of the apparitions.
“My children, take the situation seriously, for once divorce is legalised in your country, what happened abroad will happen to you too: the result will be very ugly,” her message continues.
Contacted about the apparitions last month, the Curia had said it was observing the online videos, consulting experts and relaying everything to the Vatican.
Mr Caruana originally made headlines when a statue of the Virgin that he owns allegedly started weeping tears of blood and oozing a large quantity of oil, a phenomenon said to continue to this day.
Meanwhile, surveys have shown that a general referendum proposing the introduction of divorce would probably not find majority support but if based on a conservative law with various safeguards, a referendum is likely to be successful.
See also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqCzCjRhDMA
More stories from The Times in the News section.Many popular products are 10 per cent more expensive online compared to in store. Credit:Edwina Pickles Another disgruntled shopper, Gaby Whitley said that the situation was her "worst nightmare". "We are entertaining our family and I wanted to be sure nothing was missing. Low [sic] and behold my worst nightmare has just come true; the Christmas ham I ordered is now not going to be delivered and we have no ham at all for our Christmas day lunch. Thanks for nothing Coles." Many of those who had ordered online said they had hoped to avoid the crowds with their small children and had ordered their groceries up to a month in advance. For Coles shopper Katrina Bricknell it was the second time in 12 months that online shopping system had let her down.
Pork prices aren't expected to fall this year. "I pre-ordered my Christmas ham and for the second year in a row it has been missing. I know they're all luxury items. I wish I was able to face the Christmas crowds in the supermarket with my children (who happen to be autistic so crowds are a major issue) so I could find replacements, but that's not going to happen." Courtney from Werribee in Victoria said that she was told by email that three key ingredients of her order were unavailable. Woolworths Credit:Louie Douvis "So now it's 12:40am and I can't sleep as I'm so stressed," the 28-year-old wrote. "I've been informed that the items aren't being delivered at all, no replacement."
"No Turkey for Christmas dinner." "No Duck Fat for Christmas roast potatoes." "No Pudding for Christmas dinner desert." "And by the way who replaces Rosemary gravy with brown onion?? Who the heck has brown onion gravy with lamb?! Savages." Coles' supermarket rival Woolworths has copped a similar volley of criticism. It has been accused of not including up to $150 of items from online orders
"So disappointed woollies," wrote Kristin Auguszczak. "I made an online order for Christmas to be delivered today and received an email this morning that $150 worth of my order is out of stock and with a long list of groceries I now don't have including staples such as ham, roast meat and turkey." Other Woolworths shoppers took more creative approaches to venting their complaints. 'T'was the day before Christmas and all through the house was madness because our turkey from our online order, was sold out," wrote Sitha Dim on the company's Facebook page. Supply shortages have also occurred in-store according to last minute shoppers. The Coles Mount Hutton store near Newcastle ran out of fresh prawns within 20 minutes of opening according to a frustrated Kirsten Nelson. "I asked staff last week if they would be getting enough to cater for later shoppers and was assured they would," she wrote.
"I was there at opening time of 7am and left without prawns. Do you find this acceptable for your customers to have to do this?" A Woolworths spokeswoman said the company was aware that there have been a small number of issues and the team have been working quickly to get those items out to customers. "With thousands of deliveries today, our online team will be doing everything they can to ensure orders are fulfilled so our customers can have a great Christmas." A Coles spokeswoman said that the supermarket had experienced "unprecedented demand" this year. "Coles will process a full refund for any item which is not delivered and we sincerely apologise to any customer affected," she said.Charanjit Bhullar
Tribune News Service
Bathinda, September 21
The Punjab Government has unearthed embezzlement of around Rs 20 crore under the post-matric scholarship scheme of the Punjab Welfare Department during 2014-15. Several institutions imparting technical education in the state allegedly made dummy admissions during the session.
Around 1,700 Scheduled Caste students were shown enrolled at two colleges simultaneously. The discrepancy came to light when the names of beneficiaries were linked with their Aadhaar numbers. Out of them, 966 were listed as beneficiaries both under the minority quota and the Welfare Department scheme.
The state government has now started verifying record of various private and government colleges.
To escape action, private colleges allegedly showed 6,000 SC students as drop-outs even as 80 per cent of their scholarship amount (around 10 crore) had already been released.
Twenty-seven students were shown enrolled at three different colleges in the same academic session. Kuldeep Singh was shown enrolled at Guru Nanak Khalsa College, Fazilka, for BA-I; at Abohar Polytechnic College for a technical course; and at Baba Deep Singh Polytechnic college, Muktsar, for a computer course. Narinder Singh was shown doing BA-I from Public College, Samana; a diploma course at Nancy Polytechnic besides pursuing a yet another course at Lovely Professional University.
In all, 1,674 students were shown “admitted” to two colleges simultaneously. Varinder Singh was shown enrolled at Guru Hargobind Polytechnic, Bathinda, besides pursuing another course at Abhishek Polytechnic in Fazilka.
Though private colleges showed them as drop-outs, around 80 per cent of their scholarship amount had already been claimed.
In Bathinda district, 20 students allegedly appeared at two examination centres on the same day and same time.Lenovo on Sunday rolled out an Android all-in-one home computer designed to be a living room multimedia PC. Should Android-powered PCs do well it would further disrupt the PC market and splinter the operating system selection a bit more.
The company's first Android home computer, the Lenovo N308, has a price tag that may spur some interest. The N308 starts at $450 and has a 19.5 inch 1600x900 touchscreen desktop.
According to Lenovo, the general idea is to put the PC at the center of folks who already use Android for browsing, apps and entertainment on their smaller screen devices. The N308 runs Android 4.2 Jelly Bean and is powered by a Nvidia Tegra processor.
The N308 has up to 500 GB of storage, a Webcam, keyboard, mouse and integrated battery with 3 hours of life. The N308 can stand or lay flat should you want to use it as a big tablet.
Add it up and Lenovo's N308 is an inexpensive spin on its larger tabletop PC, the Horizon 2, which is 27-inches and runs Windows 8 and the PC maker's custom interface. Horizon 2, an interesting living room addition that starts at $1,499, is basically a big tabletop tablet, that's positioned more upmarket than the Android all-in-one PC.
The N308 was outlined as part of Lenovo's larger play for the digital home. Lenovo also announced a personal cloud storage unit dubbed Beacon starting at $199 to share content and media in a home as well as the A740 all-in-one desktop starting at $1,499.
What's interesting is that PC makers are pushing toward Android after seeing Chromebooks sell well. Why? Chromebooks remain the domain of Google. With Android PCs, hardware manufacturers can customize more, add security features and preserve the application ecosystem. Google has all the control with the Chrome OS.
Rumor has it that Google has been working with various PC vendors to launch Android product lines.
For Windows 8, Android PCs and laptops could be a royal pain. Sure, Android PCs won't have Microsoft Office, but there are plenty of editing and viewing apps. Games on Android are plentiful and you could do worse things than buy a PC for $450.
In other words, should these early Android PC makers get any traction product roadmaps will expand. If Google can give Microsoft headaches with Chrome OS PCs just imagine what it could do with Android and Chrome OS hardware. Google's game is clear: Upend Microsoft's operating system domination.
For PC buyers, acquiring and Android computer may not be that much of a stretch. Android will be more familiar to customers than Chrome OS in many cases. And if all else fails, someone could use Lenovo's all in one as pricey dumb monitor attached to a laptop.
Since we're in the post-PC era, hardware manufacturers are going to try a little bit of everything to sell devices and preserve some profit margin. Android seems like a good experimental OS for PC makers. There's not a lot to lose and potential gains ahead. Rest assured other PC vendors will hop on the Android bandwagon.
ZDNet's Monday Morning Opener is our opening salvo for the week in tech. As a global site, this editorial publishes on Monday at 8am AEST in Sydney, Australia, which is 6pm Eastern Time on Sunday in the US. It is written by a member of ZDNet's global editorial board, which is comprised of our lead editors across Asia, Australia, Europe, and the United States.
ZDNet's Monday Morning OpenerEarlier this week, General David Perkins, the commander of the US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) spoke at the Association of the US Army’s Global Force symposium, where he discussed the threats that the US military would begin to face in the coming years. One notable example is how a US ally recently shot down a $200 consumer drone with a Patriot Missile.
Perkins’ talk during the symposium focused on the complexity of a military organization in the field, and how the interconnected nature of air, ground, and sea forces can lead to a fragmented response to a threat between the commanders who are in charge of specific areas. He specifically spoke about the necessity for commanders to address threats holistically. He used one specific example of how this occurs on the battlefield: hostile, civilian Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs). “The gut instinct was,” he explains, “that’s an air defense problem, because they’re in the air.”
“In fact,” he went on to say, “we have a very close ally of ours that was dealing with a adversary using small quadcopter UASs, and they shot it down with a Patriot missile.” The problem, he said, wasn’t effectiveness: the tiny drone didn’t stand a chance — the issue is economics. The situation showed: whoever was flying the drone now knows that they can easily undermine this unnamed ally with the missiles. All they need to do is buy more cheap drones and fly them, running up the operational costs of that military.
using a $3.4 million missile to destroy a civilian drone is overkill
As Perkins notes, using a $3.4 million missile to destroy a civilian drone is enormous overkill. The solution to avoiding this in the future is for a commander to recognize the nature of the issue from the onset. Rather than defining the problem as a threat to one’s airspace, for which a missile is usually an appropriate response, looking for solutions across the larger military organization might present a new, more appropriate response. It’s like recognizing that while a fly buzzing around is a nuisance, a fly swatter is a better solution than a shotgun.
Recognizing this approach is going to be crucial for the US military (and allies) moving forward. While militaries around the world have invested billions of dollars in drones in the last decade, the low cost and increased availability of drones aimed for a civilian consumer marketplace have made the aircraft a real threat on the battlefield. We’ve already seen them show up: last October, ISIS fighters rigged up such a drone with explosives and used it to kill a pair of Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq. The group has also used these drones to observe enemy positions during the Syrian civil war. When they do show up, the military will need to realize that the best solution will be for commanders to identify the scale of the problem, and figure out the most appropriate solution based on all resources they have at their disposal. Otherwise, the advantages that the US can bring to the battlefield will be severely undermined, making the fight all the more difficult.As regards the garment sector, the bill eases the condition for availing tax incentives under Section 80JJAA of the Income Tax Act, 1961.(Source: Reuters)
A bill to provide tax incentives to the garment sector and enable the government to raise customs duty on marble and granite from 10 to 40 per cent was approved by Lok Sabha today after Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said these measures will help in creating jobs and protect domestic industry from import surge.
The Taxation Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2016 also seeks to expand the definition of “demerger” with a view to facilitate the splitting or reconstruction of erstwhile public sector companies.
The changes in the Income Tax Act will give effect to the conditions attached to the transfer of shares by the government, Jaitley said, adding it would enable the Centre to make use of land belonging to the erstwhile VSNL which has remained with the government following privatisation of the telecom PSU 14 years ago.
The taxation amendment bill, which provides for three changes, was passed by the Lok Sabha by voice vote after a short debate.
As regards the garment sector, the bill eases the condition for availing tax incentives under Section 80JJAA of the Income Tax Act, 1961.
“In view of the seasonal nature of the business of the manufacturing of apparel, there is need to reduce the period of employment of an employee who is employed in this business from 240 days to 150 days,” said the state of objects and reasons of the Bill.
The incentive, Jaitley added, is aimed at making Indian “apparel industry competitive, so that they are able to make the cost advantage. I am sure with these incentives, the industry would be able to contribute a large number of jobs.”
As far as customs duty on marble and granite is concerned, he said the measure will give flexibility to the government to raise duty to WTO bound rate of 40 per cent with a view to protect domestic industry from the onslaught of importNational Security Advisor Tom Donilon will travel to Beijing on May 26-28 ahead of the leaders’ meeting in California.
U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping will hold their first official meetings since Xi assumed China's presidency on June 7-8 in California, the U.S. National Security Council (NSC) said on Monday.
“President Obama will meet with President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China on June 7-8 in California. The early June meeting will be President Obama’s first meeting with Xi Jinping since he became China’s President,” the NSC announced via its Twitter account (@NSCPress) late Monday afternoon.
“The two leaders will review progress & challenges in U.S.-China relations & discuss ways to enhance cooperation in the years ahead,” the NSC went on to say.
The two leaders previously met when then-Vice President Xi Jinping traveled to Washington, DC in February 2012 at the invitation of U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden. During that trip Xi also met with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, and members of the U.S. Congress.
During his U.S. trip Xi also visited Los Angeles where he was met by California Governor Jerry Brown and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. In California, Xi and Governor Brown began working on a Memorandum of Understanding that was finalized during Brown’s trip to China back in April of this year.
Since Obama won reelection and Xi formally inherited power, the Obama administration has dispatched Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, Secretary of State John Kerry, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, among other officials, to Beijing.
Obama and Xi have also talked by phone and Obama hosted China's incoming Ambassador to the U.S., Cui Tiankai at the White House in April.
The new sides have pledged to develop a new type of great power relationship, although the exact meaning of the phrase has been a source of speculation.
Also on its Twitter feed on Monday, the NSC said that “National Security Advisor Tom Donilon will travel to Beijing on May 26-28 to prepare for this meeting between POTUS [President of the United States] and President Xi.” Donilon has long served as President Obama’s point man on relations with China.
Interestingly, earlier this month California media outlets announced that Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa would travel to China from May 26 to May 29 to promote tourism, trade and investment. It was not clear if he would meet with President Xi on the trip."Character" (seen above) created by radical performance artist to, "confront issues of gender, patriarchy and the mainstreaming of authoritarian politics in America."
Minneapolis MN --- In news that stunned both the political and media world, it was revealed today that the outspoken and at times controversial Republican congresswoman from Minnesota's 6th district, previously known as "Michele Bachmann", is actually an elaborately staged performance by experimental artist "Trinity Ohm." Ms. Ohm, born Rebbecca Greene, explained that while she was satisfied with the direction of what she calls her "Cycle of Rage", she felt that the Bachmann character she had created, defined by her extreme right-wing politics and propensity to spout thoroughly outrageous claims on TV and radio, had run its course. "I was hoping that as of late, I could sort of 'out' myself by running off a series of the most paranoid and ludicrous swill imaginable," said Ms. Ohm in an interview. "Like when I seemed to imply the Democrats were responsible for spreading Swine Flu or that Obama's Americorp program was tantamount to the creation of 'government re-education camps', or when I suggested that (fellow Minnesota congressman and Muslim) Keith Ellison was connected to terrorists, but unfortunately it only seemed to further my credibility." Ohm said she simply, "wanted to expose how the media phallocracy normalizes racism and homophobia in American society," but eventually found that she had gotten more than she bargained for. "I never thought I would actually get elected, but when I did, I guess I just ran with it."
No stranger to outlandish and "guerrilla-style" art projects, the openly-gay Ohm said she created the Bachmann character as part of her ongoing mission to use experimental performance art to, "confront issues of gender, patriarchy, and the mainstreaming of authoritarian politics in America." Previously, Ohm was best known for her video art project "Tyrannosaurus Sex", a five hour video, which featured a nude Ohm, with a latex phallus attached to her forehead, making then destroying balloon animals, as well as her attempts to book herself as a children's entertainer who performed in full black-face. "When I spoke at CPAC and said 'You be the man' to Michael Steele, I was like 'this gig is over. I must have made someone suspicious that I was putting them on,'" said Ohm. "I mean, anyone can awkwardly try to relate to a black man by dropping 'you da man', but 'you be the man?' Really?"
According to Ohm, previous attempts to "out" herself, and end "this stage of the cycle" include the promotion |
Allahu Akbar" ("God is Great"), during the firefight.
"We had no intelligence that he could be in Milan," police chief Antonio De Iesu said.
"They had no perception that it could be him otherwise they would have been much more cautious."
He was identified by his fingerprints.
Amri used at least six different names and three nationalities in his previous travels around Europe.
'Without a shadow of a doubt' Berlin attacker is dead
He went to Italy in 2011 and spent time there, including three-and-a-half years in prison for setting fire to a refugee centre.
Amri arrived in Germany late last year and unsuccessfully sought asylum.
He was seen as a potential threat long before the attack this week - and was even kept under covert surveillance for six months.
But authorities failed to deport him because he lacked valid identity papers and Tunisia initially denied he was a citizen.
Amri stayed in Berlin at least for a few hours after the attack, with footage showing him at a mosque in the early hours of Friday.Image caption The pots were found at the foot of a standing stone which had fallen over
Two Bronze Age burial pots containing human remains have been found at the base of a standing stone in Angus.
Archaeologists excavated the ground around the Carlinwell Stone at Airlie, near Kirriemuir, after it fell over earlier in the winter.
Both pots - known as collared urns - could be up to 4,000 years old and were typically used in early Bronze age cremation burials.
The 7ft (2.1m) high monolith will be re-erected on Friday.
One of the pots is about 4in (10cm) in diameter, and the other is about 8in, the archaeologists said.
Melanie Johnson, from CFA Archaeology of Musselburgh, said: "The pots are typical of early Bronze Age cremation burials.
"People were burned on pyres and their remains gathered, put into pots and buried upside down in a pit."
Rubbing stones
Ms Johnson said there was "plenty of bone" inside the pots, which would be enough to determine the gender and age of the person, and if they had illnesses or trauma wounds.
"They will be taken to a lab in Edinburgh, and radio-carbon dated," she added.
John Sheriff, an investigator with the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historic Monuments of Scotland, said it was impossible to date the stone precisely but it is very likely to be neolithic or Bronze Age, and could "easily" be 4,000 years old.
He said: "This goes some way to proving that Carlinwell Stone is a genuine prehistoric standing stone, rather than something put up later.
"There was a fashion for putting up rubbing stones for cows during the 19th Century to stop them ruining the dykes by pushing against them, and they looked like standing stones, but we can say for sure this is prehistoric because of its great height.
"Human bones were found at the base of the stone in the early 18th Century, and my hunch is they were also Bronze Age, although it's possible there is no connection."
Soil samples from around the stone's socket will be analysed and any organic material found radio-carbon dated if possible.
That would go some way to solving the mystery of whether the stone was erected to mark the graves, or whether the pots were put in place afterwards.When you develop mobile applications you should always be alert on the performance and always optimize. In this blog post I will walk you through a very effective pattern that describes optimizing the loading time of an application when using Angular. Meet "Angular Lazy Loading".
You may now watch the full Angular/Vue.js code sharing webinar from June 2018 on YouTube!
Developing mobile apps with Angular may result in an application file that is too large and affects the startup time. Luckily, the Angular router provides a great feature called lazy loading to help us decrease the initial loading time.
What is lazy loading?
With lazy loading we can split our application to feature modules and load them on-demand. The main benefit is that initially we can only load what the user expects to see at the start screen. The rest of the modules are only loaded when the user navigates to their routes.
Check out this Victor Savkin's blog post for more in-depth information about lazy loading.
Using lazy loading with NativeScript
The Angular built-in module loader uses SystemJS. However, when developing NativeScript apps we don't have to set up SystemJS to create lazy loaded modules. We can use the NativeScript module loader, distributed with NativeScript Angular (the recommended way), write our own module loader or not use a module loader for lazy loading at all.
In the following sections we will use the simple lazyNinjas app which has two modules - the HomeModule (not lazy loaded) and the NinjasModule (lazy loaded). We'll cover the different methods for enabling lazy loading in the next sections. Take a minute to make yourself familiar with the ninjas - download the app from github and run it.
Providing the NativeScript module loader
We can replace the default application module loader by providing another in our root NgModule. For our NativeScript applications, we recommend using the NSModuleFactoryLoader:
Now, let's take a look at our router configuration:
The `routes` array is our app's actual router configuration.
First, we are adding the HomeModule routes using the ES2015 spread operator ('...').
...homeRoutes,
Then, we register the lazy loaded module. When the user navigates to '/ninjas', Angular will load NinjasModule located in './ninjas/ninjas.module'.
{ path: "ninjas", loadChildren: "./ninjas/ninjas.module#NinjasModule", }
In the file "./ninjas/ninjas.module.ts", we have the class definition for our NinjasModule, along with its routes. We import the routes using the `forChild` method of the `NativeScriptRouterModule`. Here's how it looks like:
That's all! We recommend using this method for lazy loading when working with NativeScript applications.
If we want to have nested lazy modules, we should provide the module loader in all NgModules that have lazy loadable routes. For reference, check out the nested-lazy-modules branch in the lazyNinjas repository.
In the following sections, we'll go over two other ways that can be used in more complicated scenarios.
Providing a callback to the `loadChildren` property
Remember the loadChildren method from our router configuration? No? Here's it again:
const routes = [...homeRoutes, { path: "ninjas", loadChildren: "./ninjas/ninjas.module#NinjasModule" } ];
We use it to specify the path to the NinjasModule. Internally, the module loader takes that string and uses it to load module from the file. However, we can pass a callback instead of a string. For example:
loadChildren: () => require("./ninjas/ninjas.module.js")["NinjasModule"]
Let's see what happens step by step.
First of all, in the "./ninjas/ninjas.module.ts" file we exported our NgModule. This is transpiled to the following JavaScript code:
That allows us to require the module object (exports) as we do in the callback, passed to the `loadChildren` property, and query for the "NinjasModule".
loadChildren: () => require("./ninjas/ninjas.module.js")["NinjasModule"]
We can also omit the extension of the file, and write the above as:
loadChildren: () => require("./ninjas/ninjas.module")["NinjasModule"]
You can find that version of the app in the callback-loading branch.
Providing a custom module loader
Instead of passing a callback to every `loadChildren` property, we can extract the loading logic to a module loader. That's pretty much why we recommend using NativeScript module loader. But we can also create our own loader and use it instead.
Let's take a look at the NinjaModuleLoader used in our simple app:
The loader implements the `NgModuleFactoryLoader`, which has a single method - `load` with one parameter - the path, which we'll pass to the `loadChildren` property. We'll adopt the same syntax that the built-in module loader uses. As stated in the Angular documentation, "lazy loaded module location is a string, not a type... the string identifies both the module file and the module class, the latter separated from the former by a #."
We should change all `loadChildren` properties in our router configuration. Luckily, we have only one:
loadChildren: "./ninjas/ninjas.module#NinjasModule"
The private `splitPath` method of the NinjasModuleLoader is where we extract the module file location and the exported module name. Then we can simply require the module in the same way as in our callback function:
let loadedModule = require(modulePath)[exportName];
Extracting the loading logic allows us to check if the module exists and throw a meaningful error message if it doesn't.
if (!loadedModule) {
throw new Error(`Cannot find "${exportName}" in "${modulePath}"`);
}
If the module was successfully required, we compile asynchronously it with the Angular compiler:
return this.compiler.compileModuleAsync(loadedModule);
Finally, we need to register our module loader in the root module*.
You can find the final version of the app in the custom-module-loader branch.
* Note that you can have a different module loader for every NgModule!
Benefits from lazy loading
For a real-life NativeScript app with lazy loaded modules, you can check out our SDK Examples. It has more than 100 different components, each with its own route, and ~15 feature modules. The following table presents the startup times with and without lazy loading.
Platform Device No lazy loading With lazy loading Android Nexus 5 ~13s ~4s
For our 2.5 release we are working to enable Ahead of time compilation and Webpack 2 with treeshaking and obfuscation, which will also improve the loading time significantly. Expect an update on this in the following weeks.How overweight was Henry VIII? Who were the country’s most superstitious monarchs? Which king desperately wanted to be a fireman? Who was the first member of the Royal family to own a car? Why does the Queen have corgis?
A new book published this week – a godsend to those of us who are gripped by royal trivia – provides answers to these questions, along with scores more regal conundrums.
For centuries, the people of Britain have been fascinated by the personal lives of their kings and queens – a fascination matched by a determination from members of the Royal family to protect themselves from their subjects’ prying eyes.
Now, How Fat Was Henry VIII? And 101 Other Questions on Royal History attempts to strip away the mystique surrounding the Royal family by using previously unpublished evidence to unearth new facts about the lives and loves of our monarchs.
Royal rumours, romances, scandals, assassinations, plots, courtiers, castles and coronations all come under scrutiny, and the results are surprising and, at times, amusing. Here, The Sunday Telegraph highlights a few entertaining revelations…
How fat was Henry VIII?
Studies of suits of armour belonging to Henry VIII – and now at the Tower of London – show how the Tudor monarch went from being a tall, handsome and decidedly thin young man to someone who would now be considered clinically obese.
The king, who ruled from 1509, ballooned from a 32in waist in 1512, aged 21, to a 54in waist just 33 years later. It is calculated that shortly before his death in 1547 – aged 55 – Henry VIII was nearly 30 stone.
In his final years, the king could barely walk. Instead, he had to be carried around on specially constructed sedan chairs. After he died, he was placed in a vast elm coffin which took 16 Yeomen of the Guard, “of exceptional heights and strength”, to manoeuvre.
Historic records show perhaps why Henry VIII was quite so large. At Hampton Court, the royal home that he “acquired” from his doomed Lord Chancellor Thomas Wolsey, archaeologists discovered 55 kitchen rooms, requiring a staff of around 200, who made twice-daily meals for a court of 600.
In one year alone, the king and his court devoured 1,240 oxen, 8,200 sheep, 2,330 deer, 760 calves, 1,870 pigs, 53 wild boar and a multitude of fish and sea life, ranging from cod to a whale. This food, plus an unknown quantity of fowl, swans and peacocks, was washed down with 600,000 gallons of ale.
Which king would have liked to have been a fireman?
The “king” who wanted to be a fireman was Albert Edward, Prince of Wales (later Edward VII). His interest in firefighting began in 1864, when there was a blaze in the nursery of Marlborough House, the home of the Prince and Princess of Wales.
The Prince of Wales helped put out the burning floorboards and organised servants in a human chain to carry jugs and buckets of water. He got such a buzz from his actions that he asked the fire brigade if he could assist with fighting future major fires in the capital. His wish was granted.
After donning a fireman’s uniform and helmet, he was present when a blaze destroyed the 17th-century Saville House in Leicester Square in 1865. Queen Victoria, his mother, was said to disapprove of such “gallivanting”, but to no avail.
Who was Britain’s first royal car owner?
Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, was the first member of the Royal family to own a car. He had his first drive in a “horseless carriage” – a Daimler – on a private road in February 1896, aged 55. In 1898, while some were still branding the new invention “dirty” and “evil”, he drove a vehicle for the first time on public roads. He bought his first car – again, a Daimler – in 1900. In 1905, by then Edward VII, he bought no fewer than seven Daimlers in a single year.
Who was the first king to have a crown?
It is now believed that the first king to wear a crown for his coronation was Edward the Elder, King of the West Saxons, who ruled from AD 899 to 924. His coronation took place on or around June 8, AD 900, at Kingston upon Thames and was conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Edward, who was the second son of Alfred the Great, was the first king to proclaim himself “by the gift of God’s grace, King of the Anglo-Saxons”.
Which king invented the handkerchief?
Richard II is credited with inventing the handkerchief more than 600 years ago. The king, who ruled from 1377 to 1399, had a effete court and was thought to have been homosexual, due to his foppish dress sense and the fact that his “favourites” were male. His interest in clothes is said to have led him to make his invention. The Household Rolls noted “little pieces [of cloth] for the King to wipe and clean his nose”.
Which monarch was the greatest gambler?
Many kings and queens have enjoyed a flutter. But the most notorious gambler of all was Edward VII. He was at his most reckless while Prince of Wales, when he ran up so much debt playing cards that Lord Palmerston, the statesman, wrote to Queen Victoria warning of her son’s gambling habit. His largest bet on the horses was £600, on a nag called Matchbox that ran in Paris in 1894. It lost.Tom Lee. Fundstrat
The recent plunge in bitcoin's price has cheapened the cryptocurrency and created another buying opportunity for traders.
That's according to Tom Lee, the cofounder of Fundstrat. This summer, while bitcoin was still below $5,000 a coin, he became one of the earliest Wall Street strategists to endorse its rise.
Last week was the worst in three years for bitcoin. As bitcoin plunged, Lee turned even more bullish, raising his mid-2018 target to $20,000 from $11,500. He estimates that today's fair value for bitcoin is $19,103, or about 26% above its current levels.
"We are revising our mid-2018 target to reflect the surge in activity in the past few months — that is, the base of users is up," Lee said in a note on Friday.
"Going forward, our projection is wallets (unique IP address) will rise to 50% by mid-2018 and activity per user up 10% from current levels. Think about it, adoption of bitcoin is still in the earliest stages, in US and globally (it's more than a millennial story outside the US). If wallets double in the future, the value of bitcoin would on a log basis (square) to that growth."
Bitcoin recovered some of its losses over the long Christmas weekend and traded near $15,157 a coin at 7:51 a.m. on Tuesday. Lee told Bloomberg TV on Friday that the pullback was "very healthy."
The number of wallets and transaction activity per wallet help explain about 93% of bitcoin's rise since 2013, according to Lee. He also disagrees with the idea that speculation is the only explanation for bitcoin's rise and says anyone who claims that hasn't done the proper homework.
"If someone says bitcoin's a bubble, it's the smallest, least held bubble I've ever met," Lee told Bloomberg TV. "I don't know very many institutions that own bitcoin. So how can something be deemed a bubble that's only held by a few?"Michael Snyder
Economic Collapse
April 4, 2013
What would you do if you logged in to your bank account someday and it showed that you had a zero balance and your bank had no record that you ever had any money in your account? What would you do if all of the money in your bank account suddenly disappeared in a single moment? If you had not kept any paper records, which most Americans do not, it would be exceedingly difficult to prove to the bank that you actually had any money in the bank. If you don’t think that something like this could ever happen in the United States, you might want to think again. Cyber attacks against major banks in the United States are becoming more powerful and more sophisticated with each passing month. In fact, major U.S. bank websites have been offline for a total of 249 hours over the past six weeks. And just last month, thousands upon thousands of Chase customers logged into their bank accounts only to discover that their balances had all been reset to zero. Anyone that would want to cause complete and total economic chaos in the United States could accomplish it very easily by wiping out all of our bank account records. So please do not keep all of your money in a single bank, and from now on please keep a paper copy of all of your bank account statements. At some point it is likely that one of these cyber attacks will cause permanent damage to our banking system, and you want to be protected.
The mainstream media has generally been very quiet about the massive cyber attacks against our major banks, but behind the scenes authorities are truly alarmed. They don’t know how to stop these attacks, and they just keep getting more intense and more sophisticated.
Could you imagine how you would feel if you logged in to your bank account and all of your money was gone? That is exactly what happened to some Chase customers last month. The following is from a recent CNET article…
JP Morgan Chase denied this evening that it had suffered a hack that many customers claimed had suddenly reduced their checking account balances to zero. After discovering the apparently empty accounts via the Internet or mobile devices, many Chase banking customers turned to Twitter to express their frustration and show screen shots of zero balances. Other users were greeted with messages that their bank account balances were unavailable.
But this was most definitely not an isolated incident. That same article noted that Chase and many of our other large banks have had their websites taken down for extended periods of time lately…
Customers’ suspicions about a possible security breach are natural, with the zero balances appearing less than a week after a massive distributed-denial-of-service attack rendered Chase’s Web sites useless for many hours. Customers trying to use the site’s tools were instead greeted with a note that the site was “temporarily down.” Hackers have ratcheted up their assaults on financial institutions in recent months, using DDoS attacks to take down Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Chase, Citigroup, HSBC, and others.
In fact, as I mentioned above, major U.S. bank websites have been offline for an astounding 249 hours over the last six weeks alone. The attacks just keep getting larger and bank officials are becoming very alarmed about the power of these cyber attacks. The following is from an article that was posted on CNBC this week…
Major U.S. bank websites have been offline a total of 249 hours in the past six weeks, perhaps the clearest indication yet that American companies are prime targets in an unrelenting, global cyber conflict. The heavier-than-usual outages are the result of a remarkable, sustained attack that began seven months ago and repeatedly knocks banks offline for hours at a time, frustrating consumers and bank security professionals alike. “Literally, these banks are just in war rooms, sitting at controls trying to stop (the attacks),” said Avivah Litan, a bank security analyst with Gartner Group, a consulting firm. “The frightening thing is (the attackers) are not using as much resources as they have on call. The attacks could be bigger.”
So who is behind these attacks?
Some are blaming Chinese hackers, others believe that Iran is behind the attacks, and yet others are convinced that it is the work of Islamic terrorists.
It is kind of frightening that they cannot positively identify who is behind these attacks. Whoever it is, they sure do seem to have a tremendous amount of resources and they are very sophisticated.
And in the future, it may not be hackers on the other side of the globe that are attacking our banks. In fact, if someone wanted to “recapitalize the banks”, all they would have to do is wipe out all of our bank account records (including all backup records). Suddenly trillions of dollars of “unsecured liabilities” (that is what our bank accounts are) would be wiped out and the banks would suddenly be solvent again. Anyone that could not produce evidence that they actually had money in the banks would be in a lot of trouble. It would be the largest single wealth transfer in the history of the world, and it would throw the U.S. economy into utter chaos. This is a scenario that I am exploring in my new novel which will be coming out later this month.
In addition, there is the constant threat that a massive EMP burst could fry all of our electronics (including the banking records), but that is a topic that I have covered in a previous article.
And of course another way that your bank account could be wiped out in a single moment is if the government decides to “legally” steal it. We just witnessed this happen in Cyprus. In February, the Central Bank of Cyprus swore that such a thing could never possibly happen, but then one month later it did happen. The politicians will lie to your face until the very day comes when they steal your money.
Sadly, a very similar thing could easily happen in the United States someday. As I wrote about yesterday, the big banks are making incredibly reckless bets with our money. When those bets go bad, our money could very well be used to cover those bets.
One way this could be accomplished is by using a practice known as “rehypothecation”. It sounds complicated, but it really isn’t. Basically, the banks use money that clients have entrusted to them to cover their own gambling debts. This is how rehypothecaton is defined by Investopedia…
“The practice by banks and brokers of using, for their own purposes, assets that have been posted as collateral by their clients.”
An excellent article by Jeff Nielson detailed how this could result in the big banks grabbing our money when their trillions of dollars of reckless bets go bad…
1) Our banking regulators knowingly allow financial institutions to engage in recklessly misleading (if not outright fraudulent) contracts with their clients, through the use of complex “small print” in their account contracts with clients. 2) The three largest U.S. “banks” by deposit (JP Morgan, Bank of America, Citigroup) have made bets in their own rigged casino, which total well in excess of $100 trillion, an amount which completely dwarfs their total, combined deposits (and assets). 3) A large portion of those bets occur in the $60+ trillion credit default swap market. Pay-outs in these markets can (and do) exceed 300 times the amount of the original bet. It is bets in this market which “blew up” AIG, requiring more than $150 billion in immediate government aid. 4) Following the Crash of ’08; these same banks mooched a package of hand-outs, tax-breaks and “guarantees” (i.e. future hand-outs) from the Bush regime in excess of $15 trillion, the last time their gambling debts went bad on them – and all of these banks have been allowed to dramatically increase the total amount of their gambling since then. 5) It would take only a minor change in the gambling contracts in which these bankers engage to allow their creditors to seize funds out of ordinary bank accounts. 6) The existing language for the bank accounts of these U.S. banks is possibly already so vague (and prejudicial to clients) that it would allow these banks to reinterpret the terms of these bank accounts – and allow rehypothecation to be used to rob the holders of ordinary bank accounts, people who themselves make no “bets” in markets whatsoever. Alternately, customers could be blitzed with an offer for “new and improved” bank accounts, where terms allowing rehypothecation are slipped into the contract, with the banks knowing that the “regulators” will do nothing to warn account-holders of the gigantic risk they are taking.
But we are all covered by deposit insurance, right?
That is what the people of Cyprus thought too.
As we just saw in Cyprus, when there is a “banking crisis” sometimes government steps in and suddenly changes all of the rules overnight even though the vast majority of the population is against it.
Hopefully you can see that no bank account will ever truly be “safe” ever again.
Your money may be safe today, and your money may be there next week, but someday it could disappear in a single moment.
And the general public is definitely starting to lose faith in the banking system. Google searches for the term “bank run” have been absolutely spiking recently. Just check out this chart which shows that searches for “bank run” are now the highest that they have ever been.
So what should we all do to protect ourselves?
As I mentioned earlier, it is important to not have all of your money in one bank, and from now on you will want to permanently keep paper copies of all of your bank account statements.
Someday you may need those statements in order to prove that you actually had money in the bank.
Our world is becoming increasingly unstable, and at some point financial disaster is going to strike.
By taking prudent precautions now, hopefully you will be able to minimize the damage to your family.At last, Google is revealing its split on AdSense: 68% to publishers for content ads, 51% for search ads.
I had two primary complaints about Google in my otherwise admittedly and obviously wet-kiss book, What Would Google Do?: Google's policy aiding government censorship in China and its opacity on advertising relationships. The first is pretty much fixed and this morning, Google is addressing teh second. so is the second. (Uh-oh, now I have fewer excuses not to be a fanboy.)
At a press meeting with Google execs in Davos in January, I pressed them about the advertising openness, having discussed the issue with publishers at DLD in Munich right before. In Davos, Google's president of global sales, Nikesh Arora, replied that the company was reconsidering its transparency on AdSense. This morning, they're revealing the deal in a blog post (to which I'll link as soon as it's up; this news was embargoed for 10a ET). From the post:
Today, in the spirit of greater transparency with AdSense publishers, we're sharing the revenue shares for our two main AdSense products — AdSense for content and AdSense for search.... AdSense for content publishers, who make up the vast majority of our AdSense publishers, earn a 68% revenue share worldwide. This means we pay 68% of the revenue that we collect from advertisers for AdSense for content ads that appear on your sites. The remaining portion that we keep reflects Google's costs for our continued investment in AdSense — including the development of new technologies, products and features that help maximize the earnings you generate from these ads. It also reflects the costs we incur in building products and features that enable our AdWords advertisers to serve ads on our AdSense partner sites. Since launching AdSense for content in 2003, this revenue share has never changed. We pay our AdSense for search partners a 51% revenue share, worldwide, for the search ads that appear through their implementations. As with AdSense for content, the proportion of revenue that we keep reflects our costs, including the significant expense, research and development involved in building and enhancing our core search and AdWords technologies. The AdSense for search revenue share has remained the same since 2005, when we increased it. We also offer additional AdSense products including AdSense for mobile applications, AdSense for feeds, and AdSense for games. We aren't disclosing the revenue shares for these products at this time because they're quickly evolving, and we're still learning about the costs associated with supporting them. Revenue shares for these products can vary from product to product since our costs in building and maintaining these products can vary significantly. Additionally, the revenue shares for AdSense for content and AdSense for search also can vary for major online publishers with whom we negotiate individual contracts. Of course, we can't guarantee that the revenue share will never change (our costs may change significantly, for example), but we don't have any current plans to do so for any AdSense product. Over the next few months we'll begin showing the revenue shares for AdSense for content and AdSense for search right in the AdSense interface.
They're also not revealing splits for YouTube, a program that just started. Note also that big publishers, such as the New York Times Company, have long known — and negotiated — their splits, which also aren't revealed. A Google spokesman told me last night that these splits hold for classic AdSense pay-per-click ads and also for newer display, CPM ads. They also hold globally.
How do the splits compare? It's not uncommon for ad networks to take 50% or more. BlogAds, one of the more generous networks, customarily takes 30% on sales it makes and has other models (if sales come through a publisher site, only 14%; they also offer networked sales).Scientists first saw the element 117 at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2010. Since then they have been waiting on confirmation of the discovery by other labs. A new paper reveals that a German team has finally had success: They've made two atoms of the superheavy element.
The findings will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.
Elements beyond atomic number 104 are referred to as super-heavy elements. These superheavy elements aren't found in nature, they live only in the lab, and only exist for tiny periods of time when they are created.
Scientists think that if they make the elements big enough, some will be stable enough to survive for a relatively long amount of time. They can then be observed and their properties cataloged. These stable super-heavy elements could have untold practical uses, the researchers told LiveScience.
Creating Element 117
To start, a beam of super-fast-moving calcium ions (blue) were shot at a target made of Berkelium atoms (orange) for 153 days. These atoms don't usually hit each other in a way that the two fuse together, they usually just fly past each other.
But once in a blue moon, the two elements collide in such a way that their nuclei became one — the superheavy element 117. Only six atoms of 117 were created in the first experiment. Only two were created in the latest confirmation experiment.
The collision forms the element, but it's unstable and it falls apart pretty quickly. The element releases alpha particles (a type of radiation that contains two protons and two neutrons) and decays into the element 115 and then 113.
After decay, the element then splits into two smaller elements through nuclear fission.
"The discovery of element 117 is the culmination of a decade-long journey to expand the periodic table and write the next chapter in heavy element research," Yuri Oganessian, of the Joint Institute For Nuclear Research, said in a 2010 press release for the original discovery of the element.
Because the discovery has finally been confirmed, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) needs to review the data, and accept the confirmation, then they will determine which institution will be able to propose a name. It is temporarily named ununseptium, according to LiveScience.Despite an unlucky launch day, Larian's latest RPG Divinity: Original Sin 2 came roaring out of the gate last week, enjoying both critical acclaim and remarkably strong sales for what is, let's be honest here, a pretty niche genre. Yesterday it broke the 75,000 concurrent user mark on Steam, today it's even higher—a little over 85,000, according to Steam Spy—and even more impressive than that, Larian boss Swen Vincke told Eurogamer that it has already sold nearly a half-million copies.
"It is fantastic, but it is also way beyond what we expected. We're close to hitting 500,000 units sold which is a number I believe it took us two or three months with Divinity: Original Sin 1," Vincke said. That's actually pretty close to the mark: The original Original Sin came out on June 30, 2014, and Vincke said in a mid-September blog post that it had achieved a half-million sales somewhere prior to that.
That success presumably makes a console release of Divinity: Original Sin 2 very likely, but Larian's priority right now is the PC release. "We're now focused on delivering our first patch for the PC version, something that is scheduled for this week," Vincke said. "Lots of players means lots of support issues coming in and we're trying to service them as fast as we can. After that, it'll be a long, well-deserved break for the team and then we'll boot up our machines again to work on the next things."
Larian rolled out a hotfix yesterday that should take care of problems that players have encountered when saving games, and Vincke said that the studio is also working on issues with its servers, which have apparently struggled under the unexpected load. But the problems clearly aren't putting off RPG fans: Original Sin 2 remains atop the Steam Top Sellers chart and holds fourth place on the Game Stats list, behind only PUBG, CS:GO, and Dota 2.
We're still working on our full Divinity: Original Sin 2 review—while you wait, here's a good list of ten things you should know about the game before you get started on your adventures.Brittany Maynard Has Sadly Ended Her Battle With Brain Cancer in Oregon, Activist & Inspiration To Many Passes Away At Age 29
Bittany Maynard fulfilled her final wish Saturday, purposely ending her own life on her own schedule, activists close to her family confirmed Sunday night.
She was 29. She was diagnosed earlier this year with a fatal brain tumor — told the cancer likely would kill her in six months. But she had no intention, she said, of allowing the disease to control how she lived, or how she died.
Maynard had planned since spring — a bittersweet stretch packed with “bucket list” moments, seizures and excruciating headaches — to escape the final stages of her cancer on Saturday by drinking a lethal mixture of water, sedatives and respiratory-system depressants.
“Brittany suffered increasingly frequent and longer seizures, severe head and neck pain, and stroke-like symptoms,” according to a statement Sunday night from Sean Crowley, spokesman for Compassion & Choices, a national nonprofit working to expand end-of-life options. “As symptoms grew more severe, she chose to abbreviate the dying process by taking the aid-in-dying medication she had received months ago. This choice is authorized under the Oregon Death With Dignity Act. She died as she intended — peacefully in her bedroom, in the arms of her loved ones,”
– the statement said.
An obituary also was posted to her website Sunday night, although friends have been posting Facebook farewells to Maynard since Saturday night.
“Brittany chose to make a well thought out and informed choice to Die With Dignity in the face of such a terrible, painful, and incurable illness,” the obituary reads. “She moved to Oregon to pass away in a little yellow house she picked out in the beautiful city of Portland. Oregon is a place that strives to protect patient rights and autonomy; she wished that her home State of California had also been able to provide terminally ill patients with the same choice.Image copyright AFP Image caption Wolves are on the rise in France, but greater numbers mean an increase in conflict with humans
A team of wolf hunters is operating in a region of the French Alps to kill wolves that are seen as a threat to livestock.
The teams were supplied by the state after pressure from shepherds and farmers.
In defiance of EU law, the French government has also relaxed the hunting rules to help farmers defend stocks.
However conservationists argue that wolves are vital to ensuring a proper balance in nature.
In addition, the owner of an estate in the Scottish Highlands has said he is pressing ahead with his plan to create a fenced-in South African-style game reserve as a means of reintroducing the extinct species to the UK.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Claire Marshall joined wolf tracker Troy Bennett in the French Alps
Livestock losses
There were four days of protests in the region after a summer of increasing numbers of wolf attacks on sheep. The disgruntled farmers also briefly kidnapped the head of a national park in the Alps.
We have to find a balance. A wolf free in the natural world is amazing - but it's not compatible with shepherding Therri Fadda, Shepherd, Haute Provence
In response, the government has relaxed the hunting rules and has supplied wolf |
Irish-American and Jewish-American communities, as well. It was known in Cuban-American communities as bolita ("little ball").[citation needed]
By the early 20th century, the game was associated with poor and working-class communities, as it could be played for as little as a penny. Also, unlike state lotteries, bookies could extend credit to the bettors and policy winners could avoid paying income tax. Different policy banks would offer different rates, although a payoff of 600 to 1 was typical.[4] Since the odds of winning were 999:1 against the bettors, the expected profit for racketeers was enormous.[3]
Boston [ edit ]
In Boston (as well as elsewhere in the northeast), the game was commonly referred to as the "nigger pool", including in the city's newspapers, due to the game's popularity in black neighborhoods.[5][6][7] The number was based on the handle from the early races at Suffolk Downs or, if Suffolk was closed, one of the racetracks in New York. The winner could be controlled by manipulating the handle.[6]
After Jerry Angiulo became head of the Mafia in Boston, in 1950, he established a profit sharing plan whereby for every four numbers one of his runners turned in, they would get one for free. This resulted in the numbers game's taking off in Boston. According to Howie Carr, The Boston American was able to stay in business in part because it published the daily number.[6]
During the 1950s, Wimpy and Walter Bennett ran a numbers ring in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood. The Bennetts' protégé Stephen Flemmi took and collected bets for them.
Around the same time, Buddy McLean began forming a gang in Somerville, Massachusetts to, among other criminal activities, run numbers. This would become the Winter Hill Gang.[8] By the 1970s, the Winter Hill Gang, then led by Whitey Bulger, moved bookies under its protection away from the numbers game to sports betting, as the state was starting its own lottery, and the National Football League did not allow betting on its games outside of Nevada; thereby Massachusetts could not compete with them. Despite the creation of the state lottery, however, the numbers game's demise in Massachusetts was not immediate, as the state lottery had a lower payout and was taxed.[6]
Chicago [ edit ]
In the 1940s, Eddie Jones and his brothers earned more than $180,000 per week in the black community. While in jail for income tax evasion, Jones became acquainted with Sam Giancana, a hit-man for hire among top Italian Mafia figures. Back on the streets, the men became friends. Eddie taught Sam everything he knew about the policy game and how to memorize number combinations, and even hired Sam to operate one of his many lucrative establishments.
Sam made his first fortune through Eddie. Aspiring to become a "made man", Sam shared his new knowledge of the policy game with the Dons, who were impressed. By then, the Italian Mafia focused their attention on the Jones market in the black community.
Under orders from the Dons, Sam was instructed to remove Jones from his lucrative position and take over. To avoid being murdered by the mob, Jones walked away from his family enterprise.[9]
Detroit [ edit ]
A 1941 trial exposed Detroit's extensive numbers operations. Among the policy houses operating were "Big Four Mutuale" (owned by John Roxborough, boxer Joe Louis's manager), "Yellow Dog" (owned by Everett Watson), "Tia Juana", "Interstate", "Mexico and Villa" (operated by Louis Weisberg), "New York", "Michigan", and others.[10] Big Four was said in testimony to be doing $800,000 business a year, with profits of up to $6000 a week. Yellow Dog was said to be doing $4,900 daily in business, totaling $1.5 million a year. The grand jury in the trial of 71 defendants charged that 10 policy houses had been paying $600 a month in payoffs equally divided between the chief of police, the head prosecutor and the mayor, with smaller bribes in the $25 to $50 range going to individual police sergeants and lieutenants. Former mayor Richard Reading was said to have received $18,000 in payoffs. Reading, Roxborough, Watson, and several others were convicted on conspiracy charges, with Roxborough receiving a 2 1⁄ 2 - to 5-year sentence, and Reading sentenced to four to five years.
Cleveland [ edit ]
Benny Mason, of the "B&M" policy house, and Buster Mathews of the "Goldfield" policy house, were the main kingpins of the numbers game in 1930s and 1940s Cleveland. In a 1935 raid on the B&M house on E. 46th St., police found 200 policy writers on hand who had handed in their books and were waiting for the payoff.[11] In a 1949 arrest, police picked up a 35-year-old woman named Robinson who told them she had been a policy writer for the past month and a half, at $40 a week. She was writing slips for the Old Kentucky, Goldfield and Last Chance games, and her top sheet showed that she had written $500 in business on that day (which happened to be Good Friday) alone.[12]
By the 1950s, there were 8 rival numbers games operating in black sections of Cleveland, including "California Gold", "Mound Bayou" and "T. & O." The winning three-digit number from 000 to 999 was determined by the closing stock market results in the evening papers, with one digit each being taken from the totals for advances, declines, and unchanged. Bets of up to $2 would be placed with hundreds of numbers writers around the city, who would keep 25% of the money bet as their fee. In the mid-afternoon a runner (locally known as the pickup man or woman) would rendezvous with the writers to collect the policy slips and cash, which would be taken to a central location and totaled on adding machines prior to determining the winners. The runners kept 10% of the money bet as their fee. 65 cents on every dollar bet would be delivered to the "clearinghouse" parlors, which calculated the winners and paid off at 500 to 1 odds, keeping 15 cents on the dollar, on an average day when no "hot" number hit, for themselves. In the evening the runner would make the rounds again to deliver the cash winnings to those writers whose customers had hit the winning number, and winners would be paid. A number of bars, private clubs and taverns around town, including the "Tia Juana", served as centers of the action where bettors and writers would congregate and wait for the winners to be announced.
After a 1955 car bombing in which the girlfriend of Arthur "Little Brother" Drake was killed, police conducted a mass roundup of 28 numbers operators and runners on the east side, including Drake, Geech Bell, Don King, Edward Keeling, Dan Boone, Thomas Turk, and others.[13] The following year Russian gangster Shon Birns tried to keep the peace by setting up a 5-member syndicate of the leading black operators in Cleveland including Don King, Virgil Ogletree, Boone and Keeling to control the game, insure payouts when "hot" numbers which had been overbet hit for large scores, and limit the payoff odds to 500 to 1; Birns also attempted to introduce a new method of determining the winning number. The game was wildly popular; in the 1950s one Cleveland numbers house was said to clear $20,000 a day.[14]
Atlanta [ edit ]
In Atlanta the game was known as "playing the bug." In 1936 The Atlanta Constitution wrote: "Both in the business section and the residential areas, one or more solicitors make their daily morning rounds into every office and every home. Then, in the afternoons, the "pay-off" men make their rounds over the same routes. Their patrons include every class of Atlanta citizens—professional men, businessmen, housewives, and even children."[15] "The bug" was believed by police to be grossing citywide as much as $30,000 in bets a day at its height in 1937-1938. During a police crackdown in 1943, authorities claimed that the game was in decline and "they are lucky if they bank as much as $12,000 to $15,000 a day," after a raid on an alleged headquarters on Parsons Street.[16] In 1944, eight bug rings were believed to be operating in the city, collectively handling a total of $15,000 to $20,000 in bets on an average day. Writers took out a 25% commission before passing on the rest of the day's receipts to the house.[17] Bug writers employed a number of schemes to foil police: in 1936 police observed writers carrying the day's bet slips gathering under the bridge which passes over the railroad tracks at Nelson St. As lottery squad officers watched, a pick-up car pulled up and stopped on the bridge overhead, the writers threw their paper sacks full of bet slips up to it, and the car sped off.[18] In 1937 indictments were brought against the alleged "big shots" of the bug game in Atlanta, including Bob Hogg, the Hall brothers (Albert and Leonard), Flem King, Willie Carter, Walter Cutcliffe, Glenn House, and Henry F. Shorter.[19] Henry Shorter was a barber who ran the game out of his barber shop. In 1944, Shorter was one of a select group of 20 African-American community leaders who were turned away from the polls when they attempted to vote in the Democratic primary; the Rev. M.L. King, father of Martin Luther King Jr., was among the others who participated in this protest.[20]
Bahamas [ edit ]
Number games are popular in many Bahamian communities. While gambling in casinos is legal for tourists visiting the Bahamas, it is forbidden for Bahamian residents. There is also no legalized lottery for Bahamian nationals. As a result, the predominant form of gambling among residents is playing the Numbers. [21]
New York City [ edit ]
The Italian lottery was operated as a racket for the American Mafia, originally in Italian-American neighborhoods such as Little Italy, Manhattan and Italian Harlem by mobsters of the Morello crime family. A young Joseph Bonanno, future boss of the Bonanno crime family, expanded the Italian lottery operation to all of Brooklyn and invested the profits in many legitimate businesses.[22] In the 1930s, Vito Genovese, crime boss of the Genovese crime family, gained control over the Italian Lottery, allowing him to have ample money to invest in nightclubs in Greenwich Village.[23]
Dutch Schultz is said to have rigged this system, thanks to an idea from Otto Berman, by betting heavily on certain races to change the Win, Place and Show numbers that determine the winning lottery number. This allegedly added ten percent to the Mob take.[24]
Harlem [ edit ]
Francis A. J. Ianni, in his book Black Mafia: Ethnic Succession in Organized Crime writes: "By 1925 there were thirty black policy banks in Harlem, several of them large enough to collect bets in an area of twenty city blocks and across three or four avenues." By 1931, there were several big time numbers operators, James Warner, Stephanie St. Clair, Casper Holstein, Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson, Wilfred Brunder, Jose Miro, Joseph Ison, Masjoe Ison and Simeon Francis.[25] The game survived despite periodic police crackdowns.[26]
Legal lotteries [ edit ]
Today, many state lotteries offer similar "daily numbers" games, typically relying on mechanical devices to draw the number. The state's rake is typically 50% rather than the 20–40% of the numbers game. The New York Lottery and Pennsylvania Lottery even use the names "Numbers" and "Daily Number" respectively. Despite the existence of legal alternatives, some gamblers still prefer to play with a bookie for a number of reasons. Among them are the ability to bet on credit, better payoffs, the convenience of calling in one's bet on the telephone, the ability to play if under the legal age, and the avoidance of government taxes.
Gameplay [ edit ]
One of the problems of the early game was to find a way to draw a random number. Initially, winning numbers were set by the daily outcome of a random drawing of numbered balls, or by spinning a "policy wheel", at the headquarters of the local numbers ring. The daily outcomes were publicized by being posted after the draw at the headquarters, and were often "fixed". The existence of rigged games, used to cheat players and drive competitors out of business, later led to the use of widely-published, pseudo-random numbers such as the last three numbers in the published daily balance of the United States Treasury, or the middle three digits of the number of shares traded that day on the New York Stock Exchange.[27]
The use of a central, independently-chosen number allowed for gamblers from a larger area to engage in the same game and it made larger wins possible. It also gave customers confidence in the fairness of the games, which could still generate vast profits even if run honestly as they paid out only around $600 for every $1000 wagered.[27]
When the Treasury began rounding off the balance, many bookies began to use the "mutuel" number. This consisted of the last dollar digit of the daily total handle of the Win, Place and Show bets at a local race track, read from top to bottom. For example, if the daily handle (takings at the racetrack) was:
Win $100 4.25
.25 Place $58 3.56
.56 Show $27.61
then the daily number was 437. By 1936, "The Bug" had spread to cities such as Atlanta where the winning number was determined by the last digit of that day's New York bond sales.[28]
Policy dealers [ edit ]
Policy reformers [ edit ]
Timeline [ edit ]
In popular culture [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]Perfect Dark is a domino piece whose very existence changed the fate of the entire industry. All right, that's a slight exaggeration, but if there had been just one detour to Joanna Dark's debut, a ripple effect could have had long-term ramifications on our favorite way to spend our leisure time. So let's examine what would have happened if Perfect Dark had been pushed back just 18 months and had been released not toward the tail end of the Nintendo 64's existence, but at the launch of the GameCube. Just a warning, this is pure conjecture. But the prospect of what might have been has been gnawing at me for years, and represents one of my favorite alternate takes on video game history. After all, delaying Perfect Dark just one year seems like it would have had negligible results on the surface, but in reality it could have had a major impact.
How Perfect Dark would have changed:
Would Perfect Dark have worked without an accessory?
Although Perfect Dark was showered with near-universal praise, it had severe technical problems that made it nearly unplayable by our current standards. Extra memory (sold separately) was required to enjoy much of what it offered, and even with twice as much RAM, it still suffered from terrible slowdown. Shifting Perfect Dark to the GameCube would have eliminated those problems, ensuring a smoother experience that wouldn't require you to take Dramamine to keep your lunch safely in your belly. Even without any other changes, moving Perfect Dark to more powerful hardware would have elevated the experience so that it was more palatable to everyone.
Why would Rare have been happy to transport the Nintendo 64 version to the GameCube without any changes, though? With so much time to move the game from one platform to the other, Rare could have implemented a few design tweaks to modernize the action. If you remember the Nintendo 64 controller, it had only one analog stick, but that wasn't the case with the GameCube. Moving Perfect Dark would have given you more precision in shooting, which would have been a godsend considering how much aiming the sprawling levels demanded. Imagine how much more satisfying the FarSight would have been if you hadn't had to fight the controller. So, by pushing Perfect Dark back, we would have gotten a game even better than the one that was already so beloved.
How the GameCube would have changed:
Would Nintendo have changed that yellow nub to a proper stick?
The GameCube was a fantastic console. However, despite housing some of Nintendo's most inventive games and a plethora of the best third-party adventures of the day, it struggled to shed its identity as just a place for families to congregate. Perfect Dark would have injected a hard-edged persona from launch day that would have shifted the perception of the purple lunchbox. Remember, people flocked to the Nintendo 64 to play GoldenEye even if the colorful adventures Nintendo was known for didn't strike their fancy, so a spiritual successor to that classic would have engendered the same competitive spirit. Housing the preeminent first-person shooter of the day would have drawn in those who relish using guns to solve problems, instantly expanding the GameCube's potential reach.
With initial success for Rare's futuristic shooter, we would have seen more third parties willing to create Mature-rated games for Nintendo's console, filling out an important segment of the library the Japanese giant was unable to fill itself. And, as long as I'm dreaming, we might have seen one major change to the controller that would have better accommodated Perfect Dark. Its reliance on a right stick might have convinced Nintendo to upgrade the yellow nub to a more functional form, opening the door for more versatility as the console aged. If Rare had pushed Perfect Dark from the Nintendo 64 to the GameCube, we would have seen a demographic shift in who flocked to the console and a more serious rival to the upstart Xbox.
How first-person shooters would have changed:
This is where things get really interesting. Console shooters began to take off with the generation that started early this century. What was popular back then has dictated much of how the genre has evolved, so if Perfect Dark were released in that era, we would have seen an evolutionary split very different from what actually happened. It's important to remember what was popular back then. Halo was still entirely unknown in 2001, and Bungie was a name only Mac diehards had any inkling of. The success of Combat Evolved was not guaranteed, and, if a worthy competitor had stood toe-to-toe against it, the market would have gone in two directions. I don't believe that Perfect Dark GameCube would have crushed Halo before it ever had a chance, but rather that a healthy number of people would have chosen one side or the other, forcing developers to adapt to varying needs.
Would capture the flag still be in Titanfall PC if it had bots?
So what did Perfect Dark offer that was so different from Halo? The differences are almost too numerous to count. Mission design, for instance, included accomplishing specific objectives that changed whenever you increased the difficulty. This is a marked shift from the straight-ahead conquests that Halo demanded, and seeing level design that was as much about investigation as shooting would have offered variety that is desperately lacking in traditional shooters. Furthermore, Perfect Dark not only encouraged the use of bots in competitive play, but let you choose the personalities of your AI-controlled foes. Bots let you design multiplayer experiences in a specific style based on what you were in the mood for, forcing your AI foes to play passively, with chips on their shoulders, and with ruthless efficiency, among many other combat philosophies. This was an idea that was never pushed further, but imagine if other companies had mirrored this approach. Considering how reliant multiplayer games are on their online communities now, how few games catch on with the public, and how quickly the populations die down once a sequel is released, having bots as a standard option would have extended the longevity and injected more variety in modern shooters.
And those aren't the only things that Rare's shooter did differently. Perfect Dark implemented counter-ops, a mode that still doesn't have a modern equivalent. Having one person control the hero and another man the guards who populate campaign levels is a brilliant idea that was never iterated on, just like bot personalities. If Perfect Dark had come out on the GameCube rather than smack-dab between the releases of the Dreamcast and the PlayStation 2 on a dying, underpowered system, it would have had a much wider impact on a genre still getting its footing. It would have been incredible to see other developers build on the level design ideas that Rare started, tinker with versatile AI, and experiment with interesting competitive modes. Instead, we got the disappointing Perfect Dark Zero five years later that couldn't live up to the brilliance of its predecessor.
How Rare would have changed:
Assuming that Perfect Dark carried the torch that GoldenEye first lit, it would have been a massive success for the GameCube. And if Rare were the brains behind this adored shooter, it would have been awfully difficult for Nintendo to let Microsoft swoop in to purchase it. We already know that the Stamper brothers, the heads of Rare at the time, first approached Nintendo when they decided to sell the company. When Nintendo refused, Microsoft jumped at the chance, simultaneously hurting all three companies in one blundering stroke. Seriously, take a look at how each party has been affected since the sale took place way back in 2002. Nintendo struggled to add diversity to the GameCube library, and though the Wii was insanely popular, Rare would have done a great job of churning out quality games during its frequent dry spells. Rare could have also shouldered some of the software burden for the Wii U, which goes for months without compelling games.
Would Nintendo have cancelled Sabreman Stampede?
Microsoft essentially wasted $375 million on a developer that didn't fit within its ecosystem. Rare was built on diversity and experimentation, a company who could make a variety of different games. If you take a look at the developers Microsoft employs, none of them fit within that structure. Turn 10, after all, makes only simulation racers, 343 Industries and Black Tusk were created to churn out sequels to established shooters, and Lionhead has been riding the Fable train for longer than I can remember. Because Rare doesn't have a franchise big enough to warrant that dedication, it jumped around like it had been doing for decades, meeting varying success with each new endeavor. Now it has been stuck working on Kinect Sports for more than five years, and most of the people who made Rare a name worth knowing have long since left.
Clearly, Rare suffered the most from this transaction. If Perfect Dark had established itself as a core element of the GameCube, maybe Rare would have stuck with Nintendo, a company that knew what it was capable of, and continued to nurture it to get the best games possible. Rare had been around for almost 20 years before Microsoft swooped in, and it took only a little bit of time for Rare to become completely irrelevant. That's why this what-if scenario is so appealing to me. Not only would it have changed the GameCube and first-person shooters, but it might have saved Rare from its horrible fate. Now if only I could get my hands on a time machine. Then I could be enjoying another Conker, Battletoads, or who knows what new characters instead of lamenting the death of my favorite developer.1 year ago
Hey Everyone,
So by now you've probably heard that we put out a special episode of Theater Mode that released on Christmas Day. It featured Cannibal the Musical, Trey Parker and Matt Stone's first film that would eventually lead to the creation of South Park. If you haven't seen it, I really recommend you watch it. Overall, it's just a fun movie to watch and we thought it deserved a special spot in the show.
Now on to the main course. Theater Mode will be returning on January 19th with our 50th episode. (PLEASE SEE EDIT BELOW)
So far we have shot 3 episodes and will continue shooting in a week or two. The holiday season it typically tough to shoot around, so we have to begin shooting early (as you may see from some of the episodes) and then take a big 4-6 week break for the holidays.
If you haven't heard, we've been shooting Funhaus Theater Mode. It hasne't been fully announced, but Bruce and Geoff have talked about ti publicly. We flew to L.A. a month ago to get the Funhaus team setup, shooting a few episodes, and beginning to help them with Post Production. We do not have a set date yet on when the episodes will premiere, but you can expect it after AH's season. I will admit, shooting with Funhaus was a treat. They are no strangers to the Mystery Science Theater style, especially after doing shows like Demo Disc and Wheel Haus.
That's all I have for now. 2018 is going to be a good year for Theater Mode fans. I'll post another update on the show when we are farther into Achievement Hunter's next season. Feel free to reply with any questions. I'll answer them as best as I can.
Frequently Asked Question:
Q: Why does AHTM have to stop while the Funhaus and CowChop volume air?
A: I see this question a lot on every social media platform, including the site. All three Theater Mode series are being produced and edited by the same group of people- which is myself, Peyton McLeod (Editor), and Justin Young (Graphic Designer). In short, we cannot work on three different shows simultaneously. In the case of when Cow Chop's volume was in Post-Production as well as airing, we were in the process of shooting the Funhaus volume as well as the Achievement Hunter volume.
EDIT:
We announced today on Off Topic #112 (1/19/2018) that Theater Mode will be postponed. Please wait for an official announcement from RT social outlets (RT Site/Twitter/Reddit) as well as on Off Topic for information on the release date. We are currently moving things around to lineup certain events and releases that will overall bring a better product for the community than we had originally intended for Q1 of 2018.Country, which has the highest rate of domestic abuse in the OECD, creates new charges with tougher penalties for family violence
The New Zealand government has announced sweeping changes to its domestic violence laws, aimed at tackling the country’s poor record on family abuse.
New Zealand has the highest rate of domestic abuse in the OECD. Last year New Zealand police investigated over 100,000 incidents of family violence, with one in every three New Zealand women reporting an experience of sexual or physical abuse in their lifetime.
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A child was present in two-thirds of the 100,000 domestic violence incidents reported to police.
On Tuesday prime minister John Key announced 50 changes to the Domestic Violence Act, including banning coercive or forced marriages, and the creation of three new offences.
Non-fatal strangulation will now become a separate charge, as will abuse against a family member, and both will carry harsher penalties than common assault.
“New Zealanders generally resist government interference in their private lives, and I get that,” said Key in a speech announcing the changes.
“But let me say straight up that in households where anyone is being assaulted, threatened, intimidated, belittled or deprived, the perpetrator has no right to expect privacy so they can go on being a bully.
“If they won’t stop that behaviour, and the victims can’t stop it, then we must ensure that someone else stops it.”
Jane Drumm, general manager for domestic abuse charity Shine, said the government’s changes were “well overdue” and lauded the prime minister’s hardline speech.
“For a long time I have felt that New Zealand had a lot to be ashamed of,” said Drumm. “And we didn’t seem to be getting any traction on this very shameful side, the underbelly to what is a beautiful country.
“Today our prime minister put a line in the sand. In my 33 years in the field I have never heard a prime minister state so clearly: ‘This will no longer be tolerated. You are not alone. This government intends to support you, and to take responsibility for keeping you safe.’”
In a statement Women’s Refuge New Zealand chief executive Ang Jury also welcomed the changes.
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“We are pleased to see the creation of three new offences, in particular strangulation, which reflects the gravity and the potentially fatal part it can play in a relationship where abuse is present.”
Farida Sultana, director of Shakti New Zealand, said the campaign group had been lobbying the government for six years to outlaw coerced marriages. She said the youngest forced marriage she knew of in New Zealand involved a 13-year-old girl.
“Over the last five years I would estimate we have saved over 300 girls who were forced into marriages – and that is just the ones that come to us or we know of, and can intervene.
“We are really pleased about the prime minister’s announcement. It will make our work easier, now the New Zealand government has stated unequivocally that what may be acceptable cultural practices in your home country will not be legal in New Zealand.”Middle-class rage has dominated this election, but ultimately 2016 seems destined to produce not a populist victory but the triumph of oligarchy. Blame goes to a large section of the middle and working class itself, which, in rejecting political convention, ended up with a candidate who never would have served their interests. You can blame “elites” all you want, but in a republic, citizens need to act responsibly. And choosing Donald Trump doesn’t fit that description.
Middle-class revulsion with the political mainstream has been driven by slow economic growth, stagnant wages, a dysfunctional education system, and, for smaller businesses, a tightening regulatory regime. Homeownership is now at a nearly half-century low. New business start-ups, for the first time in three decades, are not keeping up with the number of deaths. Both stats reveal a real decline in aspiration. Most Americans, in a stunning reversal of past trends, see a worse future for their offspring than themselves. Who can blame them? Middle-class breadwinners and working-class wage-earners now suffer from deteriorating health and shorter lifespans.
In other words, middle-class Americans could certainly use a champion. But those who chose Trump went off the rails.
Trump’s landmark professional achievement has been in catering to the luxury market while building casinos that empty the pockets of people who often cannot afford the losses. The average price of a condo in Trump Tower in New York, the Donald’s signature property, rests around a median of $5 million.
A Trump administration would be unlikely to reflect blue-collar interests, but rather those of his inner circle, which includes some of the most ravenous Wall Street operators. The same is true of his general election opponent.
Hillary Clinton: Matriarch of Oligarchy
By elevating this disingenuous demagogue, Trump voters have assisted in the further ascendency of the oligarch class. The forces coalescing around Hillary Clinton -- mainstream Wall Street, particularly hedge funds, beltway lobbyists, the big media, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and green capitalists -- do not share the priorities of Middle America. Bernie Sanders made an issue of Clinton’s Wall Street support, but the Vermont socialist was always too marginal, cranky and, ultimately, too doctrinaire to win even in today’s Democratic Party.
With Sanders conveniently dispatched, the crony-capitalist class is assured its worldview prevails. They can check all the boxes that Rob Atkinson has labeled as “the Davos application” of open immigration, greater globalization, free trade, and higher carbon prices.
With Trumpian nationalism dispatched, these globalists will be able to continue preening as noble post-national “citizens of the world.” Walter Russel Mead describes them as a “soul-sick leadership elite” that serves their class interests, but hardly those of their fellow citizens.
These constituencies all have benefited from the Obama economy, with its slow growth and rapid asset inflation driven by cheap money. They can expect a continued positive relationship with Washington. The Clintonite core includes some of the world’s most adept tax-dodgers --Amazon, Apple and Google -- who certainly do not want their special breaks reduced even if middle-income earners get hammered.
Clinton seems certain to continue Obama’s policy of not subjecting the tech oligarchs to the anti-trust investigations that bedevil other industries. No surprise that many suspect that the new media moguls of Silicon Valley, along with the residue of the old mainstream media, are waging a multi-front campaign to tear down Trump to the benefit of their more reliable ally.
The populists seem certain to have created their own worst nightmare. Under Hillary, industries such as fossil fuel energy, manufacturing, warehousing and agriculture, all of which employ many middle- and working-class people in large swaths of the American heartland, will see more regulation, and layoffs -- not only among coal miners but in a broad array of primarily blue-collar industries. In contrast “green” corporatists like Elon Musk and Tom Steyer know that by helping to fund the Clinton machine, they can look forward to continued government subsidies.
Also primed for a reaming will be middle-class suburban voters, the geographic core of the GOP. Many suburbanites are understandably turned off by Trump’s nativist and sexist braggadocio and may be now tilting towards Clinton.
Yet they too will get their comeuppance when the Clintons return to the White House. Like President Obama, her urban policy will be city-centric, and negative towards the needs of the suburbs, where the vast majority of the population resides. Following the Obama lead, HUD will likely impose new regulations forcing middle-income communities to accept large numbers of poor people, effectively undermining local public schools and property values.
It’s not inconceivable that the EPA, following the environmental agenda perfected in California, will impose policies designed to reengineer suburbs into dense cities that correlate to a lower standard of living. These rules, of course, will not impact their progressive betters -- from movie stars to corporate executives -- who will continue to live large while hectoring the hoi polloi to reduce their “footprint.”
The Real Battle: 2018
The upshot is that in the 2016 election cycle, populism first rose and then proceeded to consume itself. Even if Trump wins, he’ll will prove to be the insider New York businessman he always has been, and will likely do more good for the ultra-rich than the middle class. But most likely we will see the triumph of Hillary’s oligarchs, whose agenda will begin to impinge more seriously on the middle class and its way of life.
Moreover, Trump’s negative coattails could put Democrats back in control of the Senate, which translates to shaping the Supreme Court for a generation. Obama’s penchant for rule by decree will now grow without limit. Every community, every school, every business will fall ever more under the watchful eyes of the federal regime. Pain already evident in Appalachia will spread to the industrial sector, agribusiness, and, most of all, energy as Washington seeks to “save” the planet in ways that don’t threaten the profits of its oligarchic allies.
Fortunately, we will still have elections, and 2018 could be decisive. Given the still weak state of the economy, and the lack of tools to meet a downturn given consistent low interest rates, the country should be ready for a change. Unlike 2016, most of the vulnerable Senate seats will be held by Democrats, and 12 years of meager or no growth, and slumping productivity, do not augur well for them.
The question is whether opposition to Clinton will be fundamentally populist in nature. If Trump loses by a large margin there will be calls to resurrect the GOP policies on trade, immigration and “enrich the rich” taxation schemes that have proven consistently unable to spark either sustained growth or upward mobility.
This approach will further alienate Trump voters, not to mention those who supported Sanders. These disillusioned voters -- mostly, but not entirely, white -- have already rejected the GOP’s country club agenda. An opposition that can incorporate some Trumpian themes, notably economic nationalism and control of immigration, without embracing his clear incompetence, narcissism and mean-spiritedness, could harness the populist wave.
To succeed, the new populism has to extend itself beyond angry, aging middle-class whites. In 2018, the real struggle will be to attract increasingly diverse suburban voters who naturally seek to protect what they have from the central bureaucracy. Latino and African-American families now ensconced in a comfortable, safe suburbs with good public schools may not appreciate a political party that wants to turn their neighborhood into the very one they escaped.
The great middle-class rebellion will not end with Donald Trump, or the putting away of Bernie Sanders. There is far too much disillusionment, and far too little prospect for upward mobility, to prevent grassroots anger from spilling over again. The question will be which party -- or some new party -- will ride that prairie fire to its logical extension.The idea of growing cannabis hydroponically isn’t nearly as frightening as it once was. When hydroponic growing was first unveiled to the general public, it was depicted as something used in large-format, commercial-size grows. Dutch botanists used it in their massive tulip greenhouses, and big names like Epcot and NASA were advertising the concept as the “way of the future” and a possible solution for growing food in space colonies with zero gravity. All of this made hydroponics sound like a daunting prospect for any would-be gardener, so it’s easy to see why cannabis growers didn’t take to it immediately—especially those growing at home.
Today, a lot has changed in terms of the perception and impact that hydroponics has had on cannabis growers. While hydroponic growing, by definition, simply means cultivating plants without soil, there are still many moving parts and technical aspects to consider. However, as hydro growing has moved into the mainstream, new advances in equipment, mediums and nutrients have made hydroponic systems the most widely used method of cannabis cultivation around the world. Here’s an overview of three of the easiest and most effective hydro systems on the market, as well as a glimpse of where hydroponics might be headed in the future.
Top-Feed Hydroponic Growing
Perhaps the most popular—and convenient—hydro system in use today is the top-feed setup. Utilizing either drip or spray emitters that are staked directly into the surface of the medium, these systems offer simple and reliable water and nutrient delivery to individual plant sites.
Top-feed systems are usually drain-to-waste, but they can also be used as a recirculating system. Most often, these systems use flood tables to hold the plant containers and catch |
imagination, I'm sure you can come up with many creative ways to use this model.
* Please note the modification to the standard PEGPROD EULA listed below that allows distribution of this model along with any lots that use it.
A sample lot and building file are included. The lot can be used as-is in your game or modified to to your liking. The lot is a growable 4x3 I-HT lot modified for use with the PEG-MTP and requires installation of the MTP dependencies.
** In the Lot Editor, any items placed on the parking lot area, such as cars, should be raised about.3 to.5 meters for best effect. Trees and shrubs placed in the planter areas should be raised about.7 meters.
** The parking lot entrance is designed to line up for transit-enabling when the model is positioned properly on the lot. Minimum lot size is 4x3.
All Pegasus files are now legacy content and are no longer officially supported - however support from the wider community can be requested here.Are you a strict, obedience-oriented parent, or are you more of a liberal, independence-fostering mother or father? If you’re more the former than the latter, then science may have some bad news for you – your authoritarian tendencies are turning your children into liars.
According to research by Victoria Talwar, a renowned expert on children’s social-cognitive development at McGill University, strict parenting tends to result in offspring that really know how to deceive. By producing an atmosphere of inevitable punishment for any wrongdoing, the children of these parents learn how to lie in order to escape any punitive measures for their nefariousness.
As will be explained by psychotherapist Philippa Perry to BBC Radio 4 this week, Talwar and her colleagues developed a test designed to identify effective young liars called the “Peeping Game.” Taking her test to two West African schools – one with relaxed rules and one with harsh disciplinary regimes – the pupils were asked to guess, without looking at it, what object is making a noise behind them.
Importantly, the last object makes a noise that is very different from any sound it could actually produce. For example, a baseball would make a squawking noise. If any children knew what this final object was, they were clearly taking a cheeky peek at it when unsupervised.
During the experiment, the supervising adult leaves the room, and upon returning, asks the child two questions: what the object was, and if they peeked at it. Talwar discovered that the more relaxed school showed a distribution of liars and truth-tellers similar to that found in many western schools. However, in the strict school, the children proved to be extremely rapid and effective liars.
Fearing punishment, the lying children have to become good at warping the truth. Ironically, draconian parenting, or teaching, produces the best prevaricators.
If your son or daughter is good at covering their tracks, they're probably quite smart. bikeriderlondon/Shutterstock‘If you’ve stuck something in a place where you shouldn’t have stuck something [then you should pay],’ says former PM adviser
People who injure themselves while drunk or “stick something where it does not belong” should pay for their hospital treatment, says the policy consultant behind the $6 GP co-payment plan.
Terry Barnes, a former health adviser to prime minister Tony Abbott, faced the Senate select committee into the government’s commission of audit on Tuesday as part of its examination of his health reform proposals.
He told senators that he had not modelled the potential cost to the health system of his $6 GP co-payment push but suggested that people should also pay to use the emergency department of a hospital on a “discretionary” basis.
“If someone presents to the emergency department who has injured themselves in a drunken incident for instance, self inflicted, should the taxpayer be expected to pay the full cost of cleaning up the mess?” he said.
When asked to expand on the idea he said smokers and people who are overweight should not have to pay to use hospitals as they fall within the health risks of the general population.
“If you present to an emergency department, if you’ve stuck something in a place where you shouldn’t have stuck something [then you should pay],” he said.
When asked if a toddler who has stuck a biro tip into themselves fell into that category he replied: “I would give them the benefit of the doubt but if you presented with a milk bottle in a place it shouldn’t be as a grown adult I think that’s something I don’t really feel our emergency department should deal with but they do.”
Barnes, who is principal of Cormorant Policy Advice, admitted he had not factored potential extra pressures on hospitals into his push for people to pay $6 to visit a doctor and did not know if the costs could outweigh the benefits.
“My brief was not to focus on those bigger pictures; it was simply to model or update the 1991 measure as I’ve pointed out elsewhere when I was initially responding to criticisms about this. Imposing a similar or matching price signal on GP services in emergency departments is one way of managing those pressures,” he said.
Barnes said it was not an unreasonable thing to get people questioning if they really needed to go to the doctor and health costs per person were increasing.
“It’s interesting and I’m not going to claim the whole country behind me in terms of my assumptions,” he said.
“But certainly in terms of reaction to this proposal, the thing that surprised me is that people who are less well off, people who do have chronic illnesses, people with small children, valued those services very highly and are prepared to either consider it or pay it,” he said.
Stephen Duckett, from the Grattan Institute, told senators the co-payment idea was counter to previous government policy which was to encourage people to go to the doctor before they got too sick and ended up costing the health system more.
“We also know people on lower incomes have higher instances of illness so it would be a double whammy in that sense,” he said.
The hearing also heard from welfare expert Ben Phillips, of the national centre for social and economic modelling at the University of Canberra.
He said Australia had a “pretty well targeted” system although he would be concerned if certain areas of welfare were reduced, singling out Newstart and the youth allowance.
But he said the cost of living was much less of an issue than people thought.
“For this one the perception is very strong; in this instance it’s not so much about the reality but the expectations,” he said. “We are doing a lot better but you see your neighbours doing better and you want more.”
The age pension, in particular, took up a huge part of the welfare budget and could be reviewed.
“The general statement I’d make about welfare payments in Australia is they don’t tend to be increasing as share of GDP, as a share of expenditure or as a share of revenue,” he said.
“So at this point in time there is not a suggestion for a reduction.”
He said there were “small elements” of so-called middle-class welfare but most welfare went to low-income earners who needed it.
“Certainly worthwhile having an independent group looking into the state of finances of the country; I’d be interested to see what the recommendations are in my area of expertise,” Phillips said.
“I would be looking for those on the low-income spectrum to be beneficiaries [of the commission of audit]. I’d be concerned if there was reduction in their payments. I’d be interested to see what changes there will be in regard to pension.”
Australian Council of Social Service chief executive Cassandra Goldie told the hearing a representative from the community sector should have been on the board of the commission of audit.
“We’re concerned about the process. It does appear it will be essentially behind closed doors leading into a budget,” she said.
She likened it to when the Gillard government moved 80,000 single mothers on to the Newstart allowance without warning.
“We’ve seen the savage socio-economic implications of that because there was no process to engage with the government properly,” she said.Visual effects supervisor Steve Begg acknowledges he comes from the 'old school era' of effects production, but his wealth of experience was vital in marrying the digital and practical work in the latest Bond film, Skyfall, directed by Sam Mendes. "It was a real hybrid approach to the visual effects," says Begg. "We'd use miniatures to kick off the shot and then sweeten it with CGI."
The film, lensed by DOP Roger Deakins on digital ARRI Alexa cameras, features over 1300 visual effects shots with work by Double Negative, MPC, Cinesite, Framestore, Peerless Camera Company, BlueBolt, Lola and Nvizage. Special effects and miniature effects supervisor Chris Corbould also oversaw a team of artists completing various miniature elements.
We take a look at just some of the major sequences, including the opening train sequence and Bond's shooting, the MI6 explosion, the Komodo dragon casino attack, the London Underground encounter, the final Scottish highlands scenes and the main titles.
Click here to listen to Mike Seymour's podcast interview with Skyfall visual effects supervisor Steve Begg.
MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
Bond on a train
Skyfall's pre-title sequence is a 15-minute chase on a wide variety of transport across Turkey. Eventually, Bond (Daniel Craig) grapples with an assailant atop a train before being accidentally shot by fellow agent Eve and falls into a river below. Double Negative, which also handled later scenes of the assassination in Shanghai and views of the villain's hideout, tackled the Turkey chase.
Watch b-roll of the train sequence filmed in Turkey.
Before the train shooting, the visual effects work involved significant wire and rig removals for parts of the train chase, particularly for shots of a full-sized digger ripping off the back of a carriage. "The back of the train falling off was CG," says Double Negative visual effects supervisor Andrew Whitehurst, "but the shots where the digger bites into the top of the train were practical." Dneg also re-built plates and backgrounds where rigging and an extra bogey wagon needed to be removed.
As the train passes over a viaduct bridge - shot in Varda - Eve attempts to shoot Bond's attacker but instead hits Bond himself. His resulting fall was filmed in two passes. First, on the actual bridge in Turkey, production filmed a parked train with a crane on it. "On that crane there was a descender rig which had a set of cables attached to a stuntman who dropped a certain distance," says Whitehurst. "It was a hand-held shot there, and they filmed the stunt guy dropping backwards miming having been shot at the correct height on a real bridge at the right time of day."
Watch the digger scene.
Using that plate as reference, a second pass of Daniel Craig filmed on a smaller backlot set in Turkey took place on a mocked up railway carriage against greenscreen. "We got Daniel to do a sympathetic action which again was handheld trying to copy the movement of the previously shot plate," says Whitehurst. "He threw himself backwards onto a crash mat. We then had to stitch those two plates together."
Dneg artists tracked the stuntman's fall as the matchmove for the final shot, then tracked Craig into the head of the shot. "The moment he gets hit and his head goes back," notes Whitehurst, "we then start to transition into a CG head for a replacement on the stunt guy, then for the first 15 feet of the fall we painted out all of the rigging attached to the stunt performer. We also had to do quite a lot of warping to get the limbs to line up. Daniel's arm was up and the stuntman's arms were down around the frames that we wanted to blend together."
Bond is shot. Watch the final scene.
"Then when the descender rig was going to start breaking his fall we had to transition to a full CG double," continues Whitehurst. "We had to create the edge of the bridge that's moving past when the camera is looking down because the plate was all shot on a static train. Then we had to matte paint in a lot of the valley, since Bond falls into a river. The viaduct we shot at isn't actually above a river - it's a gorge and there is no water down there. We got a helicopter and shot reference footage of rivers in the area and stitched that together too."
For the shot of Bond hitting the water, the special effects department rigged an 80 kilogram buck known as a piston head to replicate the splash. Explains Whitehurst: "We got cables stretched across a piece of river elsewhere in Turkey - we had a couple of JCBs dig out the bottom of the river to make it as deep as we could to do the splash. We had a bomb release trigger on the cable going across the river with the buck on it, so we could trigger it and the buck would go into the river and we could shoot it. Pretty much all the water is live action in the splash impact - we enhanced it a little bit, but the main bulk of the shot is a digi-double Bond and a CG bridge."
A return to classic titles
Titles designer Daniel Kleinman returned on Skyfall to complete his sixth Bond titles sequence, which take place immediately after the train fall, where a bleeding Bond sinks underwater and the audience witnesses a journey into the mind of a seemingly dying lead character.
Framestore and partner company The Third Floor developed a moving animatic for the titles based on storyboards and 3D previs from Kleinman. A live action shoot provided elements, including underwater scenes shot at Pinewood and dancing women who end up driving a 3D fluid sim to become a black and white and classic Bond kaleidoscope.
Some of the key imagery featured in the titles were inky fluid sims, skulls, gravestones, bloody hearts and veins and even dragons. Framestore used Houdini and Mantra for the volumetric work and interactive lighting, with the final shots composited in Nuke.
Click here to jump to a bonus interview with Framestore visual effects supervisor William Bartlett and 3D Artist Martin Aufinger who talk about the titles work.
MI6 bears the brunt
The London headquarters of MI6 is hacked and the result is a deadly explosion. Exterior views of the blast featured a quarter scale model of the MI6 central office area which was constructed against greenscreen at Pinewood. Special effects and miniature effects supervisor Chris Corbould exploded the model, which was then composited by Peerless Camera Company (which also contributed the Golden Dragon Casino exterior approach and the Macau balcony love scene shots later in the film).
"A large number of elements - falling debris, exploding dust, rocks et cetera - were also shot at various speeds," says Peerless visual effects supervisor Paul Docherty. "Finally, high speed flame elements were filmed on a closed stage, again at Pinewood. The main artist live action plates were shot on location early one Sunday morning at Vauxhall Bridge in London."
See the MI6 explosion in this Skyfall trailer.
The elements were combined in Flame, with particle effects created in Eyeon Fusion were also added along with smoke effects from Houdini and Maya. A final MI6 shot shown as an aerial view of the explosion aftermath appears on a television news broadcast. "Because of security considerations no aerial footage could be filmed, so Peerless used some older HD library footage supplied by the production," says Docherty. "This had to be re-sped, image processed to increase the quality and then carefully reframed to the directors specification."
"CG fire boats, hose spray, demolished central office and debris were all created in Softimage," adds Docherty, who notes the final shot was comp'd in Nuke. "The CG team also created moving crowds for the surrounding roads as well as CG fire trucks, police cars and incidental traffic. Because of heavy traffic in the supplied footage this required the complete replacement of the surrounding roads, the bridge surface itself as well as the entire train station behind the building."
When Komodos attack
Back from the dead and tracking his Turkey attacker, Bond heads to Shanghai, and then onto a casino in Macau. Upon leaving the casino, Bond is stopped by security and ends up in a fight amongst a pit of Komodo dragons, who eventually take down one of his assailants. In a homage to the crocodile scene in Live and Let Die, Bond escapes by leaping off one of the Komodo's backs to safety.
A breakdown of Cinesite's Komodo dragon vfx.
Cinesite created an early test for the Komodo dragons before being awarded the scene. "For reference we went up to London Zoo to look at Komodos," recalls Cinesite visual effects supervisor Jon Neill. "One was hand-reared so it was quite friendly. Another one was a female born in the wild, and so was not tame like the other one. We took lots of close-up hi-res stills of its body and head, eyes, feet. For the animation reference, we set up three HD cameras on the female and we sync'd them to shoot her eating mice."
The Komodo model was built using Maya, Mudbox and Mari, with an incredibly high resolution displacement map required for the leathery skin. "We actually had the problem initially of our dragon being too detailed," admits Neill, "so we made a dirt pass to cover his underbelly - it really covered up all the texture and made it a browny and gray. We also sourced real scars on real Komodos and replicated those."
Animation proved challenging for the Cinesite team. "The interesting thing about Komodos is that they don't move much," notes Neill. "When you see them they just sit there for a long time, and wander across, so it was hard to get subtleties in there. But this was not about the Komodos - this was about the scene. You see them in the shadows, a tongue coming out, and crawling out of the shadows. Roger Deakins likes to light things with silhouettes and rim lights, and that really suited us and the sequence. The pit was actually all candle lit and had banks of candles in each corner."
In the sequence, a Komodo slowly moves in on Bond's attacker before grabbing his ankle and dragging him away. Cinesite had to match dust interaction from the on set gravel and fuller's earth mix as the dragon takes the ankle. "We also did tests of saliva that Komodo's use to usually poison their prey and wait for it die," says Neill. "But we couldn't have the Komodo biting him and then waiting for days - it wouldn't be very exciting!"
For Bond's escape, Daniel Craig jumped onto a green ramp that would later be replaced with a CG Komodo. "The problem," says Neill, "was that it was a static ramp and he's supposed to be jumping along a running Komodo. So we had to warp Bond's leg to make it look like it was traveling with the Komodo as it moved."
Into the Underground
The mastermind behind much of the film's mayhem is revealed to be Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem), who is brought to London but ultimately escapes into the London Underground. Here, Cinesite carried out wire and rig removal work for an escalator stunt, set extensions for a chase through the Tube tunnels, and augmentations for a explosion set off by Silva and an actual train crashing through a tunnel roof.
A raw camera view of the train crashing through the catacombs.
For the explosion shot - where Silva is confronted by Bond within the catacombs of the Underground - production filmed at Pinewood Studios. "Daniel Craig was actually in the same set when the bomb went off - it was only 20 feet behind him," says Jon Neill. "Roger Deakins had ten Alexas in there filming, two in the ceiling, one in the floor and the rest positioned behind arches. There was also a hand-held camera right in front of Daniel, so what we had to do was remove any camera views and replace Bond's legs and all the ground below Roger Deakins and the crew."
Cinesite also dealt with light interaction and the set's wet floor, plus wires seen pulling off part of the roof to reveal a hole. The explosion is followed by a Tube train crashing straight through the gap, realized as a full-scale effect rigged by Chris Corbould's team. The train was hung from inverted rails, ripping through the false ceiling. Ultimately, Cinesite removed the connected brackets, aided in dust interaction and placed Craig into the scenes.
The final explosion and crash.
"There was a big discussion about green or gray screens being used for the shot," says Neill. "Roger Deakins is not keen about the contamination in the lighting, so we decided to just do roto. Luckily, Bond has short hair and it's a fast sequence. Also if we put any kind of screen in there we would have been in the way of the ten cameras and have blocked one of the shots. We needed the freedom offered by roto. We didn't have to light a greenscreen and we had Bond in the right lighting."
Cinesite also added in a driver to the train - shot separately against green which was much easier to re-create to match the cab lighting - and also tracked in an 'Out of Service' message on the train to denote the lack of passengers. "We also filmed some elements of throwing bricks at camera against greenscreen, just in case we needed to cover any specific bricks and we used it on some of the shots," adds Neill. "But the practical stunt was fantastic. There was a 30 minute countdown - it was like being at NASA!"
Showdown at Skyfall
Bond and M (Judi Dench) head to Skyfall, his remote childhood home in Scotland, setting a trap for Silva to follow. Here, MPC helped create Scottish Highland environments, the crash landing of a helicopter, a foot chase over a frozen lake and many other enhancements.
Using stills acquired in Scotland, MPC built a high resolution 360 digital matte painted cyclo with simple geo. "We had nearly 300 shots to put the environment in," explains MPC visual effects supervisor Arundi Asregadoo. "We needed to have the flexibility for Sam to look at the shots and design them. When we first did the layout we had these big, massive mountains but he felt it was too cumbersome and took too much away from the Skyfall lodge, so we had to make it more open. So it's kind of got the feelings of the mountains of Scotland but re-designed the way Sam had envisaged it."
Silva arrives via helicopter, which later crashes into the Skyfall lodge. A miniature helicopter crash was augmented by MPC to include CG rotorblades and extra destruction. "We used our in-house destruction tool Kali to simulate the bricks," says Asregadoo. "We had to re-build the helicopter too and re-project it - the rig was quire rigid so it felt it was just going in a straight line. We had to re-animate it to give it more pitch, more dive and acceleration into the building."
The final crash featured a mix practical and miniature elements, a CG house and roof, fire elements, and digital downdraft from MPC. "For the downdraft we created a huge simulation of stuff kicking up to replicate what we saw happen to the grass in the plates," notes Asregadoo. "Once we had a very long sim, we could render it through each of the cameras."
The Skyfall showdown also showcases the earlier destruction of Bond's Aston Martin DB5, which takes on bullet hits before being blown up. "We built a CG model of the Aston Martin as part of the damage build-up," says Asregadoo. "In one shot there was a 120 degree camera track around the DB5, and then we broke that down by building a greenscreen version of the bonnet shot as motion control. At the direction of Chris Corbould we did 23 passes of squib hits going off on the bonnet, then we shot tons of glass of breaking and cracking for the bullets hitting the windscreen."
"Then once we had the elements," adds Asregadoo, "we used the DB5 and projected that damage onto it, adding some more elements. Actually, originally when we built the DB5 damage we had holes all inside of it, then someone realized the DB5 is bullet-proof! So we had to fill in all the holes." A third scale DB5 was crafted by the miniature effects unit with the aid of some rapid prototyping by 3D printing company Voxeljet and outfitting from Propshop Modelmakers. MPC combined a clean plate of the DB5 with projected damage and augmented the explosion of the scale car and a stand-in vehicle.
Bond fights one of Silva's followers along a frozen lake and they fall through the ice. For the running chase, MPC extended a lake set filmed at Longross Studios, replacing a light matrix set up by Roger Deakins to represent the now burning lodge. Breath, mist and smoke elements, along with DMP-based environments were also added.
Asregadoo says the underwater views of the lake were particularly challenging. "It was tricky because when you're underwater, red channel light doesn't travel that far visually in your eyes. It's very much more of a cyan feel underwater even though you've got a burning element in there. Roger wanted to make sure it was very red reflected underwater. The underwater shots were filmed on the U stage at Pinewood - we had a two and a half D approach with 2D for the ice, shot elements for the bubbles. The only bit we used CG for was the flare and bubbles when that goes off and reveals the hole in the last shot before he comes out."
BONUS INTERVIEW: Framestore's main titles
Framestore visual effects supervisor William Bartlett and 3D artist Martin Aufinger talk about the main titles work.
fxg: These incredible titles certainly feel darker and more graphic in many ways - what were some of the overriding principles Framestore followed in their execution?
Framestore: There were a couple of overall themes that we fed into all our concept work. The main one was the sense that the whole thing was in some sense underwater. Part of it is literally underwater but we tried to keep some of the visual cues throughout the whole sequence particularly the swirling volumes and the floating elements. We also designed some of the environments with the underwater theme in mind like the sandy floor in the vaulted scene with the moving shadows. As well as being underwater Bond is close to death (or is he?) and so there are plenty of skulls, blood, guns, knives, graves, shadows and fire. Once you add in a few girls to that lot it is hard to see how we could have gone wrong....
fxg: Can you talk about how you worked with Daniel Kleinman on the titles - what kind of artwork and concepts did you receive? How far do you take motion tests etc before finaling?
Framestore: As usual we started bouncing a few ideas around quite early on. We begin with more ideas than we need and gradually whittle it down to the best ones and the ones that sit together. Danny gives us some broad concepts and draws up a lot of frame ideas that we then start doing moving image tests and feed back any other ideas that we think of around the themes he has set out.
Once we have narrowed it down a bit we worked with our partners at 'The Third Floor' and our visual development department to work up a previz and a few concept frames and at the same time we worked up some technical tests so we could approach the style and look from the other direction so to speak. All these tests and ideas get bounced around and suggest new things. Danny is very open to us suggesting new ideas and we work very much in collaboration with him to find ways to create new and interesting designs. We also got a lot of reference form the main production of the film. More than ever before we have visually weaved in parts of the film into the titles.
The design of the Chinese dragons, the design of the underground vaulted scene, and of course Skyfall itself were all based on locations from the film. Although we had a block out of almost all the sequence we more or less start again after the filming has taken place and you start to block out a rough structure. Even at this point the music was not edited so we knew that whatever we did we need to be pretty flexible as we will have to look again at timings when the song is finalised. From all our technical tests we probably know at this point how we will do about half of the sequence and the methodology for the other half evolves over the course of the job.
fxg: How did you achieve the opening vortex/liquidy world? What elements did you have and what tools and techniques were used for the ink and liquidy feel?
Framestore: There were two separate techniques for the opening sequence. Half of the shots were based on the live-action shoot in an underwater tank combined with elements, Nuke particles and a lot of creative grading to set the right mood.
The seabed shots feature a full cg environment. We originally shot a model of the seabed but for various reason, mainly lighting and flexibility with the camera move it was replaced by a full cg version. It is made out of a huge skull covered with silt which we created using quite dense volumes. Lighting and rendering as well as all the dynamic elements such as the vortex were created with Houdini.
fxg: How were the flaming skulls realised during the titles?
Framestore: The flaming targets were all shot as individual elements and then combined with a particle generator in Nuke. Originally they were separate from the Dragons but the two sections worked so well together that we combined them into a single scene. We did several tests for the targets before we shot them. We tested various things including the thickness of paper and whether to douse them in lighter fluid to get the perfect burn; not the easiest test to carry out on the streets of Soho!
fxg: There's a neat combination of seaweed, blood vessels and weeds for one part, and then later there are the Chinese dragons - can you talk about some of the modeling and animation challenges here?
Framestore: The scene with the blood vessels was again created in Houdini. We had really good experience with Houdini and its renderer Mantra on this project. In particular all the volumetric rendering using PBR (physically based rendering) worked like a treat. The blood vessels were created using L-systems as a source for our fluid simulation. They were animated procedurally by modifying temperature and velocity in order to push the fluids along the strands.
For the section with the graveyard we modeled a couple of gnarly trees and attached tree weed to them. We actually used fur for this, animated by a wire simulation that had to match the slow, underwater feel of the sequence. It was again all covered in volumes to get natural depth hazing and a nice atmospheric feel.
The Chinese dragons were based on the the Dragon shaped entrance to the casino that appears in the film. We used a scan of the entrance as a guide for modelling but modified it to match the feel of the title sequence.
The setup for the dragon was quite complex. It was essential to add many dynamic elements such as the beard, fins, additional floppy pieces of cloth etc. in order to give it interest and scale. The whole build was approached in a procedural way as we were not sure about the size of the Dragons when we set out to build it. Up to the very end we were able to change the length and shape of the Dragons body dynamically. The rig, all the additional body elements as well as the textures adjusted automatically.
The dragons could be positioned by laying out simple paths. Once the basic layout was approved we added detail to the animation by procedurally adding imperfections to the movement of the individual elements as well as keyframing other parts such as the jaw. We then had to run dynamic simulations for all the body elements, the beard, the fins, subtle movement of the eyes and eyelids,...
Apart from modelling and texturing the head, the entire dragon sequence was created in Houdini. In order to achieve the even interior lighting effect of such a long but thin creature we had to add about 50 geometry lights for each Dragon. Mantra handled the challenge very well.
fxg: The look beneath Skyfall seemed much more sytlized and had great shadows - what was your brief here?
Framestore: The final sequence features Skyfall, crumbling gravestones and a very stylized blood rain. The initial brief was quite different to the final result as this part was meant to look like a shadow puppet theater. Quite late in the project we changed it to what it is now as it fits the look and the mood of the rest of the piece much better. However, it was essential to keep it quite graphic and to play with volumetric lighting and shadows.
fxg: What techniques did you use for the Rorschach/kaleidoscope effects?
Framestore: The idea for this section that sits over the middle eight in the song was to have a kind of reprieve of what we have seen so far but presented in a new way. Specifically we wanted something that was more graphic and two dimensional after all the sophisticated camera moves and volumes that we had already seen. We also wanted something that was a bit more classic bond but of course still needed to have much in common with the feel of the rest of the sequence. We mapped out the timing and the fractal zoom in Nuke and then when we had picked all the girls we fed them to Houdini where we processed a 2D fluid simulation driven off their movement. We had always intended to add a bit of colour to the final thing but in the end it seemed to work so well black and white that we left it.
fxg: How was the breaking mirrors section completed?
Framestore: We filmed five versions of Daniel all at once all on one camera using real mirrors. This was a surprisingly tricky thing to set up as we wanted him against bluescreen and we wanted reflections from both his left and right side and some along side him and some behind him. We actually prevized the camera, mirror and blue screen set up in Maya to work out the layout and dimensions. Once we had the footage we re-projected it in Nuke and built a scene with multiple versions. We fed the Nuke camera move into Maya to render three separate backgrounds. These were then split in Nuke to match the mirrors. The cracking was all done in Nuke and is just offset layers with a few details added on top.
fxg: Finally, how were the close up zooms to Daniel Craig's eye achieved?
Framestore: This was in two parts. We shot a camera move into Daniel in the studio but this was never going to be high enough resolution to go right into his eye and we could not hold focus it we went as close as we needed. We also took some high res stills with a macro lens and then blended form one to the other during the shot.
All images and clips © 2012 Danjaq, LLC, United Artists Corporation and Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All rights reserved.After lying vacant for years, work has begun on a controversial, five-story, 98-unit mixed-use housing development on a lot at the southeast corner of San Pablo and Ashby avenues.
City officials and representatives from Gerding Edlen, the developer, will host a ceremonial “turning of the dirt” ceremony Tuesday at noon. Mayor Tom Bates and Councilman Darryl Moore plan to be there, as well as Brent Gaulke, vice president of Gerdling Edlen.
Gerdling Elden, which specializes in infill, sustainable development, bought the property at 3015 San Pablo Ave. and related city entitlements in 2012 from its previous owner, Ali Kashani of CityCentric. The price was not disclosed, although online real estate sites estimated it was worth $38 million. The complex had been known as “Ashby Arts,” but has been renamed “The Higby.”
The name of the project was inspired by Horace A. Higley, the California deputy surveyor who drew Alameda County’s lines back in 1857, said Sarah Maxwell, a publicist for the developer. Researchers hired by the company initially thought his name was Higby, but when it was discovered it was Higley, executives decided to keep “The Higby.”
“They wanted to pay their respects to a man who helped lay the foundations for this community, while putting their own spin on it, so they have decided to stick with Higby,” said Maxwell. “The name is supposed to reflect the surprising twists and turns that come from exploration and discovery.”
The new owners made a few changes to the conception and design of the building, but it remains similar to what the Berkeley City Council approved in 2009.
There will be 98 units, with 15 set aside for affordable housing. Seventy of those units will be studio apartments, and the rest will one-bedroom units, said Gaulke. The apartments will be slightly larger than average new construction in Berkeley, at about 800 square feet, he said. The original concept called for the apartments to be marketed to seniors, but Gaulke said his group now envisions attracting professionals.
The project will also have 1:1 parking and 6,500 square feet of ground floor restaurant and retail space. Gaulke said they are aiming for the building to achieve a LEED Gold certification, and perhaps LEED Platinum.
Gerding Edlen, which is headquartered in Portland, OR, funds its projects with capital from institutional clients. It has an office in San Francisco and has more than $5 billion invested in 60 projects, according to its website.
The new building will sit across the street from a Walgreens and kitty-corner from the Ashby complex that houses Looking Glass Photo, Orchard Supply Hardware, The Back Store and Mancini’s Sleepworld. Berkeley Bowl West is just a few blocks away.
“It’s a transitional area and we like those kinds of areas,” said Gaulke. “It’s an opportunity to do a project that can really help build on what’s there, but also bring some new life to it.”
The Higby will border a residential area, Carrison Street, on its south.
When Kashani first proposed building the complex, Carrison Street neighbors expressed concern that it would draw too much traffic and noise. To assuage some of those concerns, Gerding Edlen has moved the Carrison Street entrance to The Higby closer to San Pablo Avenue and moved the lobby to face San Pablo Avenue, according to plans submitted to the Design Review Board.
The project has proved controversial. After the City Council approved the idea, Berkeley resident Stephen Wollmer took the city to court, charging that it violated the state’s density housing bonus law and did not comply with CEQA. The Alameda County Superior Court denied Wollmer’s claim. It was also denied when Wollmer took that decision to the Appeal Court.
The groundbreaking ceremony for the Higby takes place at 3015 San Pablo Ave. at noon Tuesday. As part of the ceremony, Gerding Edlen will make a contribution to local nonprofit Waterside Workshops, which provides vocational education to at-risk youth through programs such as the Berkeley Boathouse.
Related:
Zoning board denies Berkeley micro-unit proposal (11.21. |
ocalyptic’ group that will need to be defeated but maintain limited strikes are sufficient
Senior Pentagon officials described the Islamic State (Isis) militant group as an “apocalyptic” organisation that posed an “imminent threat” on Thursday, yet the highest-ranking officer in the US military said that in the short term, it was sufficient for the United States to “contain” the group that has reshaped the map of Iraq and Syria.
Army general Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, told reporters in a Pentagon briefing that while Isis would eventually have to be defeated, the US should concentrate on building allies in the region to oppose the group that murdered an American journalist, James Foley.
“It is possible to contain them,” Dempsey said, in a Pentagon press conference alongside the defence secretary, Chuck Hagel. “They can be contained, but not in perpetuity. This is an organisation that has an apocalyptic, end-of-days strategic vision which will eventually have to be defeated.”
Dempsey’s comments came a day after the secretary of state, John Kerry, said Isis “must be destroyed” following the killing of Foley, the first American known to have died at the hands of Isis. President Obama had referred to the organisation as a “cancer”. Their remarks raised expectations that the administration was preparing for a wider war aimed at wiping out Isis, rather than stopping its advances in Iraq.
Internal administration deliberations over a response to Isis continue, and US officials predicted that there would be little departure from the strategy of limited airstrikes launched since 8 August. One said the military plan “may ultimately evolve”.
John Allen, a retired marine general who commanded the Afghanistan war from 2011 to 2013, called on Barack Obama to order the destruction of Isis. In an op-ed for the DefenseOne website, he urged the president to “move quickly to pressure its entire ‘nervous system’, break it up, and destroy its pieces”.
On Wednesday, six new airstrikes continued to hit Isis positions near the Mosul Dam, three days after Obama declared that it was no longer under Isis control. Nearly two-thirds of the 90 US strikes since 8 August have taken place near the critical dam.
A Kurdish peshmerga fighter at his combat position near the Mosul dam, where US aircraft have bombed Isis positions. Photograph: Khalid Mohammed/AP
In a grisly video produced by Foley’s captors, his killer says Foley’s death came as revenge for US airstrikes in Iraq. Soon after the video was released, the US confirmed that it had recently mounted a failed rescue bid for Foley. Elite US military forces secretly invaded Syria earlier this summer in a mission that involved dozens of special operations forces from all US military services, including the 160th special operations aviation regiment.
US forces flew into Syria in defiance of air defence batteries that senior military officials have described as highly threatening to pilots. Modified Black Hawk helicopters were involved, and “armed fixed-wing aircraft and drones” provided cover to forces on the ground, said an administration official. No hostages were found at the targeted location.
It emerged on Thursday that Foley’s family received a message from Foley’s captors on 13 August, warning them that he would be killed. They passed the message on to the US government, which helped with a response. Phil Balboni, chief executive of GlobalPost, the Boston-based online news publication that had published work by Foley, told Reuters: “It was an appeal for mercy. It was a statement that Jim was an innocent journalist,” and that he respected the people of Syria, where he was held.
Foley’s family and friends hoped the militants were bluffing and wanted a ransom, he said. The group had last year demanded a ransom of $132m for his rescue, Balboni said.
Disagreements within the administration are emerging about how to deal with Isis, both on what the goals are, and how to achieve them.
Hours after a senior White House foreign-policy official, Ben Rhodes, said the US would not be limited in its response by “geographic boundaries”, Dempsey assessed that cross-border action was necessary to defeat the group. At the same time, he tamped down speculation that US warplanes would strike Isis in Syria as well as Iraq.
Isis “will have to be addressed on both sides of what is at this point essentially a non-existent border”, Dempsey said, which would require “a variety of instruments, only one small part of which is airstrikes. I’m not predicting those will occur in Syria, at least not by the United States of America.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The secretary of defence, Chuck Hagel, and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Martin Dempsey. Photograph: Yuri Gripas/Reuters
Dempsey, an Iraq veteran, has long been sceptical of US military involvement in the Syrian conflict, citing among other reasons the threat to US pilots from dictator Bashar al-Assad’s air defences. He has frustrated those who advocated American involvement in the two neighbouring wars, such as hawkish Republican senator John McCain, who in June called on Obama to fire Dempsey, saying he “has done nothing but invent ways for us not to be engaged”.
Echoing the White House’s stated position, Dempsey said the US needed “a coalition in the region that takes on the task of defeating Isis over time”, something the administration this week has put effort into broadening and strengthening. But the group’s ultimate defeat, the general said, would only come “when it is rejected by the over 20 million disenfranchised Sunnis that happen to reside between Damascus and Baghdad.”
The senior Pentagon leadership’s rhetoric on Thursday about the threat Isis poses was as intense as its proposed options for confronting Isis were sanguine.
“When we look at what they did to Mr Foley, what they threaten to do to all Americans and Europeans, what they are doing now, I don’t know any other way to describe it other than barbaric,” Hagel said. “They are an imminent threat to every interest we have, whether it’s in Iraq or anywhere else.”
Hagel said Isis, also kown as Isil, which began as al-Qaida’s Iraq affiliate before being disavowed last year over its brutality, was a calibre above previous terrorist organisations the US has faced.
“Isil is as sophisticated and well funded as any group that we have seen. They’re beyond just a terrorist group. They marry ideology, a sophistication of strategic and tactical military prowess, they are tremendously well funded. Oh, this is beyond anything that we’ve seen, so we must prepare for everything,” Hagel said.
Isis fighters have surprised Kurdish peshmerga with their tenacity and killed an unknown but believed to be large number of civilians. Photograph: Reuters
The apparent discrepancy between the Obama administration’s assessment of Isis’s virulence and its limited air strikes against the group have prompted confusion about what Obama is trying to achieve. The 90 airstrikes launched since 8 August have “stalled” Isis’s momentum, Hagel said.
“Right now, it appears to be the goal is to use minimal American force, primarily air power, to contain Isis and hand the problem off to Iraqi and Kurdish forces,” said Peter Mansoor, a retired army colonel who served as executive officer to General David Petraeus during the 2007-2008 troop surge, a rare period of tactical US achievements in Iraq.
“To me there is a significant mismatch between the goal of defeating Isis in the long run and the tools to achieve that goal.”
Mansoor, now a military history professor at the Ohio State University, said he agreed with Dempsey that defeating Isis required Sunnis in Iraq and Syria to turn on it, but “Isis has proven themselves too strong, too virulent and too violent to enable local inhabitants to rise up and cast it off without significant help from the outside.
“European nations are asking the United States for leadership in developing a plan for defeating Isis, and this administration is failing in its duties to protect the American people if it doesn’t create an alliance that can not just contain Isis, but destroy it.”The Apache Maven team is pleased to announce the release of the Apache Maven Jar Plugin, version 2.6
This plugin provides the capability to build jars.
http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-jar-plugin/
<plugin> <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId> <artifactId>maven-jar-plugin</artifactId> <version>2.6</version> </plugin>
Release Notes - Maven JAR Plugin - Version 2.6
Bugs:
* [MJAR-135] - encoding problem with folder-names * [MJAR-151] - Error assembling JAR on OS X * [MJAR-179] - Adding empty files to jar failed with a ZipException : bad CRC
checksum * [MJAR-185] - Update version of plexus-archiver to 2.7.1 * [MJAR-188] - maven-jar-plugin is very slow on machines with slow Unix group
lookups * [MJAR-189] - Upgrade plexus-archiver dependency to v2.9
Improvements:
* [MJAR-178] - Change information on site * [MJAR-180] - Upgrade to Maven 2.2.1 compatiblity * [MJAR-181] - MavenProject/MavenSession Injection as a paremeter instead as a
component. * [MJAR-182] - Update version of plexus-archiver to 2.6.3 * [MJAR-184] - Update version of plexus-archiver to 2.7 * [MJAR-186] - Upgrade maven-plugins-testing-harness from 1.2 to 1.3 * [MJAR-187] - Upgrade maven-archiver to 2.6 * [MJAR-190] - Upgrade to maven-plugins version 25 to 26 * [MJAR-191] - Upgrade to maven-plugins parent version 27
Enjoy,
- The Apache Maven teamNorthern white rhinos are one step closer to extinction, after one of only two breeding males known to exist was found dead at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya.
In a statement, the conservancy said Suni, 34, had not been poached, but they had not yet determined why the rhino died. It continued:
"The Kenya Wildlife Service vets will conduct a post mortem as soon as possible. In 2006, his father Saút died in the Dvur Kralove Zoo by natural causes at the same age as Suni was now. "There are now only six northern white rhinos left in the world. Suni was one of the last two breeding males in the world and no northern white rhinos are known to have survived in the wild. Consequently the species now stands at the brink of complete extinction, a sorry testament to the greed of the human race."
The Guardian adds:
"Suni was born at the Dvur Kralove Zoo in Czech Republic in 1980. He was one of the four northern white rhinos brought from that zoo to the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in 2009 to take part in a breeding programme. "Wildlife experts had hoped the 90,000-acre private wildlife conservancy, framed on the equator and nestled between the snow capped Mount Kenya and the Aberdare mountain range, would offer a more favourable climate for breeding."
Correction: October 19, 2014 12:00 am — The original headline on this post said that one of seven white rhinos left in the world had died. In fact, there were only seven northern white rhinos left. There are a bit more than 20,000 southern white rhinos in the wild.
Copyright NPR 2019.LAKE PLACID, N.Y. — A volunteer fire department recently explained why a man, who was dressed in a T-shirt, shorts and tennis shoes, was helping during a large fire last weekend. They did not explain why he was allowed to do so without full PPE.
Lake Placid News reported that the major structure fire consumed one downtown building and damaged another. The building was described as a total loss.
Firefighters with the Lake Placid (N.Y.) Volunteer Fire Department used aerials to spray the roofs of the buildings and fire departments from other towns helped as well. However, when a series of photos were published of firefighters during the blaze, one man undoubtedly caught the attention of many.
Photo courtesy Twitter @BradenFrame
Related article Charges dropped against out-of-state firefighters at chaotic tunnel fire
Fire officials said the man, dressed in plain clothes with an SCBA, is not a member of the volunteer department. He was a visiting firefighter in town for the Ironman race. Another career firefighter, also in plain clothes and in town to run the race, helped out at the fire.
An Ironman was scheduled the next day and officials said it would go on as scheduled, despite the fire.
On Facebook, the Lake Placid Volunteer Fire Department issued this statement:
"The individual in those pictures is not a member of our department or mutual aid department responding to assist. He is a professional member of another fire department who was in town as a visitor, visiting our community during one of the busiest weekends of the year. That being said, we think it is important to point out that this firefighter felt the need to jump into action, seeing the incident unfold, as most firefighters, paid or volunteer, would feel the need to do … although we do not condone anyone entering an incident without proper PPE, we truly appreciate any and all assistance provided by this individual."18
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In 15th century Paris, Clopin the puppeteer tells the story of Quasimodo, the misshapen but gentle-souled bell ringer of Notre...read more In 15th century Paris, Clopin the puppeteer tells the story of Quasimodo, the misshapen but gentle-souled bell ringer of Notre Dame, who was nearly killed as a baby by Claude Frollo, the Minister of Justice. But Frollo was forced by the Archdeacon of Notre Dame to raise Quasimodo as his own. Now a young man, Quasimodo is hidden from the world by Frollo in the belltower of the cathedral. But during the Festival of Fools, Quasimodo, cheered on by his gargoyle friends Victor, Hugo, and Laverne, decides to take part in the festivities, where he meets the lovely gypsy girl Esmeralda and the handsome soldier Phoebus. The three of them find themselves ranged against Frollo's cruelty and his attempts to destroy the home of the gypsies, the Court of Miracles. And Quasimodo must desperately defend both Esmeralda and the very cathedral of Notre Dame. show lessSept. 25 (UPI) -- Left tackle Alejandro Villanueva surprised his Pittsburgh Steelers teammates Sunday when he stood in the tunnel for the national anthem at Soldier Field.
Several Steelers players told ESPN that they expected the entire team to stay in the locker room -- as planned -- for the pregame song.
But the former Army Ranger decided to walk out of the locker room and stand in the tunnel with his hand over his chest during the rendition. Steelers coach Mike Tomlin stood on his team's sideline during the song, without his team behind him.
Villanueva served multiple terms in Afghanistan.
RELATED Trump lauds NASCAR owners who threaten to fire drivers for anthem protests
His jersey has skyrocketed in sales since he took his stance on Sunday. His jersey sales trailed just Marshawn Lynch, Derek Carr, Carson Wentz, Antonio Brown and Aaron Rodgers as of 7:45 p.m. on Fanatics.com. according to 247 Sports.
His jersey was the top seller of any player as of Monday afternoon.
A spokesman for Fanatics told ESPN that Villanueva has been the most popular player in the NFL, when it comes to merchandise sales on the site, for the last 24 hours.
Tomlin revealed that his team would not participate in the national anthem on the field in an interview before the game.
"We're not participating in the anthem today," Tomlin told CBS. "Not to be disrespectful to the anthem, to remove ourselves from the circumstance. People shouldn't have to choose. If a guy wants to go about his normal business and participate in the anthem, he shouldn't be forced to choose sides. If a guy feels the need to do something, he shouldn't be separated from his teammate who chooses not to. So we're not participating today. That's our decision. We're gonna be 100 percent. We came here to play a football game. That's our intentions, and we're gonna play and play to win."
Steelers defensive end Cam Heyward told ESPN that he supported his teammate's decision.
"I don't want to go into that, but we support our guy Al," he said. "He feels he had to do it. This guy served our country, and we thank him for it."
Pittsburgh players met to discuss a players-only meeting on Saturday at the JW Marriott in Chicago, according to PennLive.com.
Quarterback Ben Roethlisberger introduced three choices of what the team would do before they took a vote, according to the report. The choices were: standing on the sideline holding hands, staying off the field or taking the sideline while some players knelt, others stood and others put their hands on shoulders of kneeling teammates.
Villanueva and Vance McDonald were two of the 15 players who spoke before the vote. McDonald was Colin Kaepernick's teammate on the San Francisco 49ers for four seasons.
"We thought we were all in attention with the same agreement, obviously, " Steelers defender James Harrison told PennLive.com. "But, I guess we weren't."
Villanueva spoke about Kaepernick and the national anthem with reporters last summer.
"This is the best country in the world," Villanueva said, according to Steelers.com. "If you go to another country, as a minority, I can tell you that there isn't a country with minorities in the world that handles the issues that we have in our country like we do. Everybody has a voice. Everybody has a platform. I don't think we are perfect by any means. Just a couple of days ago, there was a service member killed in Afghanistan. It's one of those things -- there are people that are fighting just so you can say and do whatever you please.
"I agree that America is not perfect. I agree that there are a lot of issues with minorities in this country. And I agree that we should do something about it. But I don't know if the most effective way is to sit down when the national anthem of a country that has provided you freedom and is providing you $60 million a year is the best way to do it, when there are black minorities that are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan that are protecting our freedom for less than $20,000 a year. So, it's his decision. Obviously, he has brought up the issue in a great way, but I think if he encourages other players or other people in the stands to sit down, it's going to send the wrong message. And I think he has to be a little more careful and look at the big picture of the things that he is doing, because as a service member, I have to understand it. I have to understand that. But he's an athlete. He has a huge platform. He has to see the impact that he has on a lot of people's lives. I don't think it's the most effective way."
ICYMI: The Steelers remained inside during the national anthem, but LT and army vet Alejandro Villanueva stood alone outside of the tunnel. pic.twitter.com/rhNVqnHVJz — FOX Sports: NFL (@NFLonFOX) September 25, 2017
This summer, Villanueva called Kaepernick "brave" in an interview with the Washington Post.
"If I were to make a statement right now that would affect the amount of money the NFL makes, if I were to go to a company like Pfizer, and I voice my opinion that marijuana should be legalized because it's a much better cure than all the other pharmaceuticals the company sells, and I am affecting the sales of Pfizer, therefore the company should have the right to terminate my contract...to impede this loss of money," he told the Washington Post. "I don't know if it's because of that. If it's simply because of the ideological stand on violence and whatnot, then I think it's very unfair. I think that's the concern all the players have in the NFL. I don't think it should be like that. "But I don't have all the answers to all the questions. I don't even know how he plays as a quarterback. I don't even know what system fits him. Again, I think he was very brave for taking the chance and doing something, frankly, not a lot of people would have dared to do. I don't know if it was effective or not. I don't know if the fact he was kneeling down was a bigger issue, and people got focused on that and not the fact he was trying to raise awareness. In my opinion, I have an African-American coach, and 90 percent of the team is African American. So I hear these issues nonstop. I don't have to have somebody kneel down for the national anthem. But if somebody, maybe you learn something from them, then I guess it is justified."
The Steelers lost the game 23-17 to the previously winless Chicago Bears.
Villanueva signed a four-year contract with the Steelers in July. The Army graduate joined the team's practice squad in 2014.Colorblindpicaso/Flickr The Republican push to sell the public on tax reform kicked into a higher gear Wednesday, as President Trump gave a speech at a manufacturing company in Springfield, Missouri, promoting the forthcoming GOP tax plan as a step to un-rig the economy and close loopholes that have benefitted the wealthy.
Trump's speech was light on specifics and heavy on populist patriotism, but it did lay out four broad themes for tax reform that the president said would restore American competitiveness, create new jobs and raise wages for workers.
The reality, though, is that, while Trump and Congressional GOP leaders still don't have a comprehensive, detailed plan for tax reform, the proposals they've put forth thus far have been found by independent analysts to disproportionately benefit higher-income taxpayers.
And critics are also quick to point out that the promised benefits to Main Street of Trump-style tax cuts — faster job growth, higher wages and a boost to the middle class — are very much in question.
Here's an instant analysis of Trump's four general principles:
1. "We need a tax code that is simple, fair and easy to understand." Trump riffed that closing loopholes and reducing the complexity from the tax system might cost him personally, but said that the complex current tax code "disadvantages ordinary Americans who don't have an army of accountants while benefitting deep-pocketed special interests."
This idea is bound to be popular, especially given the statistic Trump cited that more than 90 percent of Americans need professional help to file their taxes, but Trump made no mention of which loopholes he would close — and every one is in the code because someone put it there. Putting specific tax breaks on the chopping block could prompt a nasty fight.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
2. Slashing the corporate tax rate. "It's time to give American workers the pay raise that they've been looking for for many, many years," Trump said in explaining his desire to slash the corporate tax rate to 15 percent, down from the current statutory rate of 35 percent.
But a rate cut that steep appears to be dead. Instead, reports suggest that a business rate of 20 to 25 percent is more likely.
A bigger problem for Trump and the GOP: Whatever reduced rate ends up in proposed legislation, critics are bound to point out that there's little evidence to support the idea that corporate tax cuts create jobs or raises wages. A new report from the liberal Institute for Policy Studies finds that such tax cuts serve to enrich CEOs and shareholders.
3. Tax relief for middle-class families. "We will lower taxes for middle-income Americans so they can keep more of their hard-earned paychecks, and they can do lots of things with their paychecks," Trump said. "This includes helping parents afford childcare and the costs of raising a family."
Again, the idea of lower taxes is sure to be popular. But multiple analyses of the proposals Trump has put out thus far have found that they would result in much larger tax cuts for the wealthiest households than for the middle class.
4. Repatriating foreign profits of U.S. companies. Trump said the wealth parked overseas totals $3 trillion to $5 trillion, higher than the $2.6 trillion figure usually cited for corporate profits sitting "offshore."
"By making it less punitive for companies to bring back this money and making the process far less bureaucratic and difficult, we can return trillions and trillions of dollars to the economy and spur billions of dollars in new investments in our struggling communities and throughout our nation," Trump said.
But as you'll see here, the truth is not quite as simple.Andy Warhol wrote lovingly of his ever-present tape recorder. (“My tape recorder and I have been married for 10 years now. When I say ‘we,’ I mean my tape recorder and me.”) But for almost a decade beginning in the 1960s, his real boon companions seemed to be his 16-millimeter film cameras, which he used to record hundreds of reels, many of which are still little known even among scholars because of the fragility of the film and the scarcity of projectors to show them on.
Now the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and the Museum of Modern Art, which holds Warhol’s film archives, are beginning a project to digitize the materials, almost 1,000 rolls, a vast undertaking that curators and historians hope will, for the first time, put Warhol’s film work on a par with his painting, his sculpture and the Delphic public persona that became one of his greatest works. It will be MoMA’s largest effort to digitize the work of a single artist in its collection.
Patrick Moore, the Warhol Museum’s deputy director and a curator of the digitization project, said that the goal was, finally, to integrate Warhol’s film work fully into his career. “I think the art world in particular, and hopefully the culture as a whole, will come to feel the way we do,” Mr. Moore said, “which is that the films are every bit as significant and revolutionary as Warhol’s paintings.”
Warhol began using his first film camera, a 16-millimeter Bolex, in 1963. He spent more than two years shooting what became known as the “Screen Tests,” hundreds of short filmed portraits of celebrities, fellow artists, acquaintances and members of his inner circle, like Lou Reed and the socialite Edie Sedgwick, before moving on to longer, more narrative pieces. He made some 600 films of varying lengths, but only about a tenth of those have been available in 16-millimeter prints through the Museum of Modern Art.The swastika is 3 cm wide and 3.5 cm long, and dates back to the beginning of the Slatina Neolithic Settlement, i.e. 6000-5500 BC, reports the Bulgarian daily Trud. “This is a very rare find. Such an artifact was a sign of prestige in prehistoric times,” lead archaeologist, Prof. Vasil Nikolov, from the National Institute and Museum of Archaeology in Sofia, is quoted as saying. Nikolov, who has been excavating the site in Sofia’s Slatina Quarter since 1985, has made headlines in 2014 and 2015, after he and his colleague, Assoc. Prof. Krum Bachvarov, discovered a similar Early Neolithic settlement near the town of Mursalevo in the Kyustendil District in Southwest Bulgaria.“We found exactly the same swastika this summer on the last day of our excavations of the prehistoric settlement near Mursalevo. The [archaeological] science also is aware of several more swastikas of this kind which were discovered near Kardzhali [in Southern Bulgaria] and in Thessaly [in Northwestern Greece],” explains the lead archaeologists. The swastika discovered in the Slatina Neolithic Settlment bears signs of sophisticated craftsmanship even though the nephrite it was made of is a very hard stone.Nikolov says that the frog-like features of the swastika – its shoulders resemble frog legs – are not accidental. In his words, the prehistoric people deemed the amphibians a symbol of fertility because their behavior represented the cycle of life – they come out of their dwellings in the spring, and disappear in the fall in order to show up again next year. The frog-like nephrite swastika from the Slatina Neolithic Settlement was discovered between two prehistoric houses.“It probably was placed in a ritual pit, in the foundations of a new house. This could be construed as a gesture of great importance – giving up a sign of prestige in order to invest into something new,” Nikolov hypothesizes.Microserfs, published by HarperCollins in 1995, is an epistolary novel by Douglas Coupland. It first appeared in short story form[1] as the cover article for the January 1994 issue of Wired magazine and was subsequently expanded to full novel length.[2] Set in the early 1990s, it captures the state of the technology industry before Windows 95, and anticipates the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.
The novel is presented in the form of diary entries maintained on a PowerBook by the narrator, Daniel. Because of this, as well as its formatting and usage of emoticons, this novel is similar to what emerged a decade later as the blog format.
Coupland revisited many of the ideas in Microserfs in his 2006 novel JPod, which has been labeled "Microserfs for the Google generation".[3]
Plot [ edit ]
The plot of the novel has two distinct movements: the events at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, and the move to Silicon Valley and the "Oop!" project.
The novel begins in Redmond as the characters are working on different projects at Microsoft's main campus. Life at the campus feels like a feudalistic society, with Bill Gates as the lord, and the employees the serfs. The majority of the main characters—Daniel (the narrator), Susan, Todd, Bug, Michael, and Abe—are living together in a "geek house", and their lives are dedicated to their projects and the company. Daniel's foundations are shaken when his father, a longtime employee of IBM, is laid off. The lifespan of a Microsoft coder weighs heavily on Daniel's mind.
The second movement of the novel begins when the characters are offered jobs in Silicon Valley working on a project for Michael, who has by then left Redmond. All of the housemates—some immediately, some after thought—decide to move to the Valley.
The characters' lives change drastically once they leave the limited sphere of the Microsoft campus and enter the world of "One-Point-Oh". They begin to work on a project called "Oop!" (a reference to object-oriented programming). Oop! is a Lego-like design program, allowing dynamic creation of many objects, bearing a resemblance to 2009's Minecraft. (Coupland appears on the rear cover of the novel's hardcover versions photographed in Denmark's Legoland Billund, holding a Lego 777.)
One of the undercurrents of the plot is Daniel and his family's relationship to Jed, Daniel's younger brother who died in a boating accident while they were children.
Characters [ edit ]
Daniel The book's narrator and main character. Initially a software tester for Microsoft. His thoughts are funneled into the book through the epistolary format of the novel, and also as he records stream of consciousness lists of terms that he believes exist in a computer's subconscious. Susan A programmer initially working for Microsoft. Throughout the novel, Susan attempts (not always successfully) to find and maintain a meaning to life outside of work. She eventually gains semi-celebrity status after founding Chyx, a feminist support group for Valley women who code. Todd A tester and coworker of Daniel's who is obsessed with bodybuilding and is continually searching for something to believe in. His family is very Christian, while Todd has rejected his parents' faith. Bug Barbecue A tester and coworker of Daniel's; "the World's Most Bitter Man". He is older than most of the other characters, and likes to remind them of his greater experience in the software industry. Eventually he comes out of the closet. His primary reason for leaving Microsoft for Oop! was to "leave the old me behind" and start over. Michael A gifted programmer with high-functioning autism (specifically developmental coordination disorder) initially working for Microsoft. Michael's decision to leave Microsoft and found a startup company is the impetus for the change in lives of the other characters. Michael lives on a "Flatlander" diet, meaning that he eats only things that are two dimensional; this began after a period during which he barred himself in his office, eating only what his co-workers slid under the door. His screen name is "Kraft Singles". Michael is addicted to Robitussin cough syrup, which contains the dissociative drug dextromethorphan. Karla A coder, coworker, and girlfriend of Daniel. Karla's relationship with her family is tense, and she actively avoids contact with them. She begins the story as a closed-off person, but as the novel unfolds her character begins to be more open and understanding. She has a history of an eating disorder. Abe MIT graduate coder and multimillionaire who stays with Microsoft when the rest of the characters leave for California. His email conversations with Daniel appear throughout the novel. Abe, who dearly missed his friends, eventually joins Oop! and saves the company from financial ruin. Ethan President and co-founder of Oop!. Primarily business-minded, he has been a millionaire three times over with various (eventually failed) projects. He devotes his time to seeking venture capital for the startup company. Ethan's personality is diametrically opposed to the other characters, in part because of his relative lack of technical knowledge. He suffers from bad dandruff and his skin is pocked by scars from procedures to remove cancerous growths. Dusty Female bodybuilder and coder who is introduced later in the novel. She is romantically involved with Todd, and they have a baby together (Lindsay). She becomes an employee at Oop!. She and Todd are obsessed with transforming their bodies into perfect "machines" by going to the gym every day and taking protein pills and drinks. Amy A Canadian computer engineering student who is introduced later in the novel. She and Michael meet on the internet and fall in love despite never meeting in person or even knowing each other's genders. Due to Michael's fear of rejection, Daniel is sent to the University of Waterloo to meet her. Amy becomes engaged to Michael and joins the Oop! team after graduating from university. Emmett Introduced later in the novel, Emmett is a meek and asthmatic storyboard artist hired by Oop! who enters into a submissive relationship with Susan. He collects manga despite his hatred of Japan's influence on American animation. Anatole French coder who is Daniel's neighbor and used to work for Apple. Although not an Oop! employee, he visits the team often and accompanies them to Las Vegas for the CES convention. His accent becomes stronger around women. Daniel's father A mid-level manager at IBM who represents an older generation of technical workers. After being laid off, he begins to work closely with Michael on a secret project that evokes feelings of jealousy from Daniel. Daniel's mother A librarian with little technical knowledge, she serves to give the group insight into what the laypeople understand about technology. Jed Daniel's younger brother who died in a childhood drowning accident. He is a looming presence in Daniel's mind throughout the novel. Misty The Underwoods' overweight dog. She was originally trained to be a seeing eye dog, but failed the exam because she was too affectionate.
Influences [ edit ]
Microsoft, Silicon Valley, and geek culture [ edit ]
It always amazes me that 90 per cent of people in the States now work directly around a PC. That's like a billion person-hours a day spent, and yet none of the stories we tell, or the books we write, take place in an office. There's just so much of the human soul and imagination in that strange environment now. I'm amazed we don't see 50 books a week on office life. Coupland, The Times, July 1998.[4]
Coupland lived in Redmond, Washington for six weeks and Palo Alto, Silicon Valley for four months researching the lives of Microsoft workers.[5][6][7] "It was a 'Gorillas in the Mist' kind of observation… What do they put in their glove compartments? What snack foods do they eat? What posters are on their bedroom walls?"[8] Friends from Microsoft and Apple also helped him with research.[4]
The novel was a radical departure from Coupland's previous novel, Life After God. "I wrote the two books under radically different mind-sets, and Serfs was a willful rerouting into a different realm".[9] Coupland first noticed that his art school friends were working in computers in 1992.[10]
Digital faith [ edit ]
Coupland's research turned up links to the themes of Life After God. "What surprised me about Microsoft is that no one has any conception of an afterlife. There is so little thought given to eternal issues that their very absence make them pointedly there. These people are so locked into the world, by default some sort of transcendence is located elsewhere, and obviously machines become the totem they imbue with sacred properties, wishes, hopes, goals, desires, dreams. That sounds like 1940s SF, but it's become the world."[10]
Allusions to history, geography, and science [ edit ]
The book takes place first at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington (near Seattle) and then Silicon Valley (near San Francisco). The time period is 1993–1995, at a time when Microsoft has reached dominance in the software industry and emerged victorious from the "Look & Feel" lawsuit by Apple Inc., a company that had at times seemed in danger of falling apart. The Northridge earthquake takes place during the story and has a profound effect on Ethan, who eventually constructs a replica highway interchange out of Lego pieces to honor the infrastructure destroyed by the earthquake.
History [ edit ]
When Microserfs first came out, most people thought it was a tightly focused anthropological look at a tiny group of historically transient information workers in the American Pacific Northwest. It turns out they were forming a template of the way everyone else in the world works in and around information. As time went on it became a lot broader, instead of a lot narrower, which is what happened with Generation |
and the Pacific (+7 percent) was the best performer, while by sub-region Southeast Asia, North Africa (both at +9 percent) and Central and Eastern Europe (+8 percent) topped the ranking.
“The year 2012 saw continued economic volatility around the globe, particularly in the Eurozone,†said UNWTO secretary general Taleb Rifai.Image caption Supernovas are traditionally named after composers
Astronomers have spotted the most distant supernova ever seen.
Nicknamed "Mingus", it was described at the 221st American Astronomical Society meeting in the US.
These lightshows of dying stars have been seen since ancient times, but modern astronomers use details of their light to probe the Universe's secrets.
Ten billion light-years distant, Mingus will help shed light on so-called dark energy, the force that appears to be speeding up cosmic expansion.
Formally called SN SCP-0401, the supernova was something of a chance find in a survey carried out in part by the Supernova Cosmology Project (SCP) using the Hubble space telescope, first undertaken in 2004.
But the data were simply not good enough to pin down what was seen. As David Rubin of the University of California, Berkeley, lead author on the study, told the AAS meeting, "for a sense of brightness, this supernova is about as bright as a firefly viewed from 3,000 miles away".
Further news had to wait until astronauts installed the Wide Field Camera 3 on the Hubble telescope in 2009 and again trained it on the candidate, which had - in an SCP tradition of naming supernovae after composers - already been named after jazz musician Charles Mingus.
"Unfortunately, it took the development of Wide Field Camera 3 to bring home what the [2004] measurements meant," Mr Rubin told BBC News.
"The sensitivity is a few times better, which makes a huge difference, and we have a much cleaner image."
Image caption The Wide Field Camera 3 enabled scientists to focus in on Mingus
The team went on to confirm that the supernova was in fact a Type 1a - a particular class of exploded star whose light occurs in such a regular way that it is known as a "standard candle".
'Bit of history'
What interests astronomers trying to find ever more distant Type 1a supernovae - distant both in space and in time - is the chance to compare them to better-known, more local supernovae.
"We were able to watch these changes in brightness and spectral features for an event that lasted just a few weeks almost 10 billion years ago," said Saul Perlmutter, who leads the Supernova Cosmology Project.
Prof Perlmutter shared the 2011 Nobel prize in physics for work with Type 1a supernovae that proved our Universe is speeding up in its expansion.
Elucidating the mysterious force, "dark energy", which has been invoked as the cause of the expansion, will require careful study of supernovae all the way back to the epoch of the earliest stars.
"We're seeing two-thirds of the way back to the beginning of the Universe, and we're getting a little bit of history where the physics of what makes a supernova explode have to all work out the same way there as they do near here," he told the meeting.
The group's study is published online and will appear in the Astrophysical Journal on 20 January.
Dark ambitions
Image caption Supernova SN SCP-0401 fits into a wider story, Prof Frieman says
The meeting also heard from Joshua Frieman, director of the Dark Energy Survey - a five-year mission using the most powerful camera ever trained on the skies to get to the bottom of the dark matter mystery.
The phone-booth-sized Dark Energy Camera snapped its first images in September 2012 and will begin its formal mission in September this year, looking not only at supernovae but also at three other dark-energy signatures in the cosmos.
Prof Frieman told BBC News that the distant supernova result fits neatly into a story that he hoped the Dark Energy Survey would explore in great detail.
"What they're doing is using the Hubble telescope to go really deep - we're going to use the Dark Energy Survey to go very broad," he explained to BBC News.
"They're finding tens of supernovae at these high [distances], and we're going to find thousands of supernovae not quite as deep. You really need both of those together to really make progress in trying to figure out why the Universe is speeding up."David Sirota of the International Business Times reported last week that Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and his appointee, the deputy governor of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, had released a political opponent's private tollbooth data in order to embarrass him.
Under criticism from the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg at a hearing on toll increases, the Port Authority official, Bill Baroni, fought back, as Sirota describes:
"Respectfully, Senator, you only started paying tolls recently," Baroni said, according to a transcript of the exchange. "In fact, I have a copy of your free E-ZPass," he continued, holding up a physical copy of the toll pass Lautenberg had received as a benefit from his tenure as a Port Authority commissioner. "You took 284 trips for free in the last 2 years you had a pass."
The next day, in a press conference, Christie used the data to attack Lautenberg more specifically about the details of his travel:
I find it interesting, too, by the way, in 2005 and 2006, that he went over the Hudson River 284 times. Where was he going?... I think he needs to answer that. 'Cause he's supposed to be the senator from New Jersey. So what's he doing going over the bridge or through the tunnel to New York three or four times a week for 2005 and 2006?... Did he ever spend any time in New Jersey?
MSNBC also has a story on this with video of Christie and Baroni's attacks.
As I told Sirota, this incident ties together a lot of the reasons we worry about privacy: that location data is very personal (as we tried to convey last year in this video). That information is power and always raises the temptation for abuse through Nixonian dirty tricks, embarrassment of rivals, or leverage over critics. And that every incident of abuse that actually happens casts a long shadow of chilling effects over those who just worry about how data might be used. If officials feel comfortable using information against a senator, what is a lower ranking political official, let alone ordinary citizen, supposed to conclude about how data could be used against them?
EZ Pass and other electronic toll booth systems should have the option for anonymous use, where money on the devices is treated like cash, for users who prefer privacy to the convenience of having named accounts. A driver, in other words, should be able to buy a transponder for cash, and use cash to store and re-load value on it. The Washington DC Metro system, for example, offers this option for users of its contactless transit passes.
Where identifiable location data is collected, it needs to be subject to very strict protections and controls, including immutable audits that record who is accessing what data, and for what legitimate purpose. Those controls need to cover everyone, right to the top.
New Jersey law does say that "any information obtained from a toll collection monitoring system" shall be available only to Port Authority and police officials "for the purposes of discharging their duties," and "shall not be discoverable as a public record by any person, entity or governmental agency, except upon a subpoena issued by a grand jury or a court order in a criminal matter."
On Monday, New Jersey Congressman Frank Pallone called upon the Justice Department to investigate Christie and Baroni's use of the tollbooth data. Given that Gov. Christie may run for the White House, presidential politics will no doubt enter the equation here, but it should be a scandal when any political leader uses personal data as a weapon in this way.Former treasurer Peter Costello co-owns Melbourne-based ECG Advisory Solutions with his one time political adviser David Gazard. ECG has Westpac, Transurban and detention centre operators Serco on its books.
Several lobbyists expressed surprise that Mr Costello and Mr Minchin are not listed on the official register of lobbyists. Ian Smith, owner of Bespoke, said Mr Minchin was a special adviser and was not directly lobbying the new government. ECG did not return calls.
One lobbyist, who did not wish to be named, said the nexus between business interests and power within the Liberal Party meant there would be greater potential for perceived conflicts of interest.
The biggest winner in the rush to conservative-aligned lobbyists is Barton Deakin, chaired by former NSW Liberal leader Peter Collins. Since the September election its client list has quadrupled to 63.
Barton Deakin is taking on eight out of 10 clients of the Labor-aligned Hawker Britton. Both companies are owned by STW Group and clients are migrated from one to the other depending on which side of politics is in the ascendancy.A newly discovered mechanism of antibiotic resistance helps explain how bacteria have so quickly undermined medicine's front-line defenses, turning miracle drugs into duds in just a few decades.
Scientists have long known that exposing bacteria to the right antibiotics will kill most of them, but leave a few mutants that happen to resist the drug better than the rest. These mutants go on to multiply, and eventually the whole strain evolves resistance.
Now a new study paints a more complicated picture of antibiotic resistance. Bacteria don't just develop resistance to one drug at a time, but to many – and at accelerated rates. That's because antibiotics boost bacterial production of free-radical oxygen molecules that damage bacterial DNA. Repairs to the DNA cause widespread mutations, giving bacteria more chances to randomly acquire drug-resistant traits.
"You have a wide range of mutations being introduced across the genome. Some afford resistance to that antibiotic. Some afford resistance to other antibiotics," said James Collins, a Boston University biomedical engineer who described the mechanism in a paper published Feb. 11 in Molecular Cell. "It would happen anyways, but this process is accelerating it."
Drug resistance is a serious public health concern. According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 70 percent of 1.7 million infections acquired in hospitals every year are resistant to at least one drug. Those infections annually kill 99,000 Americans – more than double the number that die in car crashes.
Drugs that once destroyed almost any bacteria now kill only a few, or don't work at all. In the case of some drugs, like Cipro, the decline is dramatic: Where in 1999 it worked against 95 percent of E. coli, it treated only 60 percent by 2006. Against lung infection-causing Acinobacter, its effectiveness fell by 70 percent in just four years.
Though drug resistance is ultimately inevitable, conventional wisdom holds that antibiotics consumed at suboptimum doses hasten the process. Bugs that would have succumbed to a larger dose live to multiply, pushing the strain as a whole closer to resistance. That happens when a prescription goes unfinished, or when antibiotics used on farms enter food and water at low levels.
The conventional wisdom isn’t wrong, but the new findings suggest that drugs push bacteria towards resistance even more rapidly, and in more ways, than was thought.
"It's a really important paper. It underscores that we don't fully know how antibiotic resistance is engendered," said Harvard University molecular biologist Deborah Hung. "If you treat with low concentrations of antibiotic, the bugs respond by increasing their mutation rates."
In earlier research, Collins' team showed that antibiotics don't only kill bacteria as expected – by corroding cell walls, messing with DNA and blocking proteins – but by triggering the release of free-radical oxygen molecules. Thanks to an extra electron, the free radicals bind easily and corrosively with other molecules, and prove as lethal as the drugs themselves.
For the latest study, the researchers tested whether free radicals might also affect drug resistance by using sublethal doses of five common antibiotics on Staphylococcus aureus, the annual cause of 500,000 infections in the United States, and two strains of E. coli, including one taken from a patient.
The free radicals caused DNA damage that didn't kill all the bacteria. The bacteria's self-repair processes then introduced mutations to genes that provided resistance to many drugs, not just those being administered.
Drugs might be found that could alter bacterial DNA repair systems, but that prospect is extremely speculative, said Collins.
Hung said more research is needed to show how different bacteria respond. Mutation rates might vary between strains. It's also possible that free-radical damage also accelerates horizontal gene transfer, in which bacteria swap genes without reproducing. If so, resistance could develop faster and spread more rapidly.
"The clinical significance is not clear yet, but it certainly should make us pause and think about the way we use antibiotics," said Hung.
In recent years, public health experts have recommended that doctors use antibiotics only when necessary, and that patients complete every prescription. They've also called for dramatic cuts in the agricultural use of antibiotics.
Of the 35 million pounds of antibiotics consumed annually in the United States, 80 percent goes to farm animals. Much of it is used to treat diseases spread by industrial husbandry practices, or simply to accelerate growth. As a result, farms have become giant petri dishes for superbugs, especially multidrug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, which kills 20,000 Americans every year – more than AIDS.
Alarming cases of farm-based MRSA and other diseases led to a proposed Congressional law restricting the use of agricultural antibiotics. That bill, supported by the American Medical Association and American Public Health Association, is opposed by farm lobbyists and remains stuck in committee.
"We need to look carefully at situations where antibiotics are used in agriculture and water supplies," said Collins. "The benefits may not outweigh the potential harm we're doing by creating stronger, more problematic microbes."
Image: Samantha Celera/Flickr
See Also:
Citation: "Sublethal Antibiotic Treatment Leads to Multidrug Resistance via Radical-Induced Mutagenesis." By Michael A. Kohanski, Mark A. DePristo, and James J. Collins. Molecular Cell, Vol. 37 No. 3, February 11, 2009.
"The Fast Track to Multidrug Resistance." By Benjamin B. Kaufmann and Deborah T. Hung. Molecular Cell, Vol. 37 No. 3, February 11, 2009.
Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecological tipping points.France's latest battle to ensure the principles of secularism are being upheld is taking place on the football pitches of the Riviera city of Nice.
In a city where the right wing mayor Christian Estrosi is fighting to prevent a new mosque from opening, authorities are also trying to ensure that Muslims do not bring their religious beliefs anywhere near the municipal football pitches.
They have taken teams to task for beaching a new "secularism charter" that players and clubs are required to adhere to.
Ten breaches of the charter have been reported since last October, according to a report in BFM TV. Most of the incidents consisted of Muslim players praying either on or close to the field, before or during a match.
For example, on March 19th, some footballers asked to go into a referee's dressing room to pray, whereas previous incidents included pausing from a team workout to pray.
“We noticed that people were praying in the changing rooms, on the football fields, and sometimes, other inappropriate behavior such as players who refused to shake hands with the female delegates of the football federation," Eric Borghini (see photo) President of the French Football Federation in the Côte d'Azur region told The Local.
(Eric Borghini. Photo: BFM TV Screengrab.)
"There were even referees who refused to shake hands with female players.”
“So that forced us to react because it doesn't conform to the French republican spirit of secularism," Borghini said. "When something is forbidden, we don't do it. When you have a red light, you stop at the red light. It's the law.
"We consider that sports in general and football in particular, the most popular and universal sport, should not be mixed with religious or political practices.
"On the contrary, it should be a moment of brotherhood, a moment where we should forget all the issues that divide people," said Borghini.
"I don't want to prevent people from practicing the religion they want, but in an appropriate setting, in temples and mosques and churches, and not on a football pitch or in the changing rooms."
"They're not hurting human beings, but they are hurting the principles of the French Republic," he added.
Borghini told The Local the issue of players praying on the pitch or in changing rooms has only arisen in recent years.
(A list of incidents when the secularism charter has been breached. Photo: BFM TV)
Nice's secularism charter calls for “respect for the values of the Republic” and consists of four rules which clubs must abide by, not just regarding religion.
The principle of neutrality of buildings is one rule, while the other three are: gender equality, freedom of conscience and worship and the equality of all before the law, regardless of beliefs.
Nice mayor Estrosi warns that if players are found to be breaking any of these rules, their club may be hit by sanctions in the form of a reduction or even complete cancellation of subsidies.
One club has already been reprimanded for failure to comply with the charter; players received a two-match suspension for praying on the pitch.
Football chiefs admit that other players don't mind the praying because "they are all friends".
One player told BFM TV: "It doesn't shock me if someone prays at half-time. if they are in their own place and not disturbing anyone, then it doesn't bother me."
Many will wonder whether the charter was really necessary and will see it as the mayor's latest attempt to stigmatize Muslims.
(Mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi. AFP)
Estrosi has a history of "sticking his nose in the affairs of the Muslim faith", whether it's his battle to prevent the city's new mosque from opening or banning the waving of foreign flags, namely Algerian, during the last World Cup.
France has a long-established secular tradition that has its roots in the anti-clericalism of the French Revolution and a 1905 law enforcing a strict separation between church and state.
But in recent years French politicians, both on the left and the right, have in the past been accused of using the country's principle of laicité as a cover for trying to limit the influence of the Muslim faith. It is often referred to by the term "militant secularism".
Mayors have refused to offer alternative school meals when pork is on the menu, while even the country's famed veil laws introduced in 2004 and 2010 on the grounds of secularism and then security were deemed by many Muslims to be an attack on their faith.
Muslim mothers were also barred from accompanying their children on school trips if they wore the headscarf.
Last year the country's Education Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem warned against the rise of militant secularism
"In recent years, we have reached levels of unwarranted tension, which go a long way in explaining the misunderstanding surrounding the notion of secularity, and the reason why some young people don't associate with it," Vallaud-Belkacem said.
But football chiefs on the Côte d'Azur say the current political climate means it's more important than ever to reinforce the values of the French Republic.
"Radicalization isn't something that often happens on a football field, but there's a true risk that these lapses could encourage radicalization," said Borghini.
by Katie Warren/Catherine Edwards/Ben McPartlandA physics researcher at the University of Washington says that the scientific citations within the leaked “Ideological Echo Chamber” Google memo must be ignored because the research was “conducted primarily by white men.”
She claims that peer-reviewed research is invalidated by the “experiences of women.”
Penned by James Damore, who lost his job following the leak, the memo called into question the company’s diversity policies by offering a wide range of scientific resources that observed biological differences between men and women.
While the issue remains a subject of contention, scientists have already weighed in to state agree with at least some of the conclusions Damore drew within his 10-page article.
On Quilette last week, four scientists across the fields of psychology and neuroscience largely agreed with Damore’s findings. Neuroscientist Debra Soh wrote in to say that she “didn’t find the memo offensive or sexist in the least.”
UW physics associate Chanda Prescod-Weinstein disagrees, calling the memo a product of “shoddy science.” Campus Reform reported Monday that the researcher first voiced her argument on Slate before taking matters to Twitter, where she devalued the importance of peer-reviewed research.
“It’s 2017, and to some extent scientific literature still supports a patriarchal view that ranks a man’s intellect above a woman’s,” wrote Prescod-Weinstein for Slate on August 9.
She claims that a “well-known scientist” told her that “the Google memo failed to constitute hostile behavior because it cited peer-reviewed articles that suggest women have different brains.”
The fact that the research is peer-reviewed does not mean they are “correct,” she argued, adding that “science has often made its living from encoding and justifying bias” in ways beneficial to white men.
Prescod-Weinstein goes on to say that Damore relied on “shoddy science” to promote a “patriarchal view that ranks a man’s intellect above a woman’s.”
Of course, nowhere in Damore’s memo does he make any such assertions, so it is unknown how the UW researcher managed to infer these claims.
Prescod-Weinstein claims that European scientific advancement was “in fact collations of borrowed indigenous knowledge,” with no citations to her claim, and that the drive for technological breakthroughs has “left us in a dangerously warmed climate.”
On Twitter, the researcher complained that science was not beneficial to women and people of color, and has instead helped to promote inequality.
This reporter was unable to contact Chanda Prescod-Weinstein because she uses a Twitter blocklist.Now I'm not the most P.C. of peoples, but forewarned is forearmed, and if I had four arms I still wouldn't have enough fingers to count the amount of times a day the internet takes some poor, unsuspecting schmuck to task for insensitive usage of language, warranted or not. So I have decided to compile this handy reference list of everyday words and phrases that are of potentially discriminating origin. I was inspired by a recent Huffington Post article on the subject that resulted in much discussion, and by discussion I mean name-calling and ire. Seems people can't agree on whether these words are offensive or not, and they don't care who they offend in the name of proving their point. In the interest of decorum, let's see if we can't clear up a few misconceptions, and at the very least avoid munching on our own feet.
Philistine
Calling someone a philistine makes you a pompous jerk, but is it racist? According to Merriam-Webster, the word has two different meanings:
a native or inhabitant of ancient Philistia a person who is guided by materialism and is usually disdainful of intellectual or artistic values
But are the two definitions mutually exclusive? The Philistines were key enemies of the Jews in the Old Testament—kind of like the Klingons of the Bible. (Why are the swarthy always the enemy?) They existed in what is pretty much modern day Palestine. So is calling someone a philistine anti-Palestinian? By using that term, are you saying all Palestinians are uncouth and uneducated?
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the two uses have different origins. The proper noun Philistine dates back to the 14th Century and comes from the Old French, Late Greek, Late Latin and Hebrew; while the snobbish insult philistine is Germanic in origin, and was popularized in the 17th Century. So they seem unrelated, but here's the catch: the German word philister, from which philistine was derived, literally means enemy of God's word. So, yeah... While the current definition has moved away from Biblical allusion, the origins are definitely sketchy. Still, this isn't one you hear too much complaining about, and people continue to use it with impunity. Being white and Christian has its privileges, amirite?
Sold down the river
The figurative meaning of this phrase represents a deceit or betrayal, but the specifics of its literal origin are much more sinister. According to this dude's online phrase finder, the phrase "originated in the Mississippi region of the USA during slave trading days." Essentially, uppity slaves (uppity being another word that could easily have made this list) would be sold farther south to plantations that had a reputation for having the harshest conditions. And as someone who has just seen the harrowing 12 Years A Slave can attest, being sold down the river SUCKS.
While not pleasant in meaning, this isn't a phrase that is thrown around as a personal insult, so I don't think anyone's going to brand you a racist for using it. Still, if you are going to compare a friend calling you out on Facebook to being sold into slavery, you should probably reconsider.
Hooligan
According to Merriam-Webster, a hooligan is a usually young man who does noisy and violent things as part of a group or gang. So far so not-so-culturally-offensive. But if you scroll down to the origins section, you are met with this tid-bit:
perhaps from Patrick Hooligan, 1896 Irish hoodlum in Southwark, London
Okay, that's slightly more specific, but still. Further research was required. According to an unsourced (for those without a subscription to the OED online) article on Cracked:
The earliest use of the word "hooligan" dates back to British newspaper and police reports in the summer of 1898. They seem to have adapted the word from the Houlihan family, a group of Irish immigrants living in London. The family became known for their hilarious drinking songs, jigs and their enthusiastic police brutality that tended to ensue.
The Online Etymology Dictionary corroborates this, adding that the Irish surname Houlihan "figured as a characteristic comic Irish name in music hall songs and newspapers of the 1880s and '90s." So basically, if you call someone a "hooligan" you are calling them a drunken, Irish stereotype. In some families, it is considered a term of endearment. But if you're not saying it to your abusive Irish dad out of love, please be careful.
See also: vandal (n), barbarian (n)
Hip hip hooray!
Did this triumphant exclamation originate as an anti-semitic cheer? According to the Phrase Finder, according to The Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins by Robert Hendrickson, there really isn't much to this myth:
The old story here can be taken for what it's worth, which isn't much. Hip, we're told, derives from the initials of the Latin words 'Hiersolyms est perdita,' 'Jerusalem is destroyed.' German knights...were supposed to have known this and shouted 'hip, hip!' when they hunted Jews in the persecutions of the Middle Ages. 'Hurrah!' by the same strained imagining, is said to be a corruption of the Slavonic word for Paradise (hu-raj). Therefore, if you ever shout 'hip! hip! hurrah!', you are supposedly shouting: 'Jerusalem is destroyed (the infidels are destroyed) and we are on the road to Paradise!' There is not the slightest proof of any this, and the phrase, which doesn't date back earlier than the late 18th century, almost certainly comes to us from the exclamation 'hip, hip, hip!', earlier used in toasts and cheers, and 'huzza', an imitative sound expressing joy and enthusiasm.
Despite disagreements over the etymology of the phrase, "the 'acronym theory', whether or not apocryphal, was already mentioned by a British newspaper in August 1819." See how hearsay becomes accepted as fact? There are also those who try to trace the origins of Hip! Hip! to Hep! Hep!, which was used as a rallying cry during the Hep-Hep Riots in 1819, even though that phrase has non-antisemitic origins as a sheep herders cry and is considered unrelated. Consensus? This one is safe to use, if you don't mind sounding like a complete weenie.
Gyp
According to our old pals Merriam-Webster, gyp means to cheat or swindle. It is pretty much agreed upon by all sources that the term is short for Gypsy, one of those fun-loving European nomads commonly stereotyped as thieves. So if you call someone or something a gyp, you are disparaging an entire group of people. But hey, how many of us know any actual gypsies? What are the odds of your words coming back to haunt you? On the other hand, gypsies know magic, so on the off chance you do offend one, they will probably put a curse on you. THINNER!
Fun fact: the term Gypsy is derived from the word Egyptian, which is where said people were incorrectly thought to have originated when they immigrated to Europe in the Middle Ages, because their skin was brown. In reality, they were from India.
Calling a spade a spade
Despite the garden tool being homonymous with a racial epithet, the origin of this phrase is completely innocuous. In fact, it had been in use for almost 400 years before the word spade became popularized as an African American slur. It basically means: it is what it is. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and talks like a duck, chances are it's probably a duck.
Of course, now that I think about it, that could be construed as being offensive to ducks, which is a whole other can of worms. Which might be offensive to worms. I give up.
Even though it is devoid of racial origins, changes in the language might make this a phrase best to avoid. As pointed out by the Phrase Finder, this quote from John Trapp's Mellificium Theologicum, or the Marrow of Many Good Authors (1647) doesn't help:
God's people shall not spare to call a spade a spade, a niggard a niggard.
The definition of niggard is yet another conversation, but suffice to say the word has little more than phonetic commonalities with the most offensive of words, although people get in trouble for using it all the time, a la Coleman Silk using the word spook in The Human Stain.
Bugger
This is probably something our friends across the pond are a little more hip to than us. Next time you are about to call a friend's child a "cute little bugger," be careful—what you are actually calling them is a dirty sodomite, most likely of Bulgarian lineage. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary:
bugger (n) "sodomite," 1550s, earlier "heretic" (mid-14c.), from Medieval Latin Bulgarus "a Bulgarian" (see Bulgaria), so called from bigoted notions of the sex lives of Eastern Orthodox Christians or of the sect of heretics that was prominent there 11c.
I was aware of the sodomy connection (cool band name alert!), but Bulgarians? Homosexual Eastern Orthodox Christians? It's all a bit esoteric. I wouldn't worry about that aspect unless you live in a neighborhood referred to as "Little Bulgaria." Still, the homophobic implications are troubling. Let's not forget that the enemy in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game were called Buggers, and he hates gay people like it's his job.
Peanut Gallery
As in: "No comments from the peanut gallery, please."
There are two schools of thought on this. According to the Phrase Finder, amongst other sources, the term "peanut gallery" referred to the cheap seats located in the balcony of some theaters. They were called so because peanuts were the concession of choice—due to being as modestly priced as the seats—and the shells were rained down on lackluster performers.
But during the Jim Crow era, the balcony is where African Americans were made to sit, and some, including an unsourced Wikipedia entry and those who cited it, put forth that peanuts were introduced to America by the slave trade, therefore the origins of this term are discriminatory. Chances are the term predates segregation, but its probably got some racist skeletons in its closet that would make it best to avoid.
Cake Walk/Piece of Cake/Take the Cake
Let them eat cake! Unless it's racist cake.
From, you guessed it, the Phrase Finder:
It is widely supposed that this phrase originated with cake-walk strutting competitions, which were commonplace in the black community of the southern USA in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In those, couples would be judged on their style in the 'cake-walk'. The winners were said to have 'taken the cake', which was often the prize.
But...
As early as the 5th century BC the Greeks used 'take the cake' as symbolic of a prize for a victory.
Now, just because these terms were popularized in the African American community doesn't mean they are racist, does it?
Well, according the the Wikipedia entry, the Cakewalk went on to become quite popular in Minstrel shows, where all aspects of African American culture were usurped and bastardized, so... maybe? You should probably play it safe. Steering clear of this antiquated phrase should be a piece of cake.
Paddy Wagon
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, paddy is slang for an Irishman, and paddy wagon, the term for a large police vehicle used to round up scofflaws during prohibition times, was so-called because so many cops were Irish. Hm...
Of course, there is that stereotype about Irishmen and drinking... Could it be the term's origin is less innocent than some would have us believe?
Does it even matter? Who uses the term paddy wagon these days? Apparently, according to a (not Irish) friend of mine on the force: cops. Lots and lots of cops. And we all know it's okay for cops to be racist. So unless you are a cop, you should probably stick with the much simpler: large police vehicle used to round up scofflaws. You'll be happy that you did.
What do you guys think? Are these words and phrases insensitive? Should we avoid using them? Are there any examples I missed? And finally, what matters more: what a word meant or what it means?In my recent blog post about the ACLU’s lawsuit against the State of Mississippi for promoting religion in a state-sponsored and state-funded event, I pondered whether Mississippi thinks the Constitution doesn’t apply to them. Apparently, Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant doesn’t think it does.
Early this week, the lieutenant governor commented on the ACLU’s case, saying:
I was so disappointed that the ACLU has decided that we don’t need to tell young women in the state of Mississippi about our faith; we don’t need to explain to them that abstinence, we believe, is related to our faithful Christianity beliefs.
If you are like me and cannot believe that a state official would basically admit to violating the Constitution, you can see for yourself by watching the lieutenant governor utter those words in an interview.
There are so many things wrong with his sentence, I don’t even know where to start. First, the lieutenant governor’s remarks show no respect for the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from supporting one religion or another. Mississippi clearly crossed the line when it featured Christian prayers, sermons, and performances in its 2009 abstinence-only summit.
Second, it is revealing that the lieutenant governor believes that we need to tell “young women” that they should remain abstinent until marriage. This is the age-old — and sexist — double standard that dictates that women and girls must be the gatekeepers of sex, and are solely responsible for the consequences. Instead of reinforcing these outdated gender stereotypes, we should be providing all teens with the tools they need to make healthy and responsible decisions.
Tomorrow, September 17, is Constitution Day — perhaps the lieutenant governor and other state officials should take a moment and study the First Amendment, so in the future they can ensure that they don’t promote government-sponsored, taxpayer-funded religious activities, and reinforce outmoded gender stereotypes in the process.Lousy days happen to all of us.
Even a seemingly harmless wake-up-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-bed morning can send you into a funk. No matter how many happiness hacks or positive mantras you try to make it better, it can be hard to shake your grouchiness and glass-half-empty attitude.
And when a bad mood follows you to work, it can amplify all sorts of everyday annoyances and frustrations. Now, perhaps you’re not able to hold it together in front of your boss when she criticizes your report. Or you’re more prone to raise your voice at the intern when he makes copies in black and white instead of color like you asked. And you make absent-minded mistakes, like distractedly sending the wrong version of a document to a client. Ugh.
While none of these are career-ending mistakes, their effects can leave you feeling down on yourself for days. Whatever the situation, you know you need to turn it around as soon as possible.
To help you do that, here are a few tips for turning a really, really bad day into a better tomorrow.
1. Identify the Real Problem
In the middle of a bad day, you’re prone to making blanket statements like, “I feel so stupid” or “Nothing is going according to plan.”
But pause your catastrophic thinking, and take a moment to identify the emotions behind those thoughts. Are you angry with a client? Disappointed with yourself?
It may sound simple, but applying a label to the emotion you’re experiencing can discharge its hold on you and equip you to overcome the negative feelings. When you’re flustered, your mind is cluttered, but research shows that putting your feelings into words can put the brakes on your emotional response and help you process the situation from a more rational, calm perspective. A thought becomes simply a thought; an emotion just an emotion.
For example, “I keep messing up at work, and I’m so frustrated with myself” becomes “I’m having the thought that I’m not doing enough at work, and I’m feeling frustration because of it.” This mindfulness practice has been shown to improve behavior and problem |
that the ban no longer exists, but the second is that we are still asking for a clarification, an explanation, on why did the incident happen?" said Ms Retno.
The Indonesian minister was speaking to reporters on Monday after meeting with US Deputy Ambassador to Indonesia, Ms Erin Elizabeth McKee, who was summoned to the foreign ministry in Jakarta earlier in the morning.
Ms McKee, representing US Ambassador Joseph Donovan who was away, had expressed regret for the treatment of General Gatot, who was told he cannot travel to the US despite having been invited to Washington by General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"We deeply regret the inconvenience that this incident caused and we apologise," said Ms McKee. "We have resolved the matter, General Gatot is able to travel, there are no restrictions and the United States welcomes his participation in the conference that General Dunford had invited him to."
She also added that the US embassy is "working very hard to understand what transpired in this incident and we hope that it will not happen again".
Ms Retno said the US ambassador had apologised for the incident in a phone call on Sunday, and reiterated the importance of Indonesia's relationship with the US.
The American embassy in Jakarta also posted a statement on its website on Sunday, apologising for the inconvenience caused to the general, adding that it was working to facilitate his travel.
The US statement came after Indonesia sent a diplomatic note to the US Secretary of State over the weekend and summoned the US ambassador to explain the incident.
General Gatot, who is due to retire from the military in March next year, is a popular but sometimes controversial public figure in Indonesia.
Last month, he made it compulsory for troops to watch an anti-communist propaganda film made during the Suharto-era, a move critics said could revive a 'Red Scare" in Indonesia.
He has also held a longstanding belief that Indonesia faces "proxy wars", where foreign states seek to undermine his country by manipulating non-state actors.
The US apologies did not seem to placate supporters of the general, whom many had touted to have political ambitions.
By Monday afternoon, banners were spotted in downtown Jakarta that said "Expel the US Ambassador". But they were removed later in the day by city officials.
Ms Retno said that Jakarta is now waiting for her counterpart in the US to investigate the incident, in a bid to offer an explanation as to why its top military commander was denied entry.by John Galt
October 9, 2013 23:00 ET
While I realize that outlining a specific date leaves this website and myself open to massive attacks and criticism, there is no guarantee nor offer of financial advice nor investment ideas behind this article as there is always the probability of another disastrous political solution to the upcoming economic disruption which will begin next week. However, if the politicians and bankers decide to press the issue in order to obtain even greater control over the economy and to justify a greater role for our financial industry within a newly created international economic system, then the logical conclusion is that the system must be crashed sooner, rather than later.
The term of the day to remember is “SD” also known as “Selective Default.”
The definition of Selective Default per the ratings agency Standard & Poors:
“An obligor rated “SD” has failed to pay one or more of its financial obligations (rated or unrated) when it came due. An “SD” rating is assigned when Standard & Poor’s believes that the obligor has selectively defaulted on a specific issue or class of obligations but it will continue to meet its payment obligations on other issues or classes of obligations in a timely manner.”
Why is this terminology important? Let’s review what Obama said at his press conference yesterday:
Just what is his point in this discussion? It would appear that President Obama is setting the table to blame the Republicans for a default, even if the monies are available to pay the interest payments or principle owed. David Stockman, former head of the OMB under President Reagan provides a warning about how such a default would occur while he was a guest on Lou Dobb’s Fox Business News program on October 5th:
How does this event lead to a stock market crash so quickly? Think about what the entire construct of our economic system consists of; the full faith and credit of individuals, businesses, and governments having the ability to borrow money and pay it back. No longer is about creating goods and services to expand wealth, we have built a new system of debt, investment, financial services, and Ponzi schemes designed to multiply returns for the elites while extracting opportunity and imposing control on the masses. This hybrid capitalist approach, and I use the term “capitalism” quite loosely, was perfected by the same leaders while designing Communist China’s emergence from it’s fascist neo-feudalism period into the modern age. By introducing the same system into the European and United States the control of the world’s central bankers will extend to every modern society leaving freedom only as a fleeting memory and history to be redefined as the winners see fit.
Thus if the Obama administration and Federal Reserve are prepared for the worst, what would stop them? They have a patsy within the Republican Party known as the Tea Party movement which gives the leadership which disdains them an excuse to leave them as the scapegoats for an event which need not ever occur. By inferring that it was a small extremist block of politicians that caused this, history and the current crop of political elites will destroy the last opportunity to restore true capitalism and freedom as we once knew it.
The crash would occur as Mr. Stockman noted because Obama ordered a Treasury Department default, The economic consequences would be immediate and severe as his perceived unpredictability would rattle markets worldwide. The methodology behind the default however, is simple and swift. On October 18, 2013, for example, the following Fannie Mae with the CUSIP identifier of 3136G0AB7 has an interest payment due on October 18th (part of a 30 year 4.15% offering). Imagine the market reaction should the Treasury Department announce that their would be a suspension of this interest payment due to the debt ceiling issue and other instruments may be announced throughout the upcoming days.
Boom.
Instant 10%, 12%, 20% or daily limit down on U.S. markets and massive sell off on the Treasury market. But is the market primed for this just because of the debt ceiling and Obamacare fight in Washington? Certainly not; look at the amount of time since a substantial correction and bear market, even short term, has impacted the market in the last 5 years:
The 1-3-6 month T-Bill markets are also flashing equally disturbing signs:
The unnatural rates suppressed by the Federal Reserve and banksters are showing signs again of a strange anomaly at the end of the graph. Bond traders are perhaps the least emotional, most rational bunch I have ever met and they do not move the needle that dramatically unless they feel there is an actual risk of a default, whether planned or not. This event seems to be even more dramatic when reviewing the 4 week Treasury Bill compared to the 3 and 6 month since January 1st of this year:
For the bond market, especially the short duration Treasuries, that is a dramatic move. This fits the model for a preconceived default where a harmless instrument like a GSE bond or bill is deliberately defaulted on creating the excuse for a stock market correction of at least 20% to flush out the weak hands and 40% if there is a more insidious goal planned for the long term. Remember that under the Dodd-Frank legislation, the President and Secretary of the Treasury can waive and eradicate many of the protective banking regulations which would allow greater dominance of the core members of the Federal Reserve to control our economy and personal finances. It is a logical idea to crash the system now, kill two birds with one stone namely the Tea Party and anti-Fed movement, plus create a permanent power structure which destroys any opposition to the policies developed or desired by the highest bidder.
Tread lightly next week because another predictive element I watch, the historical relationship of gold to the stock market is flashing an equally dangerous warning sign. When gold and short term Treasuries illustrate a similar pattern of panic as they did in 2008, I tend to pay attention. Another warning signal for me was the Financial Times story about banks hoarding cash for a potential debt ceiling crisis by increasing their reserves, much like some institutions did in 2008. Hopefully, as I stated above, I am incorrect, but watch what our financial and political leaders do, not what they say.
Like this: Like Loading...A construction worker who was killed after a bridge beam fell along I-90 over Touhy Avenue in northwest suburban Des Plaines has been identified. Three other construction workers were hurt.Sources identified the victim as Vicente Santoyo, 47, of Berwyn. He would have turned 48 next week.Investigators with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration said crews were removing large beams from the site early Tuesday morning. While cutting steel bracing between two beams in half around 2:50 a.m., investigators said the load rolled off a pier support and came down on the crews."They were moving some steel across the roadway. Apparently the load shifted, the girder came down," Des Plaines Police Chief Bill Kushner said.All 45 tons - nearly 101,000 pounds - came crashing down onto a lift where Des Plaines police say Santoyo was working with a team to help cut the beam. His wife and four children were asleep in their Berwyn home when it happened."Today around 5:30 in the morning she called me and she told me that she was going to be unable to come to work because her husband had an accident," said Maria Hernandez, a neighbor who works with the victim's wife. "She said that the doctors said he didn't suffer because the beam came to his chest and he passed away right away.""He was a good guy, he was a family guy. He did everything for his family, especially for his kids," said Francisco Cervantes, a neighbor.OSHA said preliminary reports suggest a strap or chain that was supposed to support the beam may have failed."These types of incidents are preventable if the employer is following all OSHA standards and regulations. We can help prevent workplace fatalities if these standards are followed," OSHA spokesperson Scott Allen said.The other three workers suffered minor injuries and were taken to Lutheran General or Northwest Community Hospital in Arlington Heights for treatment.Touhy was reopened around 10:30 p.m. Tuesday after it was shut down between Wolf and Lee all day.Two lanes of eastbound I-90 are also blocked in that area. To get around the closure, drivers should take Oakton, Howard Avenue or Algonquin Road to go east-west. They should not take Higgins Road, since it turns into Touhy."If you're driving anywhere to the northwest suburbs please allow extra time. We have message boards and detour signs placed throughout the area trying to divert people away from this scene," Chief Kushner said.Larry Joswiak, OSHA's acting area director in Des Plaines, said the administration is investigating Elgin-based Omega Demolition Corporation, who employed Santoyo, and New York-based Judlau Contracting Inc., the general contractor at the site.Omega has had seven inspections since 2006, which have mostly been health inspections due to the company's work with lead abatement. Omega has been issued nine citations since 2006, OSHA said. Two health violations in January 2011 were related to the health inspections. The company paid minor fines for those violations: $3,465 in 2011 and $3,000 in 2006.OSHA said in 2014, 4,251 workers were killed in the private industry. One in five of those deaths were in construction. Falls were the leading cause, followed by electrocution, beings struck by an object and getting caught in between objects.NEW YORK, N.Y. - Anaheim Ducks forward Shawn Horcoff has been suspended for 20 games for violating the NHL's performance enhancing substances program.
The suspension is accompanied by mandatory referral to the NHL/NHLPA program for substance abuse and behavioural health for evaluation and possible treatment.
"This morning we were made aware of the situation regarding Shawn Horcoff. The Anaheim Ducks organization fully supports the NHL/NHLPA performance enhancing substances program," Ducks general manager Bob Murray said in a statement. "We will also continue to support Shawn as a player and person throughout this process.
"We will have no further comment at this time."
Based on his average annual salary, Horcoff will forfeit US$357,526.88. The NHL said it will have no further comment on his suspension.
Horcoff, 37, has six goals and four assists in 45 games with Anaheim this season. He has 186 goals and 320 assists over 15 NHL season with Edmonton, Dallas and Anaheim.
Horcoff is the first NHL player suspended since November 2014, when Toronto Maple Leafs forward Carter Ashton was banned for 20 games by the league after failing a drug test. Ashton said at the time he inadvertently ingested clenbuterol, a prohibited substance, after using another athlete's inhaler during an asthma attack.
Horcoff is the fourth player suspended under the NHL/NHLPA policy, following Ashton, New York Islanders defenceman Sean Hill in 2007 and Buffalo forward Zenon Konopka in 2014.Here is a list of 5 festival trips that you can do in North East India this coming months.
Pangsau Pass Winter Festival – Nampong, ARUNACHAL PRADESH
January
Well if you think you have seen and done it all, head off to explore the Pangsau Pass Winter Festival in Nampong, Arunachal Pradesh coming January. We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us. This is exactly what this festival does to you when you visit Nampong. The Winter Carnival was organised by the PPWF committee in collaboration with the State Tourism Department amidst the breath taking beauty of Nampong, nestled in the Patkai range, a small town in Changlang district just 12 Kms away from the border with Myanmar. Along with the festival there are so many other things that one can visit or see. The historical Stilwell Road does not need any introduction as it was an imperative route of trade for the entire North East. Gliding through the serpentine track of the historical Stilwell road magnifies the excitement manifold, and while on the move, on the way to the festival ground, there is another place of utmost importance - the WW-II Cemetery that reminds us of the sacrifices made by the brave soldiers to protect our tomorrow.
Shine – a – Light : Voice of the Silent Hills, Sohra, MEGHALAYA
November
It initiated with one purpose in mind – To Revive Rock N Roll with the sole intention to provide support to local musicians and bands. But lo behold!, Who can stop music from becoming what it is. This festival is three day of bliss to music lovers. The festival takes place at a 60 Acre venue in Sohra, Cherrapunjee. Apart from music, there are a lot of other activities like mountain cycling, trekking and cave exploring, among others, to enjoy the scenic beauty and the ambience of the surrounding silent hills. Festival goers also have the choice to camp right next to the venue. “We selected music that has soul and we wanted to keep it raw. Music should be what triggers emotion and that is how the bands and artists, were selected for the festival,”saysAtanu Buragohain, a music lover and one of the organizers of the festival. Expect spectacular showmanship on the stage, impressive gigs and exciting adventure excursions.
Ziro Music Festival, Ziro, ARUNACHAL PRADESH
September
Ziro Music Festival has been one of India’s biggest festivals for a couple of years and attracts a large, varied audience in addition to national and international artists! In the past, the festival has been the festival, and the campground has been the campground. But what an experience! It’s always different every time. Imagine a loose spontaneous parade of raw music, dance and revelry all moving along, set to the most amazing soundtrack of brass. The third edition of Ziro Festival of Music (ZFM) is set to commence this September with off-the-block offering for all music-lovers. ZFM aims to raise awareness of northeast India and bring it into the mainstream consciousness of the country through music, art and culture. It is hosted by the Apatani tribe people at Ziro, a beautiful, serene valley in central Arunachal Pradesh and supported by the local and state government. Anup Kutty, Co-Founder – ZFM says, “After the success of the previous two editions, we have decided to let the fun and music spill over to an extra day. This year will also see a lot more folk artists from across India making it an unique convergence of cultures”.
Dree Festival, Ziro, ARUNACHAL PRADESH
July
The Dree Festival of Arunachal Pradesh is a celebration of the agricultural way of life for the Apatanis. The Festival is the biggest for the Apatanis and celebrated with much zest marked by sacrificial offerings and prayers. The Dree Festival is celebrated in July. The main and the biggest celebration of this festival happens at Ziro, Arunachal Pradesh. During the festival prayers are offered to please the 4 Gods – Tamu, Harniang, Metii, and Danyi to bring in a bountiful harvest season. Fowls, eggs, and animals are sacrificed during this festival as part of the ritual. The festival is also marked by big community feasts served with delicious rice millet beer. Traditional songs and dances are also displayed as part of the Dree celebrations. This day long festival is an occasion where womenfolk brew wine and visit homes of their relatives and present them wine as a symbol of love and affection. Eventours is organizing a Dree Festival Photography Expedition, from July 3rd till July 8th with renowned photo expert – Dhruba J Dutta. This workshop cum expedition calls for some exciting frames of incredible landscapes, portraits, some exotic tribes and their culture. One can write to them at info@eventours.in.
Hornbill Festival, Kohima, NAGALAND
December
Life in Nagaland is one long festival! But every December, from 1st till 10th, life becomes a carnival in Kohima. Hornbill Festival showcases a mélange of cultural displays under one roof. Hornbill Festival is held at Naga Heritage Village, Kisama which is about 12 km from Kohima. All the tribes of Nagaland take part in this festival. The aim of the festival is to revive and protect the rich culture of Nagaland and display its extravaganza and traditions. The weeklong gala offers something for everyone – one could sip on rice beer, rest in Naga huts and shop from the Night Bazaar while experiencing a multi-stage musical extravaganza. The annual Hornbill Rock Contest offers the winners Rs 10 lakh, and runners-up Rs 5 lakh and Rs 2.5 lakh. Held once a year in early December, the Hornbill Festival includes traditional Naga morungs exhibition, sale of arts and crafts, songs, dancing, archery, indigenous games, Naga wrestling, herbal medicine stalls, food stalls, flower shows, beauty contest, fashion shows and concerts. Traditional arts are also displayed with paintings, sculptures and wood carvings. This December give in to the extravaganza of culture and celebration in Nagaland as you get a chance to engage yourselves in the colorful celebrations of the Hornbill Festival.After its introduction last season, Pilot quickly became one of the most interesting maps, due to a mix of complexity and simplicity. A casual glance at a preview of the map would lead an observer to assume straightforward gameplay, but the limited elements lend themselves to a game of complexity. The primary of these are the bombs in the middle of the map, which tempt risky balls to ricochet away into their opponents. It seems at times that most important factor in a Pilot match is making the correct decision.I’m going to forget the nuanced decisions of the map to focus on what’s tangible: stats. Measurements like GASP and NISH value players who are productive, lots of returns or hold are a good thing, right? When slide inevitably puts up over seventy tags this week, should we begin to hand him the award for defensive player of the season? Fortunately, slide is also on a good team, and as MLTP success relies heavily on a team, the Base Gods are a very productive team as well by leading the league in returns and captures.But let’s ignore what teams have already done over the entire course of the season, and focus on what they have yet to do. Let’s predict the future. In the past I modelled team success based on the totals for each stat, which worked pretty well, but was flawed because of teams like LagProne which have barely any hold, but lots of returns and not that much hold against. If a team prevents its enemy from having the flag a lot, it matters less that a team doesn't have its opponent’s flag out, especially if they capitalize on scoring opportunities.Proportions, then, were the best way to combat this. Simply, the total of a teams production divided by their plus the opponent’s production.(team’s total)/(team’s total + opponent’s total), gave the proportion of that stat total earned by the team. Each week two maps are played, so Pilot was chosen because it is again played Week 7, so we can use last week's stats to predict next week’s results. Two models were created using backwards elimination to calculate plus/minus (how many net caps more (or less) a team scores compared to their opponent) based on the proportions for each half of Pilot played the previous week. Data from the previous week was used to predict each team’s stats for week 7, and the proportions for the upcoming meetups were fed into the models to create the predictions.The first model is from an earlier step in the backwards elimination, which means not all variables have the strongest correlation, but the model had the lowest error. The second model comes from the end so all variables are strongly correlated to plus/minus (>0.05), but has fewer independent variables and slightly higher error.The strongest influences for both models are grabs and drops, which is very similar to captures (a variable manually removed from the data). The negative strength of drops also ties into pops, because every time a player pops they are sidelined for 3 seconds. Should a player pop 20 times, they would be inactive for 10% of the game. Thus living proportionally more than the opponent is a huge factor in scoring having a positive plus/minus, due to the overtime player advantage. The first model also includes returns, prevent, and hold against. The strangest part of the model is the negative weight for defensive statistics: prevent and returns. Prevent is very weak anyway, but is likely affected by LagProne’s tied half despite having only 20.8% of the prevent. Returns however, is different, and probably stems from the fact that a team with a large proportion of the returns will have a small proportion of the grabs, and grabs are a huge positive (if you’re not dropping a lot too). Additionally, Pilot is unique in that many drops are caused by flag carriers spiking due to mid bombs which makes a standard return less important.Origin Ducks are comfortable in the rankings right now, but lost to the dominant Merballs on Pilot. Roll Models on the other hand are making up ground with victories like the one over Holdin’ Gate Warriors. These teams end up neck in neck in the predictions however. Neither team is excessively grabby, but the Roll Models have a slight edge from not popping or dropping as much. What gives the Origin Ducks the slightest of edges in Model One, is their lower share of returns which matches their higher grab proportion. The Ducks are also predicted to win powerups, but whichever team can control them better might have the edge to send it one way or the other.Merballs should wrap up another victory against the Holdin’ Gate Warriors who are their biggest threats to the Western crown. While the Merballs are already exceptional at staying alive more than their opponents, Holdin’ Gate struggled and as a result are predicted to have twice as many non-drop-pops.Angry Balls Redux against Tears should be another close match, with the Redux coming off of a dominant victory over Texas Hold ‘Em and Tears sliding past BMX2. Interestingly, the lowest pops Tears had on a half last week (55) is equal to the Angry Balls’ max. However Tears’ powerup strength saves them in the prediction. Angry Balls will likely dictate the flow of this game but Tears should use powerups to get the caps needed to keep it close.The last western conference matchup predicts a low ranked BMX (who played Tears close) to take a game off of middling Texas Hold ‘Em. Both teams are nearly identical in grabs and drops, but Texas Hold ‘Em was on the upper end of pops. Additionally BMX should rebound with better pup control and take care of the game.The most exciting prediction of the night is that the first model expects LagProne to bring the Base Gods down to demigods with their first defeat. LagProne is very conservative with grabs, they averaged 30 per half, and and while they popped a bit more than that, they were still on the lower side of the league. Base Gods on the other hand are volatile and explosive, which is what makes them exciting. Though they aren't far above league average in grabs, drops, or pops. The second model predicts a Base Gods victory, as the first model gives them a hard time for inflated defensive statistics. The stingy LagProne offense won’t feed the slide return machine so it would be very surprising to see Base Gods’ offenders past 3. Both teams are strong with powerups but LagProne will need to gain control to make the most of their limited chances.The first model likes the KGBallers a whole lot more than the second, but KGB had a close game against LagProne whereas Adrenaline Spikes were blown out a bit by Base Gods. AS shattered every other team by averaging 74.5 pops which does not bode well for their chances. They did this by grabbing a lot, so if they manage to convert they could make it close, otherwise they’ll definitely be putting this season to rest. Xile doesn’t help this problem much either, he plays both positions and would be more aggressive on offense than a standard defender.The new and improved Dyson Majors are back on track but will have their hands full with pimped out Boostin Dynamo. jjpoole was able to fleece his former teammates and upgrade his positions of need. This prediction is likely to be inaccurate, especially due to the fact that both teams were very close statistically.Ghostboosters and ALL CAPS both lost last week on Pilot but Ghostboosters managed one good half against Dyson before falling into shambles for the second. Neither team stands out much except GB’s powerup control. ALL CAPS pop a little less but still drop more. Close game but this homecoming game should be exciting nevertheless.Flush with energy and political activism in response to President Trump’s Muslim immigration ban this weekend, social media users turned on ride-sharing service Uber for its support of the president.
When protests erupted at New York City’s JFK airport Saturday evening over an executive order signed by the President that temporarily halted immigration from seven predominantly Islamic countries, and established preferential treatment for refugees seeking asylum who identify with “minority religions” in their country of origin, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance tweeted out that there would be a temporary strike to stand in solidarity with those affected by the ban.
NO PICKUPS @ JFK Airport 6 PM to 7 PM today. Drivers stand in solidarity with thousands protesting inhumane & unconstitutional #MuslimBan. — NY Taxi Workers (@NYTWA) January 28, 2017
Uber quickly seized on the opportunity by tweeting out that surge pricing would be temporarily turned off in order to capture the market share of stranded travelers.
Surge pricing has been turned off at #JFK Airport. This may result in longer wait times. Please be patient. — Uber NYC (@Uber_NYC) January 29, 2017
Journalist Dan O’Sullivan saw the Uber tweet and immediately called out Uber for exploiting the situation and breaking the taxi strike.
congrats to @Uber_NYC on breaking a strike to profit off of refugees being consigned to Hell. eat shit and die https://t.co/19gbpIc9m9 — HUNTER S. FAILSON (@Bro_Pair) January 29, 2017
O’Sullivan continued tweeting against Uber, pointing out that Uber CEO Tarvis Kalanick supports President Trump, and began encouraging his followers to delete their account with the company as well as the app from their mobile devices. He promised to retweet anyone who took a screenshot of themselves sending Uber a request to delete their account. It was not long until the hashtag #deleteUber was trending.
don’t just delete the app, delete your account, and tell those fuckers why, then send me a screencap, I’ll RT #deleteUber — HUNTER S. FAILSON (@Bro_Pair) January 29, 2017
don’t just delete the app, delete your account, and tell those fuckers why, then send me a screencap, I’ll RT #deleteUber — HUNTER S. FAILSON (@Bro_Pair) January 29, 2017
Later in the evening, Uber responded on Twitter saying it did not intend to end the strike by getting rid of surge pricing. Uber stated it simply wanted to be paid to do the work of striking taxi drivers.
Last tweet not meant to break strike. Our CEO’s statement opposing travel ban and compensating those impacted: https://t.co/joWvPvux9J — Uber NYC (@Uber_NYC) January 29, 2017
Uber has also announced it will compensate drivers stuck overseas due to the ban, and set up a $3 million legal defense fund to help drivers get back into the U.S.
Seizing on the opportunity and noticing many #deleteUber tweets referencing them, Uber competitor Lyft announced it was donating $1 million to the ACLU, which is leading the charge against the Muslim ban arguing it is unconstitutional.
#deleteUber began gaining even more momentum on Sunday as influential Twitter account George Takei tweeted in support of deleting the app.
Lyft donates $1mil to ACLU while Uber doubles down on its support for Trump. #DeleteUber — George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) January 29, 2017
People considering deleting Uber looking for alternatives can use Lyft as well as several other ride sharing services depending on their availability in their area.
If you prefer to patronize a unionized and regulated taxi service, you can download the Arro app which will hail a licensed taxi cab.
One takeaway from this weekend and the #deleteUber movement is that activists and protesters are not just going after politicians, but companies believed to support policies they disagree with.
Dan Webb, Political Correspondent for Lima Charlie News.
Dan Webb is a former U.S. Air Force Airborne Systems Engineer on the RC-135 Rivet Joint aircraft. He completed three deployments to Southwest Asia in support of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom totaling over 1200 combat flight hours. He currently works as a software engineer for an Omaha based marketing agency. Previously he worked for the Office of Military and Veteran Services at the University of Nebraska Omaha where, as a student, he received his B.S. in Political Science with a minor in Economics. Dan’s interests include domestic economic policy, veteran’s issues, and national security. Follow Dan on Twitter @DanWebbLC & listen to Dan every week on the Horse Race political podcast.
Lima Charlie provides global news, insight & analysis by military veterans and service members Worldwide.
For up-to-date news, please follow us on twitter at @LimaCharlieNewsMasayoshi Son (Japanese: 孫 正義, Hepburn: Son Masayoshi, Korean: 손정의 Son Jeong-ui; born August 11, 1957) is a Japanese business magnate and investor of Korean descent[3] who is the founder and current chief executive officer of Japanese holding conglomerate SoftBank, the chief executive officer of SoftBank Mobile, current chairman of U.S.-based Sprint Corporation and chairman of U.K.-based Arm Holdings.[4] According to Forbes magazine, Son's estimated net worth is US $23 billion and he is the richest man in Japan,[2] despite having the distinction of losing the most money in history (approximately $70bn during the dot com crash of 2000).[5] Forbes also describes him as a philanthropist.
Son was named the world's 45th most powerful person by Forbes Magazine's List of The World's Most Powerful People in 2013.[6]
Son was ranked at number 39 on the Forbes list of The World's Billionaires 2018, with a net worth of $22.7 billion.[7]
Early life and education [ edit ]
Ethnically Korean, Son's grandparents immigrated to Japan from North Korea in search for economic opportunities. Son was born in a small town on Japan's southern island Kyushu in the sparsely populated Saga Prefecture.[8][9] [10]
At age 16, Son moved from Japan to California and finished high school in three weeks by taking the required exams at Serramonte High while staying with friends and family in South San Francisco. After spending two years at Holy Names University in Oakland, CA, Son transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, where he majored in economics and studied computer science. Enamoured by a microchip featured in a magazine, Son at age 19 became confident that computer technology would ignite the next commercial revolution.[11]
His first business endeavours began as a student. With the help of some professors, Son invented an electronic translator that he sold to Sharp Corporation for $1.7 million. He made another $1.5 million by importing used video game machines from Japan, on credit, and installing them in dormitories and restaurants.[9] Son pursued his interests in business by securing a meeting with Japan McDonald's president Den Fujita. Taking his advice, Son began studying English and computer science.[12]
Son graduated from UC Berkeley with a B.A. in Economics in 1980,[13] and started Unison in Oakland, CA, which has since been bought by Kyocera. Son's family had adopted the Japanese surname Yasumoto (安本), and Son had used that surname as a child.[9] He decided to use his Korean surname instead on returning to Japan from the U.S.,[14] and became a role model for ethnic Korean children in Japan.[14]
Yahoo! and Alibaba [ edit ]
Son was an early investor in internet firms, buying a share of Yahoo! in 1995 and investing a $20 million stake into Alibaba in 1999. Son's holding company SoftBank owns 29.5% of Alibaba, which is worth around $108.7 billion as of 23rd October 2018.[15][16][17] Although SoftBank's stake in Yahoo! had dwindled to 7%, Son established Yahoo! BroadBand in September 2001 with Yahoo! Japan in which he still owned a controlling interest. After a severe devaluation of SoftBank's equity, Son was forced to focus his attention on Yahoo! BB and BB Phone. So far, SoftBank has accumulated about $1.3 billion in debt. Yet, Yahoo! BB acquired Japan Telecom, the then third largest broadband and landline provider with 600,000 residential and 170,000 commercial subscribers. Yahoo! BB is now Japan's leading broadband provider.
Vodafone K.K. [ edit ]
On March 17, 2006, Vodafone Group announced it had agreed to sell Vodafone K.K. to SoftBank for approximately 1.75 trillion Japanese yen (approximately US$15.1 billion). On April 14, 2006, SoftBank and Vodafone K.K. jointly announced, that the brand and company name Vodafone will be changed to a "new, easy-to-understand and familiar company name and brand". Masayoshi Son is the CEO (Representative Director) of Vodafone K.K.
Arm Holdings [ edit ]
In July 2016 SoftBank announced its plan to acquire Arm Holdings for £23.4 billion ($31.4 billion) which had to be the biggest ever purchase of a European technology company. In September 2016 SoftBank announced that the transaction is complete. The total acquisition price was approximately £24 billion ($34 billion).[18][15]
Sprint Corporation [ edit ]
Through his holdings in SoftBank, Son bought a 76% share in Sprint. SoftBank has further accumulated shares in Sprint (S) to about 80% ownership.[19]
Investment in solar power [ edit ]
In response to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011, Masayoshi Son criticized the nuclear industry for creating “the problem that worries Japanese the most today”,[20] and engaged in investing in a nationwide solar power network for Japan.[21] In March 2018, it was announced that Son was investing in the biggest ever solar project, a 200GW development planned for Saudi Arabia as part of its Vision 2030.[22]
Personal life [ edit ]
Son met his wife, Masami Ohno, while in university. They have two daughters.[23] He lives in Tokyo in a three-story mansion that is valued at $50 million which has a golf range that has the technology to mimic the weather conditions and temperature of the world’s top golf courses. He has also bought a home near Silicon Valley in Woodside, California that cost him $117 million. He owns Softbank Hawks, a professional Japanese baseball team. [24] Son has three brothers and is the second oldest of the siblings. His youngest brother Taizo Son is a serial entrepreneur and investor, having founded GungHo Online Entertainment and the venture capital firm Mistletoe [25]
Philanthropy [ edit ]
In 2011 Son pledged to donate 10 billion yen ($120 million) and his remaining salary until retirement to support victims of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.[26]
Vision Fund Investments [ edit ]
SoftBank's investment vehicle, the $100 billion Vision Fund which invests in emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics and the internet of things.[27], aims to double its portfolio of AI companies from 70 to 125.[28] It also invests in companies to revolutionise real estate, transportation, and retail. Son makes personal connections with the CEOs of all companies funded by Vision Fund.[29] Son plans to raise $100 billion for a new fund every few years, investing about $50 billion a year in startups. [30]0 Police unsuccessful in locating armed carjacker in Redmond
REDMOND, Wash. - Police were pursuing a carjacker Monday afternoon in Redmond who they said was armed |
Jock. Liner notes by Edgar Wright and David Arnold. Pressed on 180 Gram Crown-Ale colored vinyl (also available on 180 Gram black vinyl). $25
Edgar Wright's sophomore film turns 10 years old this year, and we are honored to continue our celebration of his iconic film trilogy with the premiere release of David Arnold's score to HOT FUZZ.
Never before released in its entirety, David Arnold’s score for HOT FUZZ plays it straight. The world of Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) and Danny Butterman (Nick Frost) is filled with stylized shoot-outs, colorful characters, and rapidfire comedic beats; the music of HOT FUZZ takes the sincere approach. It brings the heroes (and their many, many villains) into the action films that eventually crash headfirst into the peaceful idyllic village of Sandford.
The title track, ‘Theme from Hot Fuzz,’ feels like a retro futurist version of a ’60s cop show - all urgent beats and huge orchestral flourishes that make you feel like you are in the action. ‘The Hot Fuzz Suite (Hotter and Fuzzier)’ is 23 minutes of utterly spellbinding music which travels the path from beautiful Spanish guitar flourishes to Arnold’s signature orchestral techno stylings. David Arnold went back to the master tapes for us on this and pieced the entire soundtrack together; both David and Edgar were involved in the approvals.
Featuring original artwork by Jock, continuing his Cornetto Trilogy series (with companion artwork to his previous take on SHAUN OF THE DEAD), mastered for vinyl at Air Studios UK, and pressed on 180 Gram Crown Ale Colored Vinyl (also available on 180 Gram Black).
AVAILABLE NOW
MONDO
Atomic Blonde - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack 2XLP. Original Artwork by Ron Lesser. Pressed on 180 Gram Blue and Yellow Swirl Vinyl. Also available on Black Vinyl. Note: this item ships mid-August 2017. $35
A cool film needs a cool soundtrack, right? And none come cooler than ATOMIC BLONDE. A double LP filled to the brim with needledrops of some of the '80s best known cuts, as well as some under the radar gems, and a smattering of brand new tracks recorded especially for the movie.
David Bowie, George Michael, The Clash, Nena, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and A Flock Of Seagulls of course need no introduction, and they all contribute absolutely killer songs here. Rubbing shoulders with these A-listers are lesser known acts such as Re-Flex, whose track ‘The Politics of Dancing' was a minor hit in the UK and is a pure '80s synth-pop banger from start to finish. After The Fire went from playing uninspired prog rock to recording the should-have-been classic ‘Der Kommissar,’ full of funky guitar licks and a chorus so hook-laden it should be illegal. ‘Voices Carry’ by American new wave band 'Til Tuesday features Aimee Mann on vocals and is an all-timer everyone needs on vinyl.
DISTRIBUTED TITLES
DISTRIBUTED TITLE
Sonic Mania - Original Video Game Soundtrack LP. Released on Data Discs Records. Music by Tee Lopes. Pressed on 180g Sonic Blue Vinyl (Also available on 180g Black Vinyl). $27
Just in time for Sonic's 26th Anniversary, and to celebrate the launch of his newest adventure, SEGA and Data Discs are proud to announce the official SONIC MANIA vinyl album.
The SONIC MANIA LP features 16 new tracks by composer Tee Lopes, as well as new gatefold art featuring Sonic, Tails and Knuckles exploring the lush vistas of Green Hill Zone Act 2. The vinyl album is a must-have for any fan or Sonic music aficionado, and a gorgeous addition to any Sonic collection.
Pressed on 180g translucent “Sonic Blue” vinyl and packaged in a heavyweight gatefold sleeve with UV spot varnish, this release features new and exclusive artwork, along with a printed inner sleeve featuring an array of characters from the game. It also includes a download code of the album in both lossy and lossless formats. Also available on 180g Black vinyl.
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Popol Vuh - For You and Me. Released on One Way Static Records. Pressed on Black and Silver swirl vinyl (300 copies only). $25
Out of print since 1991 and never released on vinyl outside of Europe, Popol Vuh's For You and Me is now available as a gorgeously packaged deluxe vinyl edition. Pressed on colored vinyl and strictly limited to 300 copies worldwide (black & clear swirl vinyl), For You And Me was the band's 17th album (!) and now - 28 years later - holds up more than ever. While decidedly new age and world music in sound, this album has style and grace, and the updated sonic quality makes it a pleasure to listen to. The light pieces combined with their timeless dramatic signature sound, the majestic piano chords, the profound lyrics and the crescendos of emotions set this album apart from the banal new age mainstream. The authentic Popul Vuh spirituality permeates on every track here; prepare for goose bumps and a divine moment. In For You and Me, they created a modern day classic, easily their best album of the '90s.
DISTRIBUTED TITLE
The Burning - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Released on One Way Static Records. Music by Rick Wakeman. Black & Orange vinyl (limited to 200 only). $25
The iconic score for THE BURNING was composed and performed by Rick Wakeman, an English composer, keyboardist, songwriter, author and actor who needs little introduction. He is best known for being in the progressive rock band Yes, and for his solo albums released in the 1970s. Wakeman’s early credits include playing on David Bowie’s "Space Oddity" and on songs by T.Rex, Elton John, Cat Stevens, Lou Reed and Black Sabbath (among others). He also composed numerous soundtracks and additional music for films like CREEPSHOW 2 (1987), CRIMES OF PASSION (1984) and THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1990).
Rick delivers a SCARY soundtrack to go with the film, even paranoid-sounding at times, contrasted with beautifully delicate piano work which crashes into the powerful pulsating synth driven sections that are Rick Wakeman’s trademark. Jazz components mixed with eerie ambient electronics makes this an essential release for fans of horror movie soundtracks. Now... get ready to experience the sound of fear.Story highlights Derek Medina is accused of shooting his wife, Jennifer Alonso, in August 2013
He posted a picture of her body on his Facebook page with a note
Sentencing on the second-degree murder charge is set for early next year
(CNN) A Florida man who posted a photograph of his wife's body on Facebook was found guilty Wednesday of second-degree murder.
Derek Medina of South Miami was accused of shooting his wife, Jennifer Alonso, in August 2013. After he killed her, authorities say, he posted a picture of her body on his Facebook page with a note.
Prosecutors are expected to seek a life sentence at a hearing set for January.
"No family should ever have to see their daughter killed and then exhibited world-wide on the internet like some macabre trophy to a husband's anger as was Jennifer Alfonso," Miami Dade State's Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said in a statement.
"Far, far too often this kind of domestic violence leads to injury and death. That's why we all must end all forms of domestic violence," she said.
Read MoreFor years, a specter hung over Ciudad Juárez. In the 1990s, the largest city on the Texas-Mexico border became infamous for its gruesome “femicides”—the murders of hundreds of women. The murders, held to be predominantly mysterious and sexual in nature, grew in the public’s imagination. Juárez developed an international reputation as a place of horrific violence against women, a reputation that has become an internationally dominant narrative about the city. The femicides of Juárez have spurred activism and academic study, and become a major part of artistic and cultural depictions of life in Juárez—from the Tori Amos song “Juárez,” to Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666, to FX’s recent drama The Bridge.
Some who write about the femicides speculate wildly about the source of the violence, suggesting the killers “belong to street gangs, organized crime syndicates, powerful families, a satanic cult, an underground snuff film industry, the police—or all of the above.” The killings, they claim, are sexual, brutal, commonplace, and above all, inexplicable.
That’s a narrative that Molly Molloy, a research librarian and professor at New Mexico State University, finds deeply troubling. Molloy has studied Juárez for two decades, and has written for The Nation, Phoenix New Times, Narco News Bulletin and The Texas Observer. She’s also the force behind Frontera List, an invaluable and long-running repository of raw information and discussion about border issues.
In recent years, she’s become increasingly convinced that the commonly accepted story of the Juárez femicides is a myth. While violence has extracted a horrific toll in the city, Molloy says, the proportion of homicides with female victims in Juárez is less than it is in many American cities. What’s more, she says, the sensationalistic narrative of the sexual murders of young women in Juárez distracts Americans from the real social dysfunction experienced by Mexicans living near the border. It’s a contention that’s been hotly contested by others who write about the femicides, but Molly says careful study of Juárez paints an unambiguous picture.
The Texas Observer spoke with Molly Molloy by phone and email about life in the city:
Texas Observer: Does Ciudad Juárez experience a disproportionate amount of violence against women?
Molly Molloy: Female murder victims have never comprised more than 18 percent of the overall number of murder victims in Ciudad Juárez, and in the last two decades that figure averages at less than 10 percent. That’s less than in the United States, where about 20 to 25 percent of the people who are murdered in a given year are women. Ciudad Juárez is experiencing profound social distress, and the elevated violence in the city is a continuing crisis. But this idea that Juárez is a place of disproportionate violence against women is a misperception.
TO: How confident are you in the accuracy of the available statistics?
MM: Mexican statistics are notoriously difficult to get and unreliable. That said, statistics do exist—and they can be very useful, especially when you can track them over time. And there are other sources. From the late 1980s until her death in 2009, Esther Chavez Cano, one of the most eloquent voices on women’s rights and human rights in Juárez, wrote hundreds of columns in Juárez newspapers to draw attention to the lack of social services in the city and especially to the ravages of domestic violence that primarily affected women and children. She became a spokesperson and a resource for families of victims, and she began to keep meticulous records of the crimes against women.
Of the roughly 400 cases documented in Esther Chavez’ files from 1990 to 2005, about three-quarters of the cases were domestic violence, and the cases were essentially resolved. That is, the killer was known as an acquaintance or domestic partner or other relative of the victim. Only about 100 were completely unsolved cases. These are the cases that have received (and continue to receive) most of the media, artistic and academic attention. The only real statistical study on the topic, done in 2008, found that the proportion of female homicides in Ciudad Juárez was lower than Houston’s.
What’s more, until 2008, when the violence associated with organized crime escalated and the Mexican military was deployed, Juárez was not exceedingly violent—at least not compared to other places around the globe that have similar kinds of social pressures. Before 2007, as far as I know, there was never a year with more than 300 murders, and that ends up being a murder rate of somewhere between 25 to 30 per 100,000 people. That’s a relatively high rate, but it’s not as high as some of the rates you see in U.S. cities like Detroit and New Orleans, where the murder rate can be upwards of 60 per 100,000.
When you look at the 427 murders—that’s the figure usually quoted for the number of women killed between 1993 and 2007—those are all of the female murder victims. Those are not categorized by the type of crime. If a woman is shot in a robbery, it goes into that number and is categorized [by some] as a femicide, even though there would be nothing to indicate in that crime that she was killed because she was a woman. There was a famous case in 2004 that Mexican reporter Sandra Rodríguez wrote about in her book La Fábrica del Crimen of these young boys who murdered their family—mother, father and sister. The mother and sister are counted as femicides, even though that wasn’t a gender-specific crime.
TO: But what’s the problem with focusing on femicides if it heightens awareness of the real problem of violence in Juárez?
MM: I have a problem with this extreme focus on the women victims. I think every single one of the victims matter. The fact that a crime or homicide victim is a woman, or a child, or a man—it makes a different story. But in human terms, no one victim should be more highly valued than another.
If 300 people are killed and 30 of them are women, but the women’s murders are the ones that get all of the attention, I find that to be absolutely mistaken and wrong. There are so many other victims and people are killed for many different reasons. Not every woman victim is killed for some sexual reason, or simply because she’s a woman. Sometimes people say to me, well, the women are innocent, the men that are killed are narcos and criminals. That’s such an oversimplification, and it is a statement made with absolutely no evidence. It is a criminalization of the great majority of all of the homicide victims. This is what has happened especially since the number of murders exploded in Juárez in 2008. And it is false.
It’s almost like we’re fetishizing these dead women. To always be looking back at these women as if their bodies are this kind of sacrificial host—I find that to be troubling, in terms of our culture and our focus on life and death and what it means. In other words, if you’re constantly focusing on women as if they’re this symbol for suffering, you never move beyond that particular death to look at the social conditions that gave that kind of life, and that kind of death, for so, so many people.
TO: Could you say more about why you think the portrayal of the murdered women is problematic?
I’ve read things by some feminist scholars talking about the “harvest” of young, nubile women. I mean, the terminology becomes kind of sensual, or sexual. Some of the writing about these cases I find to be pushing over into the extreme and eroticizing the victims in a way that makes them appear a lot more helpless and powerless than women in Juárez are. Some of the writing makes the women appear as if they’re just parading on the street to be picked off by predatory men. I just don’t think that’s a realistic depiction of life in a place like Juárez.
Many of the women, who do the work and are the only breadwinner, are quite powerful. Many of them are mothers, and workers, and take care of other people. They’re not the powerless people that some of the literature portrays them as. And I find that, as a feminist, to be counterproductive in the extreme.
TO: Why do you think the narrative about the Juárez femicides has been so enduring? Why do you think it appeals to people?
If you look at the problem of violence in Juárez as essentially being a problem of young women being murdered, and that if you can solve those murders, then everything will be ok, it feels safer. It feels like you can accomplish something, because then you don’t actually have to look at the real problems of the city. The economic system and the social conditions in Juárez are not any better now than it was in 1993. If anything, conditions in the city have gotten worse
More people are being killed now, men and women, than were killed in any year before 2007. So obviously, whatever has gone wrong in Juárez continues to go wrong. We went through a period of hyper-violence where Juárez was one of the most dangerous places on the planet. It’s still a very dangerous city, for men and women and children. And almost nothing has been done to correct the social issues that underlie this kind of violence.
Nothing has been done to address the economic suffering that came from [the North American Free Trade Agreement]. Nothing has been done to address the issues of drug trafficking, and why it’s so appealing for people in Juárez to become a part of these criminal enterprises. No one has really created a public school system in Juárez that serves all of the children that need to be going to school rather than working in factories or joining gangs.
TO: What are the social conditions you see driving violence in Juárez? What are the factors you think don’t receive enough attention from Americans?
MM: Trade policies are the most important thing. One of the major things that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) did was make it very difficult for Mexican farmers to compete economically with the giant industrial agriculture in the United States. When a lot of these small and inefficient farms went under, many people were left without any way to make a living. That feeds into the other aspect of the free trade agreement, which encouraged the development of manufacturing facilities, or maquiladoras, along the border.
The people who work at these factories earn a tiny fraction of what workers in the United States would earn. Most of the salaries in Juárez range from $50 to $70 a week. But the cost of living in Juárez is not commensurately lower; it’s 80 to 90 percent of what it is in El Paso. And El Paso is one of the cheaper places in the United States.
You have a core part of the city, and then you have miles and miles that stretch south and east into the desert. Most of the housing in those areas is absolutely substandard. The most heavy aspects of the violence, when it got really bad, occurred in these neighborhoods. In 2008, many of the people who had moved to Juarez for jobs decided to leave to try to get away from the violence. So what you see when you drive around the city are abandoned neighborhoods with acres of empty houses that have been stripped of everything. Other areas had never had proper houses and people lived in shacks they had built with thrown-away goods from the factories where they worked.
These are very dangerous areas. There’s no lighting, no police protection. It’s true that a lot of young women were abducted. That’s absolutely true. The only thing I’m pointing out is that these conditions were not terribly unusual or specific to Juárez. These conditions existed in a lot of places. Women were at risk there in the same way they were at risk in some neighborhoods in Chicago or New Orleans, or in other cities in Mexico.
TO: When you look at Juárez’s future, what most worries you?
MM: As anyone who’s taken a sociology class in the last 50 years knows, children who grow up in a violent home can grow up to be perpetrators of violence. If you look at Juárez now, with 11,000 murder victims in the space of six years, you have thousands of families who have lost one of the breadwinners of the family.
Most of those victims are young men; some of them are young women. Now you have thousands of orphaned children who’ve lost at least one parent—some have lost two. What kind of social services are available for those children? This is a recipe for this violence to recur. And when you think of the things these young children have witnessed—in the street, in their homes, in public places of all kinds, it doesn’t bode well for the near future of Juárez.Please submit your email to receive the latest Ascension energies about every ten days.
I share what Soul guides me to share about every two weeks. I don’t consider this channeling, for my Soul and I are One. The Ascension Notes include the latest energies and each word carries high dimensional energy that flow into you as you read, helping you during this time of Transformation. The Notes are very grounding and practical. They are your potential and the information is not to be stuck in your intellect, but felt in your Heart.
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« Ascension Notes
1-11-2015 & More - 10-Jan-2015
While many have gotten attached to "we arrive in the Golden Age in 2015" phenomena, as I mentioned in the last Ascension Note, there is no separation between years, for time is human-made. Higher Truth is infinite, timeless and free-flowing. So "last year" flows into "this year" without demarcation. What you were working on "last year" continues, only on a higher level.
With the energies of 1-11-15, there will likely be some very deep old energies bubbling up for release. It can cause some real shakeups in your life, especially if you want a predictable life. In the higher realms, there is no predictable or controlled life, so the most important thing you can do is to flow with it all. And trust that you are safe and guided. Self-care is guided and letting everything go is one way to just Be. Meditation helps you stay in the Moment, which truly is the only place to Be! Let go of the past and the future-tripping. And release anything that bubbles up that is not Love, especially anything that takes you out of the Moment.
For those of you who have been on your Path for a while now, you may see things that definitely are not of the 3-D. Trust what you see and feel. And know too that nothing is in black and white. Some feel like they are complete with the old and only in the New. We are in a continuum of energy. We are in the New for sure and we still will be releasing the old. This is part of being multidimensional...being in more than one place at a time. Some days you will feel so light and free and other days you will feel as though you have bottomed out. Don't judge it and have Patience with it all and have Patience with yourself and others. There is also more of a valley between those who are walking their talk and those who use the buzz words of Ascension without being what they speak of. Just remember that everyone is exactly where they need to be, and it will shift.
During this powerful time your New Blueprint, heightened DNA and expanded Pineal Chakra are activated even more, so that you will receive more Aha's!, see more colors and feel yourself vibrating at times. We continually rise higher in vibration and consciousness and a big part of this time is to have our lives reflect it. It does no good to be Light and still act and react in the old way. Be congruent with all aspects of life. Be in your New Integrity. not in rules, but in your Heart's knowing. Because we are rising more in Light, anything of the old will be more pronounced and feel really really uncomfortable. It may feel as though you have no choice but to shift the thing that is creating the discomfort. be it a job, a relationship, a belief or a way of being in the world.
We are moving quite quickly now. This is because the more dross we release, the quicker we move. As we stay in the Moment and stay focused on being Divine Love and merge more with our high dimensional Souls, we can let go of our "ain't it awful" old attitude about personal and global events. If you find yourself fixated on what is wrong, you then create more of that. And if you find yourself doing that, bring yourself back to center. You can take a deep breath into your Heart, while you place one of your hands on your Heart (or High Heart). This brings you back to center quickly and easily. You can also call to your Higher Self/Soul and merge as One. You can always ask for assistance, for it is always there for you. Keep your vibration high and let go of any drama or chaos or "bad news." As you do, you will flow more easily, receive higher Light more easily and will notice how indeed it instantly shifts your mood. Check in often with yourself and see where you are. Are you resisting or flowing?
As part of your self-care, which is self-Love, take much alone time to disconnect from lower energies. The more sensitive you are, the more you will feel the energies, especially now, and will need that quiet time to assimilate the New energies. Whether you are aware of it or not, your energy affects others. And since we are the wayshowers of merging Heaven and Earth as One, it is important to take care of ourselves. If you are exhausted, it is because you need a break, since you are doing much to raise the vibration and consciousness of Earth. And know that your own frequency is much higher now and will become more so.
There is also an empowerment and balance of the Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine within. You will not want to keep silent nor hold yourself back any more. You will want to take action on your guidance, while letting go of any end result. The Divine Feminine raises you in vibration and consciousness, while the Divine Masculine anchors it within your body, making you strong and clear. In this way, you can be out in the world without feeling swallowed up by it. And this also helps you stay in true Balance.
If you are guided to do Ceremony on 1/11, then do so, making your intentions strong, which means to follow up with taking action on your intentions. Remember, 11 is a powerful master number. It is the number of the Visionary. With this 1/11 energy you empower the Visionary to be the Master Manifestor. What do you want and how do you want to feel? Let go of the details and focus instead on how you want to feel in your manifested vision. Elevens also let you know you are not alone, for it is a time when all the Angels of the Divine Light and Plan are with you in Love and Support.
Tomorrow we have the opportunity to receive a really powerful download of high dimensional Light (you probably are already feeling it). This is connected strongly to the 11-11-14 "gateway." (I am guided not to use human terms such as "gateway" and "portal," as these lock the energies in a box and are finite. Instead, by not labelling the energies, we allow them to be free-flowing, much like it is essential that we be free-flowing.) If you want to remind yourselves about the 11-11 "gateway," here is the Ascension Note: http://soulsticerising.com/newsletter.asp?NID=182. This 1-11-15 also adds up to an 11, as did the 11-11-14. There has been a continual flow of high vibrational energy since then and now culminates in anchoring the higher energies. Because of this, many are experiencing physical manifestations such as headaches, skin eruptions, sleeplessness and other manifestations that are aligned with each unique Ascension pathway (Ascension is not a generalized, cookie-cutter phenomena).While many have gotten attached to "we arrive in the Golden Age in 2015" phenomena, as I mentioned in the last Ascension Note, there is no separation between years, for time is human-made. Higher Truth is infinite, timeless and free-flowing. So "last year" flows into "this year" without demarcation. What you were working on "last year" continues, only on a higher level.With the energies of 1-11-15, there will likely be some very deep old energies bubbling up for release. It can cause some real shakeups in your life, especially if you want a predictable life. In the higher realms, there is no predictable or controlled life, so the most important thing you can do is to flow with it all. And trust that you are safe and guided. Self-care is guided and letting everything go is one way to just Be. Meditation helps you stay in the Moment, which truly is the only place to Be! Let go of the past and the future-tripping. And release anything that bubbles up that is not Love, especially anything that takes you out of the Moment.For those of you who have been on your Path for a while now, you may see things that definitely are not of the 3-D. Trust what you see and feel. And know too that nothing is in black and white. Some feel like they are complete with the old and only in the New. We are in a continuum of energy. We are in the New for sure and we still will be releasing the old. This is part of being multidimensional...being in more than one place at a time. Some days you will feel so light and free and other days you will feel as though you have bottomed out. Don't judge it and have Patience with it all and have Patience with yourself and others. There is also more of a valley between those who are walking their talk and those who use the buzz words of Ascension without being what they speak of. Just remember that everyone is exactly where they need to be, and it will shift.During this powerful time your New Blueprint, heightened DNA and expanded Pineal Chakra are activated even more, so that you will receive more Aha's!, see more colors and feel yourself vibrating at times. We continually rise higher in vibration and consciousness and a big part of this time is to have our lives reflect it. It does no good to be Light and still act and react in the old way. Be congruent with all aspects of life. Be in your New Integrity. not in rules, but in your Heart's knowing. Because we are rising more in Light, anything of the old will be more pronounced and feel really really uncomfortable. It may feel as though you have no choice but to shift the thing that is creating the discomfort. be it a job, a relationship, a belief or a way of being in the world.We are moving quite quickly now. This is because the more dross we release, the quicker we move. As we stay in the Moment and stay focused on being Divine Love and merge more with our high dimensional Souls, we can let go of our "ain't it awful" old attitude about personal and global events. If you find yourself fixated on what is wrong, you then create more of that. And if you find yourself doing that, bring yourself back to center. You can take a deep breath into your Heart, while you place one of your hands on your Heart (or High Heart). This brings you back to center quickly and easily. You can also call to your Higher Self/Soul and merge as One. You can always ask for assistance, for it is always there for you. Keep your vibration high and let go of any drama or chaos or "bad news." As you do, you will flow more easily, receive higher Light more easily and will notice how indeed it instantly shifts your mood. Check in often with yourself and see where you are. Are you resisting or flowing?As part of your self-care, which is self-Love, take much alone time to disconnect from lower energies. The more sensitive you are, the more you will feel the energies, especially now, and will need that quiet time to assimilate the New energies. Whether you are aware of it or not, your energy affects others. And since we are the wayshowers of merging Heaven and Earth as One, it is important to take care of ourselves. If you are exhausted, it is because you need a break, since you are doing much to raise the vibration and consciousness of Earth. And know that your own frequency is much higher now and will become more so.There is also an empowerment and balance of the Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine within. You will not want to keep silent nor hold yourself back any more. You will want to take action on your guidance, while letting go of any end result. The Divine Feminine raises you in vibration and consciousness, while the Divine Masculine anchors it within your body, making you strong and clear. In this way, you can be out in the world without feeling swallowed up by it. And this also helps you stay in true Balance.If you are guided to do Ceremony on 1/11, then do so, making your intentions strong, which means to follow up with taking action on your intentions. Remember, 11 is a powerful master number. It is the number of the Visionary. With this 1/11 energy you empower the Visionary to be the Master Manifestor. What do you want and how do you want to feel? Let go of the details and focus instead on how you want to feel in your manifested vision. Elevens also let you know you are not alone, for it is a time when all the Angels of the Divine Light and Plan are with you in Love and Support.
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http://www.soulsticerising.com/donate.asp If so guided, your continued tithes are graciously and gratefully accepted. And thank you to those of you who consistently tithe to support this body of work. Tithing is giving from the Heart; creating a consciousness of Prosperity. I am blessed and grateful for each of you!
Important: if you sign up to receive the Ascension Notes from my website, please add Important: if you sign up to receive the Ascension Notes from my website, please add kara@soulsticerising.com to your spam filters...as I receive notices of being undeliverable because it’s considered spamWASHINGTON -- New Jersey taxpayers, who already send $31 billion more to the federal government than they receive in services, would see their federal income taxes rise by another $137 million under the House Republican tax bill, according to a new study.
Only three other states, New York, California and Maryland, would see their overall tax burden rise despite legislation designed to reduce taxes on businesses and individuals, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a progressive research group in Washington.
"Every report that I have seen over the last month indicates that the Republican bill is not going to be good for New Jersey," said Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., D-9th Dist., a member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee. "All in all, this is a bad bill and every report that has come out indicates how bad it is."
N.J. helping to subsidize low-tax states
The four states combined would pay $16.7 billion in additional taxes. The other 46 states would get a $101.5 billion tax cut.
Meanwhile, almost one-third of the reduction, $31.2 billion would flow to just two states: Texas, home of Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady, and Florida.
The House Republican tax plan would exacerbate a disparity between high-tax states that send billions more to Washington than they receive in services, and states that can keep their taxes low because they getting more in federal funds.
New Jersey, for example, gets 74 cents back for every $1 in federal taxes, lowest among the 50 states, according to the State University of New York's Rockefeller Institute of Government. New York is second with 81 cents.
Florida gets $1.22 back. Texas almost breaks even at 98 cents.
The study was released as House Republicans prepared for a Thursday vote on their tax plan, which would increase the federal deficit by $1.5 trillion over 10 years.
It blames the tax hike on the fact that residents of the four states are among the heaviest users of the federal deduction for state and local taxes. The House Republican bill would eliminate the break for all but $10,000 in property taxes in order to fund lower income tax rates for individuals and corporations.
More than four in 10 New Jersey taxpayers take the state and local tax deduction, behind only Maryland and Connecticut, according to the Tax Foundation. New York and California also are among the top 10.
As a result, the number of New Jersey residents with enough deductions to itemize rather than take an increased standard deduction of $24,000 would decline by 60 percent to 658,000 from 1.6 million, essentially making the property tax break worthless, according to New Jersey Policy Perspective, a progressive research group.
In addition, the $11,300 increase in the standard deduction for a family of three from the current $12,700 would be cancelled out by the loss of the $4,050 per person exemption. A $300 per person tax credit designed to replace the personal exemption would expire in five years.
White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said that residents of low-tax states shouldn't be paying more in federal taxes because they can't take advantage of the same deduction as residents of high-tax states.
"You can make an argument that it's not fair, it's not right, that the folks who live in the low-tax jurisdictions are actually subsidizing" high-tax states, Mulvaney told reporters from local news outlets, including NJ Advance Media.
Mulvaney's home state of South Carolina, however, gets back $1.71 for every $1 paid in federal taxes, more than twice as much as New Jersey does, according to the Rockefeller Institute study.
"The system is not set up so that states get back the same amount of money they put in," Mulvaney said.
Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JDSalant or on Facebook. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.Portsmouth author MATT WINGETT tells us how a small seaside town influenced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, his belief in spiritualism and his greatest creation – Sherlock Holmes
“They sat around a dining-room table which after a time, their hands being upon it, began to sway and finally got sufficient motion to tap with one leg. They then asked questions and received answers, more or less wise and more or less to the point. They were got by the tedious process of reciting the alphabet and writing down the letter which the tap indicated. It seemed to me that we were collectively pushing the table and that our own wills were concerned in bringing down the leg |
2] Multiple studies reveal a positive correlation between loud snoring and risk of heart attack (about +34% chance) and stroke (about +67% chance).[3]
Though snoring is often considered a minor affliction, snorers can sometimes suffer severe impairment of lifestyle. The between-subjects trial by Armstrong et al. discovered a statistically significant improvement in marital relations after snoring was surgically corrected. This was confirmed by evidence from Gall et al.,[4] Cartwright and Knight[5] and Fitzpatrick et al.[6]
New studies associate loud "snoring" with the development of carotid artery atherosclerosis.[7] Amatoury et al.[8] demonstrated that snoring vibrations are transmitted to the carotid artery, identifying a possible mechanism for snoring-associated carotid artery damage and atherosclerotic plaque development. These researchers also found amplification of the snoring energy within the carotid lumen at certain frequencies, adding to this scenario. Vibration of the carotid artery with snoring also lends itself as a potential mechanism for atherosclerotic plaque rupture and consequently ischemic stroke.[8] Researchers also hypothesize that loud snoring could create turbulence in carotid artery blood flow.[9] Generally speaking, increased turbulence irritates blood cells and has previously been implicated as a cause of atherosclerosis. While there is plausibility and initial evidence to support snoring as an independent source of carotid artery/cardiovascular disease, additional research is required to further clarify this hypothesis.[10]
A U.S. study estimates that roughly one in every 15 Americans is affected by at least a moderate degree of sleep apnea.[11]
Causes [ edit ]
Snoring is the result of the relaxation of the uvula and soft palate.[12] These tissues can relax enough to partially block the airway, resulting in irregular airflow and vibrations.[13] Snoring can be attributed to one or more of the following:
Throat weakness, causing the throat to close during sleep. [14]
Mispositioned jaw, often caused by tension in the muscles. [13]
Obesity that has caused fat to gather in and around the throat. [14]
Obstruction in the nasal passageway. [13]
Obstructive sleep apnea. [13]
Sleep deprivation. [13]
Relaxants such as alcohol or other drugs relaxing throat muscles. [13]
Sleeping on one's back, which may result in the tongue dropping to the back of the mouth.[13]
Treatment [ edit ]
So far, there is no certain treatment that can completely stop snoring. Almost all treatments for snoring revolve around lessening the breathing discomfort by clearing the blockage in the air passage. Medications are usually not helpful in treating snoring symptoms, though they can help control some of the underlying causes such as nasal congestion and allergic reactions. Doctors, therefore, often recommend lifestyle changes as a first line treatment to stop snoring.[15] This is the reason snorers are advised to lose weight (to stop fat from pressing on the throat), stop smoking (smoking weakens and clogs the throat), avoid alcohol and sedative medications before bedtime (they relax the throat and tongue muscles, which in turn narrow the airways)[16] and sleep on their side (to prevent the tongue from blocking the throat).
A number of other treatment options are also used to stop snoring. These range from over-the-counter aids such as nasal sprays, nasal strips or nose clips, lubricating sprays, oral appliances and "anti-snore" clothing and pillows, to unusual activities such as playing the didgeridoo.[17] However, one needs to be wary of over-the-counter snore treatments that have no scientific evidence to support their claims, such as stop-snore rings or wrist worn electrical stimulation bands.
Orthopedic pillows [ edit ]
Orthopedic pillows are the least intrusive option for reducing snoring. These pillows are designed to support the head and neck in a way that ensures the jaw stays open and slightly forward. This helps keep the airways unrestricted as possible and in turn leads to a small reduction in snoring.
Dental appliances [ edit ]
One style of mandibular advancement splint
Specially made dental appliances called mandibular advancement splints, which advance the lower jaw slightly and thereby pull the tongue forward, are a common mode of treatment for snoring. Such appliances have been proven to be effective in reducing snoring and sleep apnea in cases where the apnea is mild to moderate.[18] Mandibular advancement splints are often tolerated much better than CPAP machines.[19]
Positive airway pressure [ edit ]
A continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine is often used to control sleep apnea and the snoring associated with it. It is a relatively safe medical treatment. To keep the airway open, a device pumps a controlled stream of air through a flexible hose to a mask worn over the nose, mouth, or both.[20] A CPAP is usually applied through a CPAP mask which is placed over the nose and/or mouth. The air pressure required to keep the airway open is delivered through this and it is attached to a CPAP machine which is like an air compressor.
The air that CPAP delivers is generally "normal air" – not concentrated oxygen. The machine utilizes the air pressure as an "air splint" to keep the airway open. In obstructive sleep apnea, the airway at the rear of the throat is prone to closure.
Surgery [ edit ]
Surgery is also available as a method of correcting social snoring. Some procedures, such as uvulopalatopharyngoplasty, attempt to widen the airway by removing tissues in the back of the throat, including the uvula and pharynx. These surgeries are quite invasive, however, and there are risks of adverse side effects. The most dangerous risk is that enough scar tissue could form within the throat as a result of the incisions to make the airway more narrow than it was prior to surgery, diminishing the airspace in the velopharynx. Scarring is an individual trait, so it is difficult for a surgeon to predict how much a person might be predisposed to scarring. Currently, the American Medical Association does not approve of the use of lasers to perform operations on the pharynx or uvula.
Radiofrequency ablation (RFA) is a relatively new surgical treatment for snoring. This treatment applies radiofrequency energy and heat (between 77 °C and 85 °C) to the soft tissue at the back of the throat, such as the soft palate and uvula, causing scarring of the tissue beneath the skin. After healing, this results in stiffening of the treated area. The procedure takes less than one hour, is usually performed on an outpatient basis, and usually requires several treatment sessions. Radiofrequency ablation is frequently effective in reducing the severity of snoring, but often does not completely eliminate it.[21][22]
Bipolar radiofrequency ablation, a technique used for coblation tonsillectomy, is also used for the treatment of snoring.
Pillar procedure [ edit ]
The Pillar Procedure is a minimally invasive treatment for snoring and obstructive sleep apnea. In the United States, this procedure was FDA indicated in 2004. During this procedure, three to six+ dacron (the material used in permanent sutures) strips are inserted into the soft palate, using a modified syringe and local anesthetic. While the procedure was initially approved for the insertion of three "pillars" into the soft palate, it was found that there was a significant dosage response to more pillars, with appropriate candidates.[citation needed] As a result of this outpatient operation, which typically lasts no more than 30 minutes, the soft palate is more rigid, possibly reducing instances of sleep apnea and snoring. This procedure addresses one of the most common causes of snoring and sleep apnea — vibration or collapse of the soft palate (the soft part of the roof of the mouth). If there are other factors contributing to snoring or sleep apnea, such as conditions of the nasal airway or an enlarged tongue, it will likely need to be combined with other treatments to be more effective.[23]
Alternative medicine [ edit ]
Among the natural remedies are exercises to increase the muscle tone of the upper airway,[24] and one medical practitioner noting anecdotally that professional singers seldom snore,[25] but there have been no medical studies to fully link the two.[26]
Epidemiology [ edit ]
Statistics on snoring are often contradictory, but at least 30% of adults and perhaps as many as 50% of people in some demographics snore.[27] One survey of 5,713 American residents identified habitual snoring in 24% of men and 13.8% of women, rising to 60% of men and 40% of women aged 60 to 65 years; this suggests an increased susceptibility to snoring with age.[28]This week, seminarians across the Episcopal Church are taking the General Ordination Examination. For those of you who may not be familiar with it, it’s a hazing ritual and final exam designed to test the worthiness of third-year seminarians as they prepare for ordination. It lasts several days and involves the writing of lengthy essays, some of which allow consultation of reference material and some of which must be written using only one’s knowledge. Opinion on these exams varies, but I’m generally among the number of folks who think the test is more useful than harmful. I blogged about this back in 2011 during the annual is-the-GOE-awesome-or-terrible conversation.
Anyway, many people feel the exam is no longer suited to the modern church. Crusty Old Dean has some fresh thoughts from this very day about this year’s test. Inspired by Crusty and the esteemed Fr. Oscar Late (who wrote his own version of the GOE a few years ago), I have decided to resolve the issues. The following exam covers the seven canonical exam areas whilst being relevant to the needs of the modern church.
While the General Board of Examining Chaplains has not yet solicited my opinion, I freely grant them permission to use these questions next year. These questions are guaranteed to position the clergy leaders of the future for success, especially if they serve the typical “we love the church of the 1950s” congregation, which is where you’re likely to end up in your first cure.
The Holy Scriptures. Using Luke 14:33 as your primary text, explain why it’s OK for an Episcopal rector to drive a Volvo, own an iPhone, and belong to the country club. Also, make sure you justify expensive buildings owned by the church and used fully for only three hours a week. Defend the use of some passages from the Bible while others can be freely ignored. Source: A printed, annotated Bible.
Church History, including the Ecumenical Movement. Since no one cares about church history in parish ministry (“We’ve always done it that way” really means “since 1960”), we wanted to offer a much more relevant question that is vaguely connected to ecumenism. Everyone expects the Episcopal Church to be the most tasteful of all churches, and this includes our service leaflets. While Roman Catholics can pass out ad-laden announcements and Methodists can use black & white bulletins, ours is a higher calling. Episcopalians expect saddle-stiched leaflets with full text and music and a full color cover with a tastefully chosen medieval art illustration. Describe the specifications of the multi-function copier you’ll lease to get this done. Source: Leaflets from Westminster Abbey, and your local Xerox rep.
Christian Theology, including Missionary Theology and Missiology. Write a three-page essay explaining the word “missional.” Seriously. We want to know what it means. Source: a dictionary and Twitter.
Christian Ethics and Moral Theology. Identify an ethical issue that you can preach on, without hypocrisy and without offending current members of your congregation. Explain, using the Bible, why “their” ethical infraction is more important than whatever sins might be local (and hence uncomfortable). Source: The Bible and various blogs of people you agree with or vehemently disagree with.
Studies in Contemporary Society, including Racial and Minority Groups. Pick a pet issue of yours. In an essay of three pages, describe your lobbying process to get General Convention to pass a resolution on your heartfelt concern. Make sure you make use of at least two techniques from secular political organization, such as whisper campaigns, invoking “do it for the children” in floor speeches, or clever hashtags. Extra points awarded if your plan includes caucusing during worship services. Source: The Washington Post, Fox News, and previous General Convention minutes.
Liturgics and Church Music. Design your Sunday morning liturgy using your own liturgical predilections. Go ahead and take liberties from the rubrics of the prayer book; everyone does it. Defend each of your “enhancements” to the Book of Common Prayer and explain why it’s OK for you to do your thing even though you publicly swore — and are canonically required — to follow the rubrics of the BCP. Source: The Book of Common Prayer, your favorite partisan liturgical manual, and folklore from the Altar Guild.
Theory and Practice of Ministry. People will expect you to be the consummate administrator, a brilliant preacher, the perfect family woman or man, and a prayerful person, bordering on monastic. You will need to do all this while visiting every person with so much as a sniffle, whether or not they called you. In an essay of six pages, explain why even Jesus would fail as a rector. Create a clerical superhero who can live up to everyone’s expectations. Sources: The Bible, George Herbert’s Country Parson, and anonymous complaint letters sent to vestries.
Like this: Like Loading...NSA Data Used To Empower Domestic Policing
The massive dragnet NSA metadata collection that has been going on for years isn't just for terrorist threats anymore, as domestic police agencies will soon begin using the data for routine policing. The National Security Agency (NSA) is going to be sharing intelligence with agencies like the FBI and other agencies, even if it has nothing to do with terrorism. This means that police departments will have access to communications which were obtained without the proper warrants; without following due process of law.
This won't be the first time however that the information will be shared as it has been known for several years now that the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the IRS are getting information from the NSA. However, this change will mean that more agencies have the potential to obtain the data and use it for their routine policing efforts.
“It's all another sobering reminder that any powers we grant to the federal government for the purpose of national security will inevitably be used just about everywhere else,” says criminology expert and Washington Post writer, Radley Balko. “[The] extraordinary powers we grant government in wartime rarely go away once the war is over. And, of course, the nifty thing for government agencies about “war on terrorism” is that it's a war that will never formally end.”
The plan now is to let an increasing number of intelligence agencies gain access to the unprocessed information from the NSA, in the hopes that it might prompt a finding of value in extinguishing any possible threats. Although, many reports since the NSA's inception have determined that its massive data collection does very little in the way of stopping any terrorist threat.
Whatever happened to good old-fashioned police work? Rather than engaging in mass phishing expeditions and the indiscriminate surveillance of millions of citizens. We seem to only be drifting further away, despite the fact that various judges and courts have also deemed NSA spying to be illegal. But it isn't likely that authorities are going to pull the plug on the program anytime soon.
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CanadaDETROIT — The only thing more noticeable than Lou Engle saying he was going to pray that Muslims would have “dreams of Jesus” during his marathon 24-hour prayer gathering over the weekend in Detroit were the efforts he undertook to show that he was all about sensitivity to minorities.
From the American Indians dancing in full-feathered dress to his proclamation a few hours later that he chose Detroit in a nod to black Americans’ sufferings, Engle carefully avoided the anti-Muslim rhetoric for which he is known and emphasized his affinity with minorities instead. Indeed, he described Detroit as the final stop on the underground railroad, the end of “black America’s trail of tears,” in explaining why he chose the city for the interfaith event that began Friday.
This was the same man who earlier had said that Muslims are “fueling the demonic realm” and in the thrall of “spiritual dark powers.” But after widespread criticism of the event — Engle seemed at pains to avoid any semblance of intolerance.
Instead, he asked his audience to ask God to bring Muslims particular dreams. "We're actually calling people to stay all night long and worship in the night watch," he said Friday. "We are going to pray in the night watch that the love of Jesus would break in on Muslims all across this area with dreams of Jesus."
And pray they did, as many as 30,000 according to one estimate. Through the night, they swelled the stands of Ford Field, home of the Detroit Lions, as if they had come for a rock festival. Some dozed as the night dragged on with their hands reverently clasped, or rocked gently in their seats. Others danced in the field and yelled, shook and wept as they circled a towering steel cross lit with glowing yellow lights near the 40-yard line.
For a decade, The Call has been one of the festivals Engle has led to energize young Christians to oppose abortion, homosexuality, and pray for the recovery of what he sees as a morally bankrupt nation. But this year, it all came under increased scrutiny. Detroit was no coincidental locale, after all. The city and neighboring Dearborn, Mich., are home to one of the nation's largest Muslim populations. The state has also been hit by the downturn in the economy. People are hurting and looking for help.
But news of Engle’s event quickly provoked controversy.
It began after several comments from Engle about Muslims that were quoted by the Family Research Council (FRC), a religious right group named as a hate group because of its animosity toward gays and lesbians. "The place where they say there is no hope — a microcosm of our national crisis — economic collapse, racial tensions, the rising tide the Islamic movement, and the shedding of our children's innocent blood on the streets...God has chosen as his staging ground for healing and prayer," Engle said of Detroit in an FRC release.
In a video that has since been taken down from The Call’s website, Engle was more specific about his goal of converting Muslims. "You got to pray all night long because it's when the Muslims sleep," Engle said in the video. "We're gathering together to say, God, pour out your grace and revelations of Jesus all over Dearborn and the Muslim communities of North and South America."
Engle, who is a senior leader at the International House of Prayer (IHOP), a megachurch in Kansas City, Mo., is also an adherent of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) movement, a highly energized culture in Christianity with close ties to groups opposing abortion and homosexuality. NAR adherents believe they have been tapped to be prophetic apostles to return the nation to God.
Holding himself out to be one of those prophets, Engle has held The Call every year since 2000, when the inaugural gathering in Washington, D.C., drew a remarkably large crowd. But perhaps no other gathering has been as symbolic of the harsh views Engle really represents than that held last year in Uganda, where Engle praised the country’s “courage” and “righteousness” in considering a bill that would impose the death penalty on people who have AIDS and engage in gay sexual activity.
Evangelizing to the Muslims at home is a new role for Engle, however, and it comes at a time when rampant anti-Islamic rhetoric has already inspired an uptick in violence against Muslims. Recognizing this, a small group of pastors, including some from Detroit, denounced The Call as a deceptive disguise for hate.
For instance, the Rev. Charles Williams II, who leads Detroit's historic King Solomon Baptist Church, urged people to distance themselves from The Call and chastised the area's religious leaders who had signed on to be involved. "They went and got some of the biggest Africa-American pastors in the city of Detroit," Williams told The Detroit News. "They tricked them into believing this was a nice, goody-goody event.... And that's not really what the situation is."
Perhaps that excuses the pastors too quickly. It isn't hard to find out what drives Engle, nor is it hard to see the animus behind many of those who partnered with The Call to worship.
Anti-gay pastor Cindy Jacobs was there, offering shrill cries for the youth of America to arise as the donation baskets circled the stadium. As a pastor with her husband at Generals International, a group devoted to "spiritual warfare," she regularly proclaims that catastrophic natural phenomena are the product of God’s anger over the nation's acceptance of homosexuality.
So was Rick Joyner, the pastor who has popularized a radical brand of militant Christianity preparing for the end of days.
In the waning hours of the event, Joyner took the stage and told the dwindling and exhausted crowd that the end of times was near. It was time to prepare. He didn't mention Islam by name—not many did after Engle's initial proclamation. But with all that had come before, he didn't really need to.
"We're among the ultimate time of the ultimate conflict of light and darkness," he said, pacing the stage in front of a quiet audience. "Make the crooked straight, because the Lord is coming."ADVERTISEMENT
Bob Mackin
B.C. Lottery Corporation and its casino operators were planning a public relations campaign to combat increased scrutiny over money laundering by gamblers with ties to China.
An undated document released by BCLC under freedom of information on Sept. 25 to theBreaker said the Crown gambling monopoly and the B.C. Gaming Industry Association had plans to jointly “communicate the B.C. gambling industry’s commitment and actions to deter money laundering.”
They wanted to stage a media tour and security walk-through at a casino, where a reporter would be given $10,000 cash and shown “what happens when they buy in, the questions asked, forms completed. Walk reporter through various scenarios such as attempting to cash out after limited play and requesting a cheque.”
The four-page plan also suggested developing a composite of a large cash gambler, based on BCLC data, “in order to dispel the myths around the use of cash and high dollar value buy-ins.” BCGIA’s executive director, former Great Canadian Gaming executive Peter Goudron, was to receive media training, to “leverage the industry’s unhampered ability to speak.”
BCLC and BCGIA also contemplated holding a news conference with the Joint Illegal Gaming Investigation Team to unveil signs at casinos to warn gamblers that police will investigate suspicious transactions. They wanted to create an internal campaign to remind and re-energize service providers “on their role in preventing money laundering and preventing facilities from being targeted.”
The document said BCLC and its casino operators are “united in their goal” of safety in casinos and fulfilling anti-money laundering duties, but “there seems to be a lack of acceptance and trust from the public and media that the industry is committed to playing its role in AML.”
“A further challenge is that authorities conflate money laundering with spending laundered funds. BCLC has a comprehensive anti-money laundering program in place to detect and deter both however, money laundering is much easier for a business to watch for, detect and report than the spending of proceeds that have been already been laundered through the financial sector.”
BCLC must report to FINTRAC large cash transactions, payments to customers $10,000 and up, and suspicious transactions “or attempted transactions of any dollar amount and in any form that are suspicious.” The latter are also sent to the RCMP and JIGIT. Casino service providers must report unusual financial transactions to Gaming Policy and Enforcement Branch. All BCLC and casino workers receive formal training on how to spot suspicious transactions.
Despite touting various safeguards, a Sept. 22-released MNP report from July 2016, that the previous BC Liberal government suppressed, indicated money laundering was rampant at Great Canadian’s River Rock Casino Resort in Richmond. River Rock was flooded with $13.5 million in $20 bills in July 2015. High rollers, mainly from China, were using underground banks to access large amounts of cash from suspected illicit activities. It also said high rollers were receiving shipments of cash to the casino or just off the property late at night. Some of the high rollers were also investing in high-end real estate in West Vancouver and Richmond.
Attorney General David Eby appointed Peter German, a law professor and former head of the RCMP in Western Canada, to investigate money laundering at Lower Mainland casinos.
17-044 BCLC BCGIA Media Plan by BobMackin on Scribd
MNPA number of Russian broadcasters have filed a lawsuit in New York court against US companies for illegally streaming their content and using trademarks.
Read more
The plaintiffs are asking the court to stop the streaming and compensate for damages of at least $75,000.
The complaint has been lodged by Russia’s First Channel, CTC, Domashny, Che, Rain, Nostalgia, REN TV and TNT Comedy, reported business daily Kommersant.
The American online operators accused of piracy are Infomir, Panorama TV, Goodzone TV, Matvil Corporation, Actava TV, and Master Call Communications.
The lawsuit alleges the companies intercept the satellite signals of Russian broadcasters and redistribute them in the United States for a monthly fee, using the channels’ trade marks in advertising.
Subscribers can view the services through a downloaded IPTV player or a set-top box.
A representative from CTC Media told Kommersant that OTT-operators [companies that deliver media over the Internet – Ed.] have been actively developing on the US market.
“… Many of them illegally distribute content without contracts with copyright holders, they do not invest in infrastructure and don’t ensure high-quality broadcasting," he said, adding that thus they could offer lower prices to subscribers. The average monthly price in the US for online Russian language channel packages is $5-15 against the $30-50 from traditional cable operators.
READ MORE:Downloaders face personal legal warnings as US steps up copyright protections
The CEO of Russia’s Rain TV channel Natalya Sindeyeva said pirate broadcasting causes a lot of damage to the company like “losses in revenue and in negotiations with potential partners."
For legal viewing, Russian TV broadcasters cooperate with local cable and satellite operators in the US which include the international version of Russian channels in their subscription-based packages.First, let me thank Matt for inviting me to guest blog this week. I know many of the bloggers here and am a big fan of their work. I also love this blog – both the idea and the execution. And it’s a special treat for me to be among the philosophers and make some use of my “other” undergraduate degree in philosophy. The more I learn about modern philosophy, the more I realize how deeply fortunate I was to have the teachers I had at Michigan in the early 80s. I’m not sure Peter Railton would remember me, but he was the prof for my political philosophy course. So now that my street cred is established, on with the show…
On a plane ride the other day, I finished David Schmidtz’s Elements of Justice, which is a terrific book. I had started it before the whole blog kerfuffle over Nozick began, and that incident prodded me to take it on the plane and finish it. It is, as I don’t have to tell this audience, terrific. I had read Chapter 22 on “Equality and Opportunity” before (thank you Danny), but reading it in full context this time was even better. What I’d like to do in this first guest post is to update some of David’s data and then provide some additional statistics that make his argument about what a market-driven society does for the poorest among us even stronger.
David offers some of the then-recent data on income mobility from Cox and Alm’s 1999 book Myths of Rich and Poor. That data has come under significant methodological fire since then and there has been some additional similar research since. For example, in a Treasury study of income mobility between 1996 and 2005, 58.6% of the lowest quintile moved up at least one quintile in that 10 year period and 29.1% moved up two or more quintiles. A Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis study looked at 2001-2007 and found that 44% moved up at least one quintile, with 13% moving up two or more. As David points out, what to conclude from this depends on where you stand. I would say that it shows that income mobility in the US is still alive and well, with at least half of poor families moving up a quintile in around ten years or so, and decent number moving two or more over that same time span. As David also points out, there are all kinds of cautions about these numbers, including issues of household size and “mobility compared to whom?” Whatever one chooses to make of them, I thought I’d provide some more recent data.
At one point, David makes a quick mention of consumption but then drops it. Well, I want to pick that up. One way of measuring the progress of “the poor” over time is to see what the typical poor household is able to consume in different years. We actually do have some reliable data on this. The Census Bureau surveys US households and asks if they have certain consumer items in their homes. I have tracked this data, both directly from the Census Bureau and from other sources. Here’s what the latest data look like, along with some historical comparisons. Importantly, these are households below the poverty line, not just the lowest quintile. These are the truly poor.
Two things to notice about these data. First, the absolute consumption possibilities of the poor have improved dramatically over time, as the first four columns show. US households below the poverty line have more in their homes than they did in the 1980s or the 1990s, and they have some items that didn’t even exist back then! (And to head off one objection, there is no evidence that this has all been bought on credit.)
Second, compare the poor in 2005 with the “all 1971” column. Americans below the poverty line in 2005 were living better, at least in terms of their ability to buy what we now think of as standard consumption items, than did the average US household in 1971. (Note too that the average household is better off today than in 1971, so much for “the Great Stagnation.”) One might say these are trivial consumption items, but air conditioning and cell phones save lives, and refrigerators and washing machines keep people healthy.
How is this possible? Two answers. First, contrary to what the media say, working and middle class stagnation is a myth. According to the Census Bureau over 30% of US households in 2006 earned above $75,000 compared to under 20% in 1980 (adjusted for inflation). Over the same period, the percentage of US households earning under $35,000 fell from 42.8% to 36.7%. Fewer households are poor, fewer are middle class, and a hunk more are above $75,000. And in case you were wondering, those general trends hold for black and Hispanic households too – with the percentage of black households under $35,000 falling by 10.9 percentage points and the number above $75,000 increasing by 8.9 percentage points, for example. If the middle class is shrinking, it’s because they’re getting richer, as are the poor.
Second, the real cost of goods is falling. Thanks to innovation and competition, it costs far less to buy these household items than in years past, especially if we measure by the number of labor hours it takes to earn the money to buy them. Given the increase in wages over the last few decades and the falling prices of many goods, Americans can buy much more than they could in the past for the same hours of work.
So for example take a $400 TV from 1973 which took 97.1 hours of labor at the average private sector wage of $4.12. At the 2009 wage of $18.72, the 97.1 hours of labor it took to earn that $400 in 1973 would net you $1817.71. So with the same work that would have purchased what, by our standards, was a pretty crappy color TV in 1973, we could today buy a darn-near top of the line very large flat-screen with 3D. Or alternatively, we could go to Walmart and get a relatively cheap LCD TV that would still be a way better product than the 1973 TV and tack onto it a surround sound system, a blu-ray player, and then for giggles maybe a cheap laptop and a small iPod and maybe even a digital camera and still have change left for some DVDs and software. And all of this ignores the increased variety and higher quality of the artistic creations one can enjoy on all of those toys.
So if the question is whether markets work to the benefit of the least advantaged, the answer is “it sure looks that way.” One drive around the rural area in which I live where you can see the working poor with their cell phones, flat screen TVs, and satellite dishes is perhaps all the evidence one needs. If not, you can just quote everything from above.Olbermann: 'Mr. President, you are wrong' RAW STORY
Published: Thursday April 16, 2009
Print This Email This In a "Special Comment" regarding the release by the Obama Administration of "the remainder of this nightmare of Bush Administration torture memos," MSNBC's Keith Olbermann offered the current Commander in Chief some praise for going "half-way," then blasted him for issuing a statement which said that "nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past."
"This President has gone where few before him, dared," Olbermann said Thursday night. "The dirty laundry illegal, un-American, self-defeating, self-destroying is out for all to see."
Olbermann continued,
"Mr. Obama deserves our praise and our thanks for that. And yet he has gone but half-way. And, in this case, in far too many respects, half the distance is worse than standing still. Today, Mr. President, in acknowledging these science-fiction-like documents, you said that:
"This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke."
"We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history.
"But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.
Mr. President, you are wrong. What you describe would be not "spent energy" but catharsis.
Not "blame laid," but responsibility ascribed."
The following video is from Thursday's broadcast of Keith Olbermann's MSNBC Countdown show.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Get Raw exclusives as they break -- Email & mobile Email - Never spam:You've identified yourself as a feminist writer. How do you square that with the fact that you often write about oppressions or violence targeted at men? Isn't one point of feminism to take attention away from men, where it is so often focused, and look at the less-noticed ways in which women are oppressed or discriminated against?
It's a fine line to walk sometimes. I define a feminist as someone who believes, one, that females have historically been discriminated against and persecuted on the basis of their gender, and two, that this should change in the direction of greater equality and protection. I'm also very much a global feminist, someone who has done a great deal of traveling in the Global South in particular, so my framing of gender issues tends to focus on societies where women—and people in general—are much less privileged than in the developed West. That's true for my engagement with men's issues as well.
I'm critical of many variants of feminism for failing to recognize that gender-selective atrocities happen to men and boys as well as women and girls, and I'm especially skeptical of the way that institutional gender programs and projects tend to focus exclusively on females, whether in the Global North or South. I think that's unfair and destructive; it offends my core liberal sensibilities. But without feminist critiques, we would barely have a notion of "gender," and for what it's worth, the large majority of those who have supported me and cited my work over the years have been women who define themselves as feminists. I've never felt the urge to abandon the "feminist" label.
Why do you think it's useful to talk about discrimination against men? Aren't men generally the ones in power?
It's long been recognized that gender can be trumped by, for example, social class. So discrimination against men traditionally tends to target poorer and more marginalized men, who are seen as threatening or hateful to the male-dominant power structure. One of my arguments has been that we can disaggregate the class and gender components [from each other] at least for analytical purposes, and recognize that a gender-specific fear and hatred—misandry—is also operative. It's not a contradiction for men to discriminate against other men, any more than women can also fear other women and police their gender roles and assist in keeping their "sisters" suppressed.
What about the much-maligned white male? We should certainly recognize that it's been too easy for that group to be targeted for contempt and defamation—indeed, that there is no other identifiable ethnic and gender group that can be targeted in this way without arousing protest and outrage. White men often respond to that unfair and inaccurate critique with hostility and rejection of their own—a trend that is unfortunately marked in the so-called men's movement. My feeling is we can't expect our own concerns and causes to receive an empathetic hearing if we don't show empathy as well for women and feminism and recognize the justice of many of their criticisms |
, the Honda is replete with wings both in front of and behind the rear wheels. And the goal of maximum downforce continues.
The theme of the Honda is downforce, and the tone of the Honda is simplicity. Ignoring the front wing - if you can do that - the rest of the Honda is a fairly straightforward and occasionally dull sight. There's a wing where you might expect it, there's not where you wouldn't. It's enough to wonder what Honda has up their sleeve. As a fan, I'm in deep with Chevy and I'm alway rooting for the ladies and gentleman at Ganassi. But this Honda kit gives me serious pause.
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So what does all of this mean for racing?
Well, for starters the point behind introducing these new kits has always been to inject new life and new variables into the sport.
For racing in IndyCar, it means that there's no going back to the way things were. The only way is forward. IndyCar may remain the more "primitive" top-tier open wheel series, but that's not for the worst. Formula 1 is what it is. IndyCar does not need to be that as well. For everyone that says that F1 had become too technical, they should be reminded that there is a series where the drivers still drive the cars. (I'm actually talking about NASCAR now, but you get the point.)
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Whether you like this kit or not, it should at least mean to the race fan that IndyCar is ready for the next chapter. And if nothing else, it means a bunch of untested tech on track while drivers, teams, and manufacturers attempt to figure it all out over the course of a season.
So these aero kits are new and "untested". What issues can we expect?
Well as Slipstream points out a couple of times, the obvious question from all of this downforce on the Honda is whether the mounting positions of the front and rear components and the structural integrity of the wings can hold up. Will the kit remain rigid, or are we looking at another Red Bull front wing or Toyota rear wing?
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The IndyCar rules prohibit "devices that are movable or adjustable while the car is in motion" or that "may affect airflow or aerodynamics" - Rule 14.6.2, so the potential for serious penalties is certainly there.
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Furthermore, consider the overall purpose of the Honda versus the Chevy. While the Honda is gunning for maximum downforce, the Chevy is gunning for minimal drag. While the Chevy's have traditionally made better use of their power, that power is only as affective is the aero kits ability to keep the rubber planted. Recall the Chevy's raised front winglet and the crucial role it serves in cutting down on turbulence. Again going back to an excellent observation from Slipstream, if a Chevy ends up in the bumper of another car, damage to the front could spell disaster.
Likewise, with the Honda designed to remain planted, consider the immense turbulence that it will leave in it's wake. Could it be more than Chevy can contend with and still extract meaningful speed from it's kit?
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Or has Chevy sorted out issues that Honda has yet to conceive? With Chip Ganassi Racing's access to a "secret underground tunnel", it's possible that the Chevy kits have an ace up their sleeve in the form of real world speed and real air over the body. It is not entirely clear from the IndyCar rules whether this kind of testing would be banned before open track testing. It's all speculation at this point.
That's a lot of speculation. Is anything clear from all of this?
Well, we know that what we're seeing in the renders is not the final word. The kits may be added to or subtracted from as teams see fit. We know from Ryan Hunter-Reay that the lack of power steering may be a big issue, particularly in the Honda camp. And we know that it will be a long-(ish) road ahead to figuring out exactly what works where. The ability for teams and drivers to react quickly to the kits, and make the right changes may determine the whole season. Or it may not.
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Slipstream predicts that Chevy will win at most street courses while Honda will dominate at road courses, Barber and Mid-Ohio to be exact. There could be a number of track records that may be in their final days, as well. But you're going to have to listen to Slipstream for that. (Seriously, GO LISTEN TO SLIPSTREAM!)
Most of all, it's clear that we don't have the numbers yet. What we do have is frilly plumage and bumps and bulges that may add up to the IndyCar version of a flightless peacock. Or it may end up being the most exciting new chapter in IndyCar than we've seen in quite some time. It's doubtful though, whether it attracts new spectators or not, that the racing will be a dud.
Oh, and it's CERTAIN that these cars look amazing! (Shut up, yes they do!)
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Scott Dixon's CGRT Target Chevy
Ryan Hunter-Reay's DHL Honda
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Rear end of the DHL Honda
The Honda in all black looks evil!
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Close up of the DHL Honda front wing, and other front wing, and other front wing, and....Starvation is a strong physiological stimulus of macroautophagy/autophagy. In this study, we addressed the question as to whether it would be possible to measure autophagy in blood cells after nutrient deprivation. Fasting of mice for 48 h (which causes ∼20% weight loss) or starvation of human volunteers for up to 4 d (which causes <2% weight loss) provokes major changes in the plasma metabolome, yet induces only relatively minor alterations in the intracellular metabolome of circulating leukocytes. White blood cells from mice and human volunteers responded to fasting with a marked reduction in protein lysine acetylation, affecting both nuclear and cytoplasmic compartments. In circulating leukocytes from mice that underwent 48-h fasting, an increase in LC3B lipidation (as assessed by immunoblotting and immunofluorescence) only became detectable if the protease inhibitor leupeptin was injected 2 h before drawing blood. Consistently, measurement of an enhanced autophagic flux was only possible if white blood cells from starved human volunteers were cultured in the presence or absence of leupeptin. Whereas all murine leukocyte subpopulations significantly increased the number of LC3B+ puncta per cell in response to nutrient deprivation, only neutrophils from starved volunteers showed signs of activated autophagy (as determined by a combination of multi-color immunofluorescence, cytofluorometry and image analysis). Altogether, these results suggest that white blood cells are suitable for monitoring autophagic flux. In addition, we propose that the evaluation of protein acetylation in circulating leukocytes can be adopted as a biochemical marker of organismal energetic status.It’s been a month since Sharyl Attkisson left CBS News, a departure which many assumed related to editorial interference with her reporting on stories that focused on Obama administration scandals. Attkisson appeared last night on Fox’s O’Reilly Factor and confirmed those assumptions. Attkisson tells Bill O’Reilly that CBS News labeled her a “troublemaker” for her insistence on sticking with stories such as the Fast & Furious scandal. CBS wanted her to drop the Fast & Furious story over “a lack of interest,” and Attkisson says that the “interest” issue was editorial rather than audience related.
Newsbusters has the full transcript:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICJQU3H06Qk
ATTKISSON: It just came to be that, I don’t think on the viewer’s part, but on the people that decide what stories go into the broadcast and what there’s room for, they felt fairly early on that this story was over when I felt as though we had barely begun to scratch the surface. They didn’t ask me what was left to report, they just decided on their own that this story was – O’REILLY: So they pulled the rug from you. And I worked at CBS News. I know how it goes. You can’t investigate a story unless you get a budget to do so, and approval of the higher ups, okay, you are going to do assignment O’Reilly or Attkisson. And this assignment will go to this show. That’s how the structure works. They didn’t want any part of it over there. Okay. How about Benghazi, what did you find out about that? ATTKISSON: Benghazi I was assigned to look into about three weeks after the attacks happened by management, and pursue that aggressively. And as I felt we were beginning to scratch beneath the surface on that scandal as well, which I think had many legitimate questions yet to be asked and answered, interest was largely lost in that story as well on the part of the people that are responsible for deciding what goes on the news. O’REILLY: So did they tell you, look, we don’t want you to spend any more time on this? Was it that direct? ATTKISSON: No. It’s more as though there is no time in the broadcast. They really, really liked the story but you start to hear from, you know, other routes that why don’t you just leave it alone, and you know, you are kind of a trouble maker because you are still pursuing it. It kind of goes from hot to cold in one day, sometimes. Where they are asking you to pursue something heavily and then it’s almost as if a light switch goes off and they look at you all of a sudden as if, why are you bringing us this story?
CBS News also lost interest in ObamaCare despite all of the security issues that would have made for a huge story had it taken place in the private sector:
ATTKISSON: I was asked by CBS to look into ObamaCare and it had a similar trajectory whereby we broke some interesting stories that I felt like we were uncovering some good information and making headway, but we and I feel like a lot of the media after several weeks of this kind of fell off the radar on the story to a large degree, on the critical looks that we were taking. It’s security issues, the lack of transparency, the lack of providing of figures and information that I think belonged in the public domain, belonged to us, that were being withheld. While being provided in some cases to corporate partners of the government, being withheld from us though. O’REILLY: When you say security, you mean people’s health records and things like that and that they’re not secure? ATTKISSON: Right. Just before Christmas came word that the top security official, the computer security person who still works there at HHS had refused to sign off and recommended, in fact, that this web site not go live because of all the security issues. And that was not considered a big enough story, I suppose, is the way to put it by those who decide what goes on the air. But I thought it was hugely important, because this is an insider, someone who works in the Obama administration who had made this assessment. And if you look at having had something like that occur with a private corporation that proceeded to go online with all of these alleged security risks, I think the government would be very upset by that if the tables were turned. But here was the United States government doing it.
And for some reason, the editors at CBS News found that … uninteresting. Those who wanted to cover it were troublemakers. Granted, this is only Attkisson’s side of the story, but their coverage on all of these scandals without Attkisson speaks for itself, as does her departure from the network after providing the coverage she gave these scandals.Share. Story penned by webcomic author Zach Weinersmith. Story penned by webcomic author Zach Weinersmith.
Stick It To The Man developer Zoink has announced their next game, Zombie Vikings.
Dubbed a "story-brawler", Zombie Vikings is a cooperative game for up to four player. The story, penned by Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Comics creator Zach Weinersmith, follows four undead vikings on a mission to find the Norse god Odin's missing eye.
Exit Theatre Mode
Zombie Vikings is set to be released sometime in 2015 for PlayStation 4 and PC. While a Vita version is not in the cards just yet, game director Klaus Lyngeled says the studio is "hoping to one day" to develop the game for the handheld.
IGN compared Zoink's last game, Stick It To The Man, to a Tim Schafer game, calling it "the complete package".
Lauren Puga is a freelancer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @kittentarantino.Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
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Derek Jeter’s newborn daughter is the rookie of the year.
The Yankee legend and model wife Hannah Jeter on Thursday welcomed a baby girl named Bella Raine, it was announced on Friday.
Jeter’s sports website, The Players’ Tribune, tweeted out the baby announcement: “Congratulations Derek and @hannahbjeter on the birth of your baby girl, Bella Raine Jeter, born Thursday, Aug. 17.”
A follow-up tweet by The Players’ Tribune noted that Jeter’s daughter was born on the birthday of Jorge Posada, Jeter’s friend and fellow Core Four Yankee teammate.
“Derek and Jorge were teammates for 17 years,” the tweet read.
The Bronx Bombers were quick to offer their congratulations, tweeting: “Congrats to Derek & Hannah Jeter on the birth of their daughter, Bella Raine Jeter. We can’t wait to meet her!”
Baby Bella is the first child for Jeter, 43, and the 27-year-old Sports Illustrated swimsuit model.
The Hall of Fame-bound shortstop will be squeezing in diaper-changing while being part of the new ownership team of the Miami Marlins.
The Jeters, who tied the knot in July 2016, announced in February they were expecting. At the time, Hannah said she and her husband both wanted any future children to carve out their own identities separate from their famous dad’s.
“They’re going to be born into such an extraordinary situation. They’re going to have to be some strong little people,” Hannah wrote on The Players’ Tribune. “We don’t want them to be defined by their dad’s name — for them, we want him to just be ‘Dad.’ ”
Jeter led the Yankees to five World Series titles during his 20 seasons with the club. The Captain became the 22nd Yankee to have his number — No. 2 — retired by the team.
Following his decision to retire in 2014, Jeter noted that part of the reason was so he could start a family.John Plumtree didn’t bring the lineout maul with him from Durban but it’s undoubtedly become a potent Irish weapon again.
It shouldn’t be a massive revelation to state that Joe Schmidt has chosen his forwards coach wisely. But this past fortnight we’ve seen a dangerous edge return to the pack. Schmidt is running the show but some dark words must have been exchanged away from the prying ears of the backline.
On arrival in this country Plumtree called his new charges good but not great, and duly waited for a response.
Niall O’Donovan used to seek similar reactions from his forwards, first at Shannon then Munster then Ireland. If there was a punch up in training he would be visibly happy. That’s a great session in his book. If we were willing to kick the shit out of each other God help the enemy.
I remember a massive punch up one day training out on Thomond Park. We were getting ready for a big European game but the enthusiastic younger fellas tried to pull down a lineout maul from an offside position.
It got out of hand when the Clohessy brothers, Dessie and Peter, swapped digs. Everyone waded in. Naturally I was stuck in the middle of it and a young Donncha O’Callaghan landed a few sneaky punches. He was laying down a marker himself.
When the messing abated, Niall O pulled us around him. He was delighted. Couldn’t ask for anymore.
It’s the same with Ireland of late. Real aggression is evident on the training pitch in Carton House. That’s a desire to be the dominant force in every game. That’s healthy. Being a successful coach in South Africa, Plumtree arrived with the highest expectations of what a forward pack should be able to achieve. Especially at set piece and the physical stakes.
We now see the proof as soon as Rory Best takes the ball into his hands. Since the dawn of rugby, Irish teams, Lord knows Munster in particular, have mined for jewels with the maul. It’s in our DNA but still what a welcome surprise to see it yielding three tries in our opening two Six Nations games.
The best thing about a powerful maul is how mentally draining, never mind the sagging legs, it can be on the opposition. They know its coming but they can’t do anything about it. If it’s put together quickly and in a structurally sound way it’s impossible to legally stop.
Illegally as well with the best example being Jamie Heaslip’s try against Scotland. Rory threw to Dan Tuohy who deftly slipped it off to Chris Henry veering to the right with Heaslip snuggling in behind his flanker as Mike Ross, Cian Healy and Peter O’Mahony bludgeoned a path.
That immediate change of direction took Tim Swinson, big Jim Hamilton and Ryan Grant out of the equation. No team will stop a fully stacked maul without their locks and a prop. That’s good research. Identify who tends to pull down the maul (Hamilton) and move the point of contact away from him with Dev Toner as the decoy/barrier.
All pre-planned and executed like an airplane crashing to earth. The left wing (Toner) was dragged off the main body by a desperate Scottish body with the nose of the plane – Healy, Ross and O’Mahony – only tearing off when their cargo was safely over the try line.
Untold advantage
Against Wales it was different but the same. Best threw to Toner – whose height lends an untold advantage to this ploy - who along with Ross and O’Mahony acted as decoys, or static bodies that Welsh forwards focused on, as Henry nestled in behind Best and Heaslip with Healy and O’Connell either side of him.
Heaslip could have been done for blocking but Barnes had an unimpaired view.
Plumtree, writing a column for SA Rugby magazine last year, explained the same technique behind the Springbok/Bulls excellent maul: “Generally they win the ball where they want to win it in the lineout – on Juandré Kruger or just behind him on Pierre Spies – which is important.
“They pack even numbers on either side of the jumper very quickly and the ripper (who has taken the ball from the jumper) slips to the back of the maul, with his mates protecting him from the opposition. They also get very low and tight and work hard for each other. If the opposition haven’t taken out the lifters and jumper quickly, so they can get closer to the ball, then the Bulls or Boks invariably score the try. The try-scorer is normally the ripper and/or the hooker, and while he does the least work he gets the glory!”
Change the names Kruger and Spies for any one of Toner, O’Connell, O’Mahony, Heaslip.
Paddy Jackson’s try that added further humiliation to Wales’ plight last Saturday proves more than anything that Plumtree, O’Connell, Best and the rest have spent hours sharpening this blunt force since November.
This time the lineout was on the 22 – which is miles for a maul to travel – with Seán Cronin throwing to O’Mahony as Toner ran a decoy to the front. “Once,” Wayne Barnes quickly warned Conor Murray but the Irish pack knew they had the legs and perfect shape to trundle onwards (especially after O’Mahony tore Toby Fatelau’s arm out of its socket when he tried the spoil).
Again the Welsh were fooled with four of them – including Sam Warburton and Alun Wyn Jones – tearing down the wrong section as O’Mahony and Marty Moore happily landing on top of them. The numerical advantage, which is what makes the maul so effective, prompted Leigh Halfpenny to abandon his position, which Murray immediately spotted and put Jackson away with a neat skip pass. What made that last maul so impressive was Tommy O’Donnell, Jack McGrath, Cronin and Moore were off the bench and still they knew precisely what their individual roles entailed.
Structural base
That’s what Plumtree was hired to do. Provide the structural base and let the players build a monstrously effective machine. Schmidt might be the undisputed boss with many of the praise and plaudits being laid at his feet but the Kiwi has so clearly been afforded the pitch time to construct a very South African looking set piece.
He may be born and bred in New Zealand but the 48-year-old played most of his career for Natal before returning to South Africa, via Wellington and Swansea, to lead the Sharks to Currie Cup success.
And no team wins that competition without an awesome maul.
Not that it’s all him, mind. I’ve no doubt Paulie, Rory, Jamie and O’Mahony – leaders from the provinces – weren’t long warming to the idea of building a maul to be feared by mixing up their knowledge. Best was already influenced by the Natal think-tank having played alongside Johann Muller and Ruan Pienaaer.
The beauty of the maul is the fear it instils in opposing packs.
Now what Ireland has achieved in such a small space of time is admirable as they don’t have a Bakkies Botha or John Hayes anymore. Mountains of men, when they walk the maul moves, I’ve seen Hayes take the impact of three charging forwards and still hold O’Connell at full stretch.
Anthony Foley was another with that strong base to bring the jumper down.
So technique is everything. The guy lifting from behind the jumper must be so powerful. Ross and O’Mahony both do decent impressions of Hayes. When that’s done correctly, and the initial assault is fended away, the switch and body positions ignites the tank.
At Munster we also used it to march out of sticky positions. Mostly to create field position so Rog could clear our lines. And we used it to intimidate teams.
Ultimate mauling side
In 2002 we came up against the ultimate mauling side in the Heineken Cup final. When Leicester got lineout ball to Martin Johnson or Ben Kay nearly every team bowed down as Neil Back usually cranked it into gear behind Rowntree, Garforth, West, Cockeril.
They mauled everyone off the field that year. We focused on stopping them. The key is to not let it develop. As Scotland and Wales learned, it’s a number game. We just made sure there were at least six of us piling into them from the lineout. The Tigers kept at it but that’s not what won them the game. They won because they were better but we made them sweat blood over every inch.
It went out of the game for a few years because you were allowed sack players in the air and a lot of referees were penalising for blocking. But the maul is back and Plumtree has made sure if he is the Ireland forwards coach then it will be part of the arsenal.
It’s about laying down a marker as you walk slowly into a lineout five metres out. You know the opposition know what you are going to do and you know what you are going to do. You also believe they won’t be able to stop you. That gees you up.
Will Ireland employ it so effectively and so much at Twickenham? I’m not sure. But that’s certainly what the English expect now. What we do know about Schmidt is he is smarter than most of us. He’ll be aware that Stuart Lancaster will forensically examine ways to counteract Ireland’s maul. They will break down every single lineout. They will also seek to maul the hell out of us. Nothing finds the voice of a Twickenham crowd like a rolling maul.
It’s up to Plumtree to have a strategy to move the point of contact again. It won’t be easy but the tools are in place and that’s the hard part done.
I’ll leave you not with Plumtree’s signing off: “The maul, what a beautiful thing.”
His new pack of forwards so clearly agree.1 year ago
Aloha folks!
We are just a mere hours away from the kick off of Rooster Teeth's Extra Life Stream for 2017! Last weekend we held our second ever RT Community Extra Life stream, and as usual, our community kicked all kinds of ass. We raised nearly $50,000 between the 25 teams that represented us all over the country! As of this posting, we are sitting at just a hair under $100,000 for the year already! That is incredible and you should all be so proud of yourselves.
Of course, all of that money donated so far goes towards our incredible goal of $1,000,000 raised by the end of our stream this Sunday!
Now then, let me rattle off a few answers to some common questions I have received.
Q:) How can I donate?
A:) You can donate directly to the Rooster Teeth Extra Life team right here: https://www.extra-life.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=donate.participant&participantID=253462
Q:) Where can I watch the stream?
A:) You can watch our Extra Life stream at http://www.roosterteeth.com/extralife or on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/roosterteeth/live or on Twitch at http://www.twitch.tv/roosterteeth
Q:) What if I don't have money to donate? How can I help?
A:) SPREAD THE WORD! Please, if you aren't able to donate with money, please donate with time and exposure! Get on Twitter, on Facebook, Instagram, wherever, and let people know about our stream and what we are trying to do! We are going to raise a MILLION DOLLARS for Children's Miracle Network Hospitals all over the US and Canada with your help!
Q:) What are the exclusive merchandise pieces I can buy?
A:) You can pick up our exclusive Extra Life merchandise (of which, the proceeds go directly to Rooster Teeth's donation to Extra Life) right here: https://store.roosterteeth.com/collections/extra-life
Q:) I missed out on the Community Extra Life pin during the Community Weekend, is there any way I can get it still?
A:) You are in luck! We had some conversations internally and have decided to bring the For the Kids pin from our Community Weekend back for our main stream weekend! Again, proceeds from the purchase of the pin will go towards our Extra Life donation, so grab seven!
Q:) I can't get to a computer during the 24 hours you guys are streaming, can I buy the Extra Life merchandise later?
A:) Unfortunately no, part of the fun is the rush to get everyone watching us during our shenanigans and raising money! Please ask a friend to grab a shirt or poster or pin for you!
Q:) Can I donate to Extra Life even after the stream ends?
A:) Of course! Donations for Extra Life 2017 don't end until December 31st at Midnight of this year!
Q:) When will Achievement Hunter / Funhaus / #2spooky / The Know / Whose Line / etc be on the stream? Is there a schedule somewhere?
A:) We have never posted a schedule before as time slips quite a bit during Extra Life and you'll never know exactly when stuff happens. We'll do our best to keep you informed as to when major groups will be on the broadcast though. (ie: Achievement Hunter will begin the stream from 8am-10am)
Q:) Will anyone be playing games during Extra Life? Can I play with you?
A:) This year we have dedicated game stations set up for our team to play games the entire 24 hours we are streaming. We'll do our best to post information on how you can join them gaming.
Q:) Is it too late to join the Rooster Teeth team for Extra Life? I want to stream soon!
A:) It's never too late! We'd love to have you! You can join our team or create your own team and become a sub-team of the Rooster Teeth Super Team here!
Q:) I have a suggestion for a Wheel of Vengeance punishment or stretch goal!
A:) Please post it below in the comments! We could always use more ideas.
Q:) Do you guys have a medic/security on staff?
A:) Yes, we have a medic nearby just in case Gavin lights himself on fire.
Q:) Where can I get more information on Extra Life?
A:) At their excellent website.
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I think covers every question I've heard. If you have more, please ask below in the comments!
I cannot wait for this weekend and I can't wait for you guys to astound me again with your generosity. Here's to $1,000,000!!!Not long after the Gophers introduced Richard Pitino as their new men’s basketball coach, rumors began to circulate that an unnamed player intended to seek his scholarship release and transfer to another program.
My gut reaction was, “Wonder where Maurice Walker will end up?”
It didn’t require much deductive reasoning to determine that Big Mo appeared ill-fitted for Pitino’s breakneck brand of basketball. At 310 pounds, Walker looked out of shape manning the low post in Tubby Smith’s plodding offense. How in the world would he ever survive in Pitino’s run-and-gun system? That’s like asking a pontoon to keep pace with speed boats. A change in scenery seemed inevitable.
In a touch of irony, the player who transferred — Joe Coleman — might have been the team’s best athlete. As for Walker, he decided to stick it out and make some life changes.
“Once I heard Pitino, I was really excited,” he said.
And then they met for the first time. Pitino has made Walker’s weight a standard quip in his public speeches, and he didn’t mince words in offering a blunt critique of his 6-10 junior center.
“[He said] it’s going to take a lot of work to get into shape and that I’m a long ways from where I need to be,” Walker said.
He’s still not there yet, but Walker has lost nearly 40 pounds through diet and fitness training. Noticeably slimmer, he hopes to lose an additional 15 to 20 pounds and enter next season around 255.
As someone who showed up on campus as a freshman weighing 340 pounds, Walker believes his career will follow a different arc with these changes to his body.
“Looking back at it now, I should have done this a long time ago,” he said.
A coaching change provided the necessary push, but Walker’s new outlook likely stems from a recognition that he was wasting an opportunity. He was either injured or too overweight to be considered anything but an intriguing unknown his first three years, including a redshirt season. His size became nothing more than a tease because he lacked the quickness and stamina to maintain anything.
Walker ultimately should hold himself accountable because it’s his body and his career. But college athletes need guidance or an occasional kick in the pants, and Smith’s staff failed to push the right buttons to keep Walker’s weight under control.
“I felt comfortable within my body that I could perform well enough,” Walker said. “I thought I could be effective at that weight. I wasn’t really pushed as hard as I should have been.”
He is now. Walker admits being “extremely nervous” before his first individual workout with Pitino this spring. He figured it would be intense with a lot of running. He didn’t guess wrong.
“I was dead tired,” he said.
Once he recovered, he knew he really had only one option if he wanted to stay.
“I need to get in shape,” he told himself. “I’m not going to make it.”
Normally, Walker returns to his Toronto home for a few weeks every summer to visit family and recharge before school starts. He decided to stay on campus this summer to focus on his training.
He cut out carbohydrates and unhealthy snacks and replaced fast food with salads. He did cardio in the morning and then weightlifting and individual drills in the afternoon. Walker said every drill in offseason practices revolves around transition in order to prepare players for Pitino’s desired pace.
Walker said he has trimmed one minute off his mile run, posting a personal best of 6 minutes, 45 seconds. And he actually can dunk a basketball now at the end of a workout. Before, he would be too tired for anything more than a layup.
“My mentality is changing,” he said. “I feel more athletic now, so I go up and dunk it.”
Walker loves the way he feels and the comments he receives from teammates about his physical appearance and the way he moves on the court. More than anything, he has given himself a chance to realize his potential as a basketball player. His role in Pitino’s program hinged on it.
“I don’t think I would have seen the court at all,” he said.
Nobody knows how much he will play, even with these changes. Walker must prove that he can maintain his target weight and not slip into old habits. And he still needs to earn Pitino’s trust and show that he can function in his system. The Gophers aren’t exactly stocked with big men, so an opportunity exists.
We still don’t know Walker’s ceiling as a player. But he can come closer to touching it now than he could a few months ago.Part one of my new mini comic series.Ever wondered how this hostile little thief became Cinder fangirl number 1? Sure, Cinder did provide her with food, place to stay and a job but Em must've been skeptical of this beautiful stranger at first.To me, the dialogue in the flashback chapter hints that the two had already spent some time together before the" Follow me and you'll never be hungry again" happened.In this series we'll take a look at Emerald's first couple of days with Cinder before she actually decided to join her.Part two: tigerpaw90.deviantart.com/art/… I could've spent another day tweeking this comic and especially the dialogue and shading but after drawing the embroidery on Cinder's dress too many times,my brain exploded. I hate and love that dress so much. x'D It's so pretty, but such a pain to draw!EDIT: removed some unnecessary dialogue.Here’s a sure-fire way to get the No. 1 record in the country: engineer a fake controversy by making an unrated version of your video featuring strutting, mostly naked supermodels. That’s the route blue-eyed crooner Robin Thicke took with his single “Blurred Lines,” which sits atop the Billboard charts this week, ending Macklemore’s long reign.
The video, which was banned from YouTube at the end of March, continues to live on in its full naked glory on Vevo—coincidentally, a partner of YouTube—where salacious viewers can view three models, Emily Ratajkowski, Jessi M’Bengue, and Elle Evans, wearing nothing but shoes and nude-hued thongs, as they cavort and dance and flirt with Thicke, Pharrell, and T.I., who are all fully clothed. The group play with weird, nonsensical props—a needle, a lamb—and in between the screen intermittently flashes hashtags (i.e., #Thicke).
At one point, the sentence, “Robin Thicke has a big dick,” is displayed in large Mylar balloons.
So far, so … sexy? Depends on who you ask.
The nudity might be fine if the song was called, “Let’s All Have Some Fun,” but it’s called “Blurred Lines,” and the subject itself is enough to make some female music fans uncomfortable. The song is about how a girl really wants crazy wild sex but doesn’t say it—positing that age-old problem where men think no means yes into a catchy, hummable song.
“Good girl, I know you want it,” sings Thicke, who has all of his clothes on, as one of the near-naked models dances and pouts next to him. “Talk about getting blasted, I hate these blurred lines, I know you want it, but you’re a good girl, the way you grab me, must want to get nasty.”
Not surprisingly the combination of the lyrics and the video’s nudity has irked some female music fans.
“Has anyone heard Robin Thicke’s new rape song?” Lisa Huyne wrote in a post on her blog, Feminist in L.A. “Basically, the majority of the song (creepily named ‘Blurred Lines’) has the R&B singer murmuring ‘I know you want it’ over and over into a girl’s ear. Call me a cynic, but that phrase does not exactly encompass the notion of consent in sexual activity … Seriously, this song is disgusting—though admittedly very catchy.”
Canadian model Amy Davison also took issue with the clip. In a YouTube video titled “Robin Thicke is a dick,” she explained why the women showing so much skin got under her skin.
“The women are clearly being used as objects to reinforce the status of the men in the video. The men have all the control and status because they are not vulnerable—they are completely covered. Whereas the women have no status and are totally open to be exploited ogled and used,” she said. “It doesn’t jibe with me.”
Oddly, though, top feminist sites like Jezebel, The Hairpin, and XO Jane haven’t yet weighed in. Perhaps, like music critic Maura Johnston, the editor and founder of Maura Magazine, and Frannie Kelley, an editor at NPR Music, they don’t think it’s that big of a deal. Certainly, the video is less offensive than another recently banned-from-YouTube video, “Pussy” by the Dream, which is not about little kittens, and features closeups of a woman’s nether regions being covered in oil. And Thicke’s video would barely register on the outrage meter when compared to most garden-variety hip-hop videos featuring bling and babes.
“Lyrically, it’s problematic, but I feel like so many pop songs right now are problematic,” said Johnston of the song itself.
Kelley also shrugged off the controversy: “I think it’s really |
plans change Conner is next in line. While it is too far to predict who will be available in free agency, Devonta Freeman of the Atlanta Falcons and Isaiah Crowell of the Cleveland Browns could be options if they don’t strike deals with their teams. However, with salary cap hell coming in the near future, it is unlikely Pittsburgh makes a big splash in free agency.
Conner has the opportunity to work with the starters and get sound advice from his linemen and quarterback. For a solid player to get this type of exposure this early on gives him a leg up. However, there are negatives to Bell holding out and waiting to suit up.
While he has become familiar and understands the offense, practice makes perfect. Bell has an undeniable talent, but there is always room for improvement. Bell is still young and has a high ceiling; Grinding out kinks now can lead to more success once week one arrives.
Another situation to keep in mind is that Conner didn’t have an injury-free college career. Just a few months ago, in fact, he was sidelined in OTAs with a hamstring issue. This, in addition to his knee issues while playing at the University of Pittsburgh, should caution the coaching staff in giving him too much.
This isn’t to say he will have issues, but a heavy workload could cause Conner to wear down quicker and become prone to injury. For now, there isn’t much to worry about with Bell missing training camp.
Typically, since Bell’s arrival, coach Mike Tomlin hasn’t worked him too much during camp. Looking at this situation Pittsburgh can afford to be without their number one running back during training camp. If given in moderation, Conner’s reps will help prepare him in being a part of a solid one-two punch in the Steelers running game.
Photo Credit: CBS Sports
Like this: Like Loading...T HANQUARIUS CALHOUN liked to run from cops. In 2010, he fled from police in Georgia twice and was arrested for it each time. The next year he fled and was arrested again. On May 3, 2013, he did it again. Then, 11 days later, he ran from the cops for the very last time.
On that Tuesday afternoon, Calhoun, who was born and raised in Henry County, Georgia, was caught speeding on I-85, heading north, when a Banks County sheriff’s deputy put on his lights to pull the gray Toyota Corolla over for a traffic stop. Calhoun decided to hit the gas instead of the brakes and make a run for it, as he had so many times in the past. Police officers from Banks County, Franklin County, and eventually the Georgia State Patrol chased him at speeds exceeding 120 mph, with Calhoun and his pursuers weaving around cars on the highway.
At 2:03 p.m., after 14 minutes and 21 miles of pursuit, Trooper Donnie O’Neal Saddler decided that Calhoun had to be stopped to protect the lives of innocent people on the highway. Saddler pulled his car alongside Calhoun’s and performed, at 111 mph, what is called a Precision Immobilization Technique, or PIT maneuver, making contact with the back of Calhoun’s car and causing it to spin clockwise and careen off the side of the highway across the rumble strips and into a small embankment, eventually striking a tree. Calhoun was completely ejected from the car and sustained major injuries, but somehow survived.
Photo: Courtesy of Calhoun family
If Calhoun had been alone in the car, he might have received little or no prison time, as he had with all his previous arrests for minor crimes. He was driving with a suspended license — and some counterfeit currency was later found in the wreckage — but his most serious offense was running from the police. That Tuesday, however, he had two friends as passengers, 20-year-old Relpheal Morton and 19-year-old Marion Shore. In court, Trooper Saddler described seeing Morton at the scene. “He was still in the back seat,” Saddler said. “He was kind of just looking around … I will never forget it. He just kept looking around.”
Morton, whom I was not able to interview for this article, must have been stunned to be alive and relatively unharmed. The crash was so violent that the car’s roof was ripped completely off. The car looked flattened, like a tank had ridden over it. In one of the police dashcam videos that shows the crash, pieces of the car fly dozens of feet in the air toward the camera. According to a report by the Georgia State Patrol’s Specialized Collision Reconstruction Team, “The damage to the Toyota Corolla was too extensive to describe all the damage.” It seems almost impossible that two people survived.
Marion Shore was not so lucky. She was sitting in the passenger seat, wearing her seatbelt, but the force of the crash was so strong that she was partially ejected from the car while it was flipping and rolling. Shore, the mother of a 3-year-old boy, was trapped halfway inside the car, in an in-between place where death was certain. The car rolled over her several times. The chief medical examiner for the state of Georgia examined Shore’s body and said in court that, as the car was rolling, the forces propelling it “literally bent her body almost in half.”
From dashcam videos of the May 14, 2013, pursuit of Thanquarius Calhoun by the Georgia State Patrol.
T HE PIT MANEUVER is a modified version of an anti-terrorist driving tactic that has been taught for four decades by BSR, a private training facility in West Virginia that works with U.S. military and law enforcement personnel. According to BSR, the technique was originally developed by Germany’s federal police to give security details the ability to take out a car that was threatening a convoy. In 1985, the maneuver was developed by the Fairfax County, Virginia, police department in order to end pursuits with little danger to police or the general public.
This is how it is supposed to work: An officer pulls alongside a fleeing vehicle so that the officer’s front bumper is just ahead of the other vehicle’s back bumper. The officer matches the fleeing driver’s speed, gently touches — not rams — the other vehicle, and then makes a quick quarter turn of the wheel toward it. The other car then spins out safely to a stop. According to California Highway Patrol instructions, “The key to proper execution of the PIT is finesse. Ideally, the initial contact with the subject vehicle should be so gentle the operator of the subject vehicle is not aware that contact has been made.” It’s a difficult maneuver to learn, even for seasoned police officers, because the training goes up against a lifetime of being told not to touch things with your moving vehicle, especially other cars. Officers are generally trained on closed roadways at speeds between 25 and 40 mph. The PIT is now used by agencies throughout the U.S., and if used correctly at slow speeds and in the right circumstances — little traffic, no bystanders, open road — it can be an effective and predictable method to cut short pursuits and save lives. At high speeds, it becomes a deadly force technique, a way to stop a driver at all costs. As one expert put it, the PIT would only be predictable at high speeds if performed “on an airport runway.”
One state agency in particular, the Georgia State Patrol, empowered by its vague, unrestrictive PIT maneuver policy, has been using the PIT at high speeds. Yet responsibility for the deaths of innocent passengers has been placed completely on the drivers whose cars were “pitted.” Thanquarius Calhoun, just 21 years old when he was caught speeding and decided to flee, received a life sentence for the death of his friend Marion Shore.
No comprehensive or reliable data has been collected on the PIT maneuver’s use nationwide, and no true empirical studies have been done on its effectiveness or safety. What little is known can be found only piecemeal, hidden within notoriously incomplete data on police pursuits in general.
Map: The Intercept
Just over half of state law enforcement agencies train their officers in the PIT maneuver. Some call it “tactical vehicle interception,” or TVI, and in Kentucky they call it “legal intervention,” but it’s the same technique. You can get pitted on highways running the entire West Coast and in the Southeast from Florida to Virginia. You can get pitted driving from Michigan all the way to California, unless you go through North Dakota, Wyoming, or Montana. The Northeast is mostly PIT-free, with the exceptions of Maine, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. You can get pitted in Arkansas, Indiana, and Iowa. Texas’ Highway Patrol, with more than 2,000 troopers, is now piloting the PIT maneuver, and the Highway Patrol in South Carolina began using it in April 2015. Those are just the state agencies, and don’t include the roughly 18,000 city, county, and local agencies nationwide, each with its own ever-evolving policy on pursuits.
Although some state police agencies refused to reveal the details of their PIT maneuver policies (and in the case of Missouri, whether or not the PIT is used), the policies I have seen vary greatly. Most state that you should never pit a motorcycle or vehicles carrying hazardous materials. Some emphasize that you should take into account the condition of the road, visibility, pedestrians, traffic volume, and if there are other occupants in the car. The Florida Highway Patrol’s PIT policy, for example, tells officers to consider their proximity to blind curves, highway grades, bridges, guardrails, barriers, other traffic, freeway ramps, and roadside obstacles such as rocks, trees, deep ditches, signs, utility posts, traffic islands, and curbs.
Some agencies do not specify the type of eluder who can be pitted, whereas some make clear it must be someone who has committed, or is suspected of having committed, a felony. The Nevada Highway Patrol’s policy states that a PIT cannot be performed unless “the suspect is an actual or suspected felon who reasonably appears to represent a serious threat to society if not apprehended.” Some agencies require supervisory approval before an officer can pit; others prefer that the officer simply use good judgment.
Where the biggest differences lie is in perhaps the most important aspect: speed. Some agencies have very strict caps on the maximum speed at which a PIT maneuver can be performed, some have speed recommendations, and some omit any mention of speed whatsoever. The California Highway Patrol sets a hard cap of 35 mph, as recommended by the department that developed the technique in Fairfax County, Virginia. According to Don Gotthardt, a spokesperson for the Fairfax police department, “We know with great certainty where a violator will end up at speeds 45 mph or lower.” Indiana State Police sets the cap at 50 mph, Michigan State Police and New Hampshire State Police cap it at 40 mph, and Iowa State Patrol caps it at 35 mph. In Virginia and Washington, state agencies require supervisory approval if an officer is going to pit at more than 40 mph, and in Oregon and Wisconsin, the PIT is considered use of deadly force if performed above 35 mph, so officers better have a damn good reason to use it.
T HE GEORGIA STATE PATROL’S PIT policy states that “if the trooper or troopers in the pursuit determine that the fleeing vehicle must be stopped immediately to safeguard life and preserve public safety, the PIT maneuver may be used.” The policy does not specify a maximum speed, and Georgia appears to be by far the most aggressive of all state agencies when it comes to using the technique. While several agencies have policies without speed caps, the information I gathered shows a huge discrepancy in total maneuvers performed, and injuries and deaths resulting from them, between the Georgia State Patrol and other state agencies that use the PIT.
Since Georgia began using the PIT maneuver in 1998, at least 28 people have been killed and 296 injured in PIT-related pursuits, the vast majority of them riding in the fleeing vehicle. That number certainly understates the problem because data is either partially or entirely missing for eight of those years. The data I was able to collect was pieced together from open records requests, courts exhibits and depositions, and Georgia State Patrol reports. As far as I can determine, the agency has performed more than 1,100 PIT maneuvers since 1998, and 2015 had the largest annual number yet, with 155 performed. Roughly 20 percent of Georgia State Patrol pursuits involve a PIT maneuver, and the agency has never punished an officer for using it inappropriately.
In comparison, California’s Highway Patrol, which collects statistics from its own officers as well as from other California law enforcement agencies, listed 967 pursuits terminated with a PIT maneuver since 2002, about 1 percent of total pursuits, with only one death and 83 injuries. Minnesota’s State Patrol recorded 225 PITs since 2008, with no deaths and five minor injuries. The North Carolina State Highway Patrol reported 303 PIT maneuvers, with no deaths, since 2007. (North Carolina does not record injuries.) Maine’s State Police reported 17 PITs since 2012, with no injuries or deaths. Nebraska’s State Patrol reported 25 PITs, with two injuries and no deaths, since 2013. Indiana reported only five PIT maneuvers performed since 2009 and no injuries or deaths. Virginia State Police has trained officers in the PIT since January 2015, but none have performed the maneuver on duty.
There have also been fatalities in Nevada, Oklahoma, and Washington, but when you Google “PIT maneuver” and “death,” most of the hits point you to Georgia, specifically the Georgia State Patrol. Thanquarius Calhoun’s case provides some recent insight into what’s happening in Georgia, but an incident from more than 10 years ago reveals more details: the crash that resulted in the deaths of Katie Sharp and Garrett Gabe.
Photo: Shaun Raviv
O N THE MORNING of August 17, 2004, 21-year-old Katie Sharp was driving her parents’ Nissan Pathfinder from Pennsylvania to her home in Holly Hill, Florida. In the car with Sharp was her boyfriend, 17-year-old Garrett Gabe. They were heading southbound on I-95 in South Carolina when she was caught speeding by Colleton County sheriff’s deputies. Sharp was doing 86 in a 70-mph zone. Perhaps because she had initially taken the car without her parents’ permission, or perhaps because she had run out of gas earlier that morning and had been chewed out by a police officer who saw her on the side of the road, or perhaps because her license had recently been suspended due to traffic violations, Sharp failed to stop when the sirens came on. Instead, she sped forward toward home, where her parents and young child were waiting for her.
Nobody will ever know exactly what was going through her head when she decided to try to outrun the cops — a terrible idea in almost any circumstances — because after leading officers on a high-speed chase for 50 miles in South Carolina, Sharp’s car entered Georgia. “They won’t get past my two, trust me,” a Georgia State Patrol dispatcher told a South Carolina dispatcher as the chase crossed state lines. They didn’t. Georgia took over the chase, and the 75-mile pursuit ended just 53 seconds after Trooper William Scott Fisher joined it.
Fisher saw Sharp driving erratically and dangerously at very high speeds. Hoping to save innocent bystanders, he later said, he pitted her SUV, which was traveling at 107 mph. The vehicle spun off the highway, clockwise, hurtling 400 feet over an embankment and into a tree. Both Katie Sharp and Garrett Gabe were killed. “The trooper executed his training. He acted properly,” said a Georgia State Patrol spokesperson. “It was a long, dangerous chase, and we felt we needed to stop it before some innocent bystander got killed.” Of course, an innocent bystander named Garrett Gabe did get killed. He just happened to be inside the car.
Photo: Good Morning America
Sharp’s parents filed a lawuit against Fisher and other members of the Georgia State Patrol, and the case went to the United States Court of Appeals, 11th Circuit. According to a statement of material facts submitted to the court in 2007 on behalf of Fisher and his colleagues, “Fisher has no recollection of ever being told a specific speed that should be used before applying a PIT maneuver, just to use his judgment depending on the situation, to use his discretion as to whether other individuals were being placed at risk of death or serious bodily injury as a result of the actions of the person being pursued.”
Trooper Fisher didn’t even know why he was chasing Sharp. In a deposition, he said he assumed she had committed some serious crime or felony because she was being chased across state lines. In reality, the crime that started the chase was a simple moving violation. Fisher said, “I absolutely wanted to end the pursuit to save innocent people on the road that day. The way she was driving with total disregard, the way she was traveling, I thought she was going to kill somebody. I thought there was a certain death fixing to occur.” Instead, it was Fisher’s PIT maneuver that resulted in the deaths of two people, one of whom was utterly innocent. The other was guilty of speeding. “I just don’t think it’s right,” Charles Sharp, Katie’s father and a former police officer, told me. “He was judge, jury, and executioner in less than two miles.”
T HE MOST STRIKING statements in the Sharp case came from Soffie Thigpen, the first female captain in the history of the Georgia State Patrol. Thigpen, who initially brought the PIT maneuver to Georgia, was a lieutenant at the time. In her 2006 deposition, Thigpen called the PIT maneuver that killed Katie Sharp and her boyfriend a “picture perfect” example and said that it would be perfectly reasonable to perform the maneuver at speeds most vehicles can’t even reach. “It’s okay to do a PIT from zero to whatever the car will run,” said Thigpen, “whether it be a hundred, 150 or 190, or 30.”
Geoffrey Alpert, an expert on high-risk police activities at the University of South Carolina, who was a paid consultant on the Sharp case, called Thigpen’s words “a shocking statement from someone who’s in a decision-making status in that department and training officers to conduct the PIT.” He said, “She’ll pit anything at any speed.”
When I reached Thigpen, now retired, on the phone, she reiterated her support for the maneuver. “The PIT’s probably the greatest technique that we’ve been doing in Georgia. It’s sending out a message that we won’t tolerate bad people running over folks. If you don’t stop, we’re going to stop you. It’s just that simple.” Her take is that the PIT has saved lives by stopping chases before they go on too long. “I never did understand why anybody thought there should be a speed limit on it. I never could get that,” she said in her deposition. At the time, 12 people had died as a result of PIT maneuvers in Georgia. “On paper, 12 fatalities is a large number, but when you look at the number of PITs and the possible lives that have been saved, the number is small in comparison.”
It’s certainly possible that lives have been saved as a result of PIT maneuvers, but the cars driven by Katie Sharp and Thanquarius Calhoun, which each held passengers as innocent as any bystander on the street, were purposefully pitted at extreme speeds. Counterfeit money was found at the scene of Calhoun’s wreck, but police didn’t know about it at the time of the pursuit, and no one was charged with possessing it. Both cars had been identified by their license plates well before the PIT maneuver was performed, and it would not have been difficult to track the drivers down and put them in jail at a later time if they truly were never going to stop.
At the time of Sharp’s death, the Georgia State Patrol’s PIT maneuver policy consisted of two sentences. It said merely that officers must use the PIT in accordance with training and “at reasonable speeds and in locations where it is reasonable to expect that the maneuver can be safely accomplished.” The policy has since been revised, but still allows officers plenty of leeway in determining a “reasonable speed” when performing the PIT in a given situation. The factors they must now consider are:
a) Whether the violator is showing total disregard for public safety b) Whether the violator is slowing but not stopping for stop signs or other traffic control devices c) Whether the violator is darting at other vehicles d) Whether the violator is driving on the wrong side of the road e) Whether the violator is running other motorists off the road
Trooper Fisher admitted that he didn’t know how fast he was going when he pitted Sharp’s car. One expert brought in from Oklahoma said, “You can’t look at your speedometer and try to position yourself to the back of the vehicle and know what is ahead of you. You can’t do all that.” The Georgia State Patrol was comfortable with an officer performing a PIT maneuver on Sharp with no knowledge of his own speed — which happened to be 107 mph — while working under a policy in which “reasonable speed” was a key determinant. According to an internal affairs document, Trooper Fisher “acted in accordance with his training and within departmental policy.”
The 11th Circuit threw out the lawsuit, mostly based on a precedent set by another pursuit gone bad in Georgia. In 2001, 19-year-old Victor Harris fled Coweta County troopers who caught him doing 73 in a 55-mph zone. His car was eventually rammed (not pitted), and, as a result of his injuries, Harris was left a quadriplegic. He sued and his case made it to the Supreme Court. In the end, eight out of nine justices found that Harris’ driving was so dangerous that he posed a threat great enough to justify deadly force. The 11th Circuit judge in the Sharp case came to the same conclusion, though the presence of passenger Garrett Gabe was not mentioned as a factor and his name did not make it into the decision, essentially allowing the court to sidestep the fact that a second, innocent, person was in the car.
In 2006, the Georgia Association of Chiefs of Police commissioned a white paper on pursuits and pursuit policy in the state, with a heavy focus on use of the PIT maneuver. The committee in charge asked the faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology to study the technique’s safety. Four undergraduate engineering students executed the study, simulating a PIT maneuver in a computer engineering program, and determined that it was safe at both high and low speeds, in both wet and dry conditions. The simulation specified a car with a low center of gravity and wide tires. The study failed even to suggest anything that would happen on a real road with grass, bystanders, trees, and embankments, in any car but a simulated high-performance sports car that few people drive. Nevertheless, the Georgia committee relied on the students’ research in reaching its conclusion, writing, “It is the Committee’s opinion that the PIT maneuver is not deadly force because death or serious injury is not a likely consequence of using the PIT maneuver in accordance with proper training and policy.”
While the courts have said that using deadly force to stop a recklessly speeding fugitive is acceptable, Georgia’s police chiefs took a more radical position: that not withstanding the dozens of deaths it has caused, the PIT maneuver does not constitute deadly force at any speed.
Photo: Shaun Raviv
I N SEPTEMBER, the police department in LaGrange, Georgia, invited me to a PIT-training exercise at a closed-off roadway in Monroe County. About a dozen police officers attended that morning to perform the PIT maneuver on one another. After some practice, each would have to perform four out of five PITs correctly — matching the pursued vehicle’s speed, touching it a single time without ramming, making a quarter turn of the steering wheel, and pitting it to a stop in a designated area — in order to be allowed to perform the PIT in a real-life situation.
I rode in both the cars performing the PITs and the target vehicles, all of which were driven at about 30 mph, the preferred speed for training. By the time the training had been underway for an hour, screeches could be heard from all sides of the track and there was a strong smell of burnt rubber in the air. The cars used at the training center were old beaters, one step away from the dump, but fitted with metals bars on both sides and roll bars in case something went wrong. The side mirrors were missing or hanging on wire threads, the windows didn’t roll up or down, and the bodies were covered in dents, bruises, and scratches. Without the metal bars, one of the instructors said, they’d be destroyed in a day.
“If you can’t [pit] in training, I don’t have a lot of confidence that you can do it on the road,” Lt. Mark Kostial, one of four LaGrange PD PIT instructors, told me. “Remember, this is a thinking man’s game.” All involved wore helmets and heavy restraints.
As a passenger on both sides of the PIT, I found the force of the maneuver to be quite strong at 30 mph. It strained the neck to be in the pitted car, and was disconcerting to be spun off the roadway onto the grass. At 30 mph, the maneuver felt fairly controlled, and most, but not all, of the officers who trained that day passed. But they will rarely use the maneuver on the road. LaGrange’s police department, whose policy requires supervisory approval when a PIT is performed at more than 60 mph, has been training the PIT for about a dozen years, and the department has never had an injury that Chief Louis Dekmar can remember. Dekmar told me LaGrange will perform about two PITs in a typical year. Of course, LaGrange is a relatively small agency with only 80 or so people on the payroll.
One thing heavily emphasized by Lt. Kostial during the training was picking a location where a PIT maneuver may be safely performed. “If you’re going to spin someone out, it’s gotta be in the appropriate area. There’s a lot of responsibility in that,” Lt. Kostial told his trainees. Another instructor said, “There can be a speed that the PIT won’t work. The risks are too high. It’s not the be-all, end-all. … Just like we carry the belt and have a Taser and baton and gun, with the pursuit we have options.” LaGrange’s officers must be re-certified in the PIT every year.
Photo: LaGrange Georgia Police Department
W HEN I ASKED the Georgia State Patrol why there was no speed restriction in its PIT policy, Capt. Mark Perry replied that, “A vehicle pursuit is not a static event, it is very fluid, dynamic and rapidly evolving evolution.” The Georgia Department of Public Safety, he said, “doesn’t feel it is prudent to constrict a decision to one factor such as a minimum or maximum speed. It has to be a totality of the circumstances.”
I also spoke to officers from agencies with more restrictive PIT policies about their speed caps, and the consensus was that PIT maneuvers are unsafe at high speeds. “At really high speeds,” Trooper Dallas Greer of Kentucky State Police told me, “it’s not something you can use safely.” Major Russell Conte of New Hampshire State Police agreed. “It’s a dangerous maneuver any way you look at it,” he said. “It’s dangerous for the public, it’s dangerous for the perpetrators, it’s dangerous for the troopers.”
Officer David Northway of the Tallahassee Police Department, just across the border from Georgia, told me that his department trains its officers to use the PIT judiciously, with a cap of 45 mph. “We do not want it to be used on a day-to-day basis because of its inherent dangers to officers, to drivers, innocent bystanders, and the general public,” Northway said. “Above 45, the speed is too high so it is unsafe, and there is the possibility of collision.” He also said that his officers must have supervisory permission before any PIT. “It’s not something that you can just go ahead and do.” Northway could not recall any injuries from PITs in the past five years.
For an international perspective, I reached out to Peter Hosking, formerly the police inspector in charge of the reform program dealing with high-speed police pursuits in Queensland, Australia. After 29 years working for the Queensland Police Service, Hosking is now researching high-speed police pursuits and police use of force at Griffith University. “PIT maneuvers are not permitted in any Australian jurisdiction,” he wrote in an email. “In this country we are very risk averse. We tend to see PIT maneuvers as very risky behavior. In effect, it is a form of dangerous driving, the very behavior we are trying to eliminate through enforcement.”
Geoffrey Alpert, the criminology professor at USC, can be found quoted in just about any academic or journalistic article written on pursuits. Alpert told me that nobody knows how many agencies use the PIT. He said that above 35 mph, the PIT “becomes a deadly force technique.” When I asked why some agencies don’t have a cap, he said, “They’re not familiar with the risks and the liabilities.”
“Like any other piece of equipment, any other new technology,” Alpert told me, “when it’s used properly, it’s a very good technique. It’s just you gotta understand its limitations.”
In 2008, Ford Motor Company commissioned a paper on the PIT maneuver by three engineers, two from the University of Michigan and one from Ford. The authors created simulations in order to “provide guidelines for the effective execution of the maneuver.” Their intent was not to determine safety protocols for law enforcement agencies, but among their conclusions, the authors wrote, “PIT involves high risks, especially at elevated speed. The authors do not endorse the use of PIT maneuver at high-speed situations.”
“At higher speeds, the combined effects of spinning and skidding after the maneuver is more pronounced,” the authors wrote. “Although it destabilizes the pursued vehicle to a larger extent, it is more likely to induce unintended injuries since the pursued vehicle skids more at higher speeds. Because the ultimate purpose of PIT maneuver is to prevent the pursued from proceeding forward, instead of throwing it into complete instability, the execution of PIT maneuvers should be limited to relatively low speeds.”
“I CAN’T HELP BUT FEEL like the GSP officer who executed the PIT maneuver should be on trial with him,” wrote Patti Shore, Marion’s mother, when Thanquarius Calhoun was arrested in 2014. “His whole way of thinking was, it wasn’t his fault,” Shore said of Calhoun. “He didn’t do it. The Georgia State Patrol officer did it. And this is where I agree.”
Photo: Courtesy of Shore family
Patti Shore is mad at Calhoun, and has been since the day Marion died, but when I spoke to her, it was clear she was equally angry at Trooper Saddler and the Georgia State Patrol. During the one-day trial in March 2015, Shore passed a note to Calhoun, which Calhoun’s mother now keeps in her records. It reads, “Thanquarius, I just want you to know I forgive you. I miss my baby. She was my best friend. But I do forgive you & I know in part that fucken officer was at fault.”
I asked Shore why she felt the need to send Calhoun this message, and she said, “Because I felt like that was something my daughter would have wanted. She wouldn’t have wanted me to hate him, and in order for me to progress and get past this, I had to forgive him. But I haven’t forgiven that Georgia State Patrol officer. I can’t.”
One witness in the Sharp trial referred to an agency’s chosen pursuit policy as “a philosophical decision.” The decision to perform a PIT maneuver at high speeds can thus be seen as a choice to protect hypothetical people, victims who may or may not exist farther down the road. Patti Shore put it best when telling me about the district attorney who prosecuted Calhoun, but failed to place any blame on the officer who performed the PIT or the agency that allowed him to do so: “He made it all about the people that could have lost their lives,” she said. “Not the one that did.”
A clearer, more restrictive policy might help the Georgia State Patrol save more real lives rather than hypothetical ones. It might bring the numbers closer to those in California, where the PIT is practiced more safely. Georgia State Patrol officers wouldn’t have to “just go on their own feelings,” as Patti Shore put it. At the very least, the agency should be dissatisfied with a policy that depends on almost no science and very little data, except the numbers that show the Georgia State Patrol kills many more people with the PIT maneuver than other agencies do.
Causation was often discussed in the Sharp and Calhoun cases. What caused the cars to leave the road? What caused the young adults to run from the police? In the closing argument for Calhoun’s prosecution, Assistant District Attorney Brian Atkinson said, “If Thanquarius Calhoun had not committed that felonious act, Marion Shore would be alive today; therefore, Thanquarius Calhoun caused her death. Causation is as simple as that.”
Calhoun’s lawyer retorted, in his closing argument, that Marion Shore “is part of the public that this law enforcement was supposed to protect and serve. They did not do that. Was there another option other than that PIT maneuver? I don’t know. I don’t know if there was another option. Maybe. Maybe law enforcement should have backed off and just let that vehicle go. At some point they may have slowed down. But we know one thing, Marion Shore is dead because of Trooper Saddler.”
When I spoke to Calhoun’s mother, Rosie, in her home in McDonough, she offered an alternative solution, one that was pure fantasy but pointed toward a gentler idea of law enforcement more in line with that of policy expert Geoffrey Alpert, who believes pursuits should not occur unless a violent crime has been committed; the dangers do not outweigh the benefits. Rosie said she wished the police could have just put her in front of her son as he sped down the road, to show him that she was there waiting on the other end. Instead of police barricades and flashing lights, he would have seen Rosie, his mama. “And knowing my child,” she told me, “he would have slowed down.”
In a letter sent from Autry State Prison, Calhoun, who is now 24, told me that when he was fleeing from the cops that day, he was doing everything he could to avoid crashing: “In my eyes, I was driving good and trying not to wreck. Just trying to get us back home safe and not go to jail.” He doesn’t think the police should be able to perform a PIT at such high speeds for a speeding violation. “It’s too dangerous even for the officer,” he wrote. “They can get hurt behind it as well.”
In his letter, Calhoun said he hasn’t been the same mentally or physically since the PIT maneuver. He’s off balance when he walks, his reflexes are slower, and he dreams about Marion and the chase. He regrets running from the cops that day and regrets putting innocent people, including the police, in harm’s way. He regrets making that decision because now he’s away from his little girl, his mother, and everyone he loves, including his friend Marion Shore. He wishes he could go back and pull over that afternoon, but he doesn’t believe he deserves a life sentence for her death — the same sentence a serial murderer might receive in many states — or that he was the only one at fault. “I almost died the day of that crash, and then they gone try to take my life away again,” he wrote. “How much more they gone keep hurting me.”
This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, with support from the Puffin Foundation.How you can buy a property
There are many ways to buy real-estate quickly but sometimes methods through which We Buy Any House don’t necessarily work in our favour. We will therefore enlist a couple of points which you must take into consideration when it comes to buying a real estate. We will also let you know how you can buy real estate quickly and how we Buy Your Home and cover yourself in the same time.
Dynamic real estate market
Real estate market is a constantly and dynamically changing market which is always full of action. But no matter what happens, there are two rules everyone looking for a home can live by:
The real good homes will be sold quickly – no matter their price
There are always new homes worth checking out on a daily basis.
Out of this you can see that this is a business which is always very busy. But just as in gambling, you cannot rely on being quick all the time because a too quick investment can easily result in a disaster. There are a couple of ways to make sure your investment will not become one ensuring you are covered when it comes to the below points:
The house is clean from credit and mortgage: each country has a specific registry office or an assessor information system online or offline where everyone has the right to check whether a property has any sort of mortgage on it. This is a must –do before buying (unless the owners can state with papers that there is no mortgage or any other credit or other financial responsibility which needs to be covered.) This happens so often and some owners definitely would not like to talk about it, therefore the selling contract needs to include that any payment that arises from the period when your home was owned by the previous owners must be paid by them. Most real estate agencies have the necessary means to ensure this for you.
The house has been checked and it doesn’t have any serious issues which need to be urgently restored. There are several companies which are specialized in doing pre-emptive and comprehensive checks when We Buy Your House on the home’s structure which also includes the checking of the base, the roof and checking for bugs or any other means of erosion, destruction or danger. Having this check is essential because there might be home owners who obviously wouldn’t like to share some of these details, in fear of the property being sold for a much lower sum ( if at all) and some real estate agents will also not push on the issue as their main interest is in selling as well.
However one thing is for sure. If you want to buy a house or home quickly, the most efficient way is to contract one or more real estate agencies to do the majority of the work for you. This means searching, finding according to your list of attributes. They can also do the checking when it comes to mortgage and other liabilities and they can also get a company to do the house check for you. This saves you a |
. You nervously poke your crown to make sure it's properly perched on top of your dark, curly locks, and sit down on your throne with a sigh. Your advisors make sure you're ready - you ate breakfast and brushed your teeth, right?
Then, it starts. Your Drakemaster steps into the room. The dragons are getting too fat! What will you do? Your loyal subjects are not feeling so loyal when they get eaten by your scaly pets. Breaking news, they also just set the library on fire. And oh, by the way, you're getting proposed to by a princess today - too bad you're gay!
Your Royal Gayness is a story-driven resource management game for PC, Mac and Linux, where you play as a gay prince named Amir. Your job is to keep the kingdom together while your parents are away, but it's pretty hard when problems keep piling on and princesses are showing up, hungry for marriage with the heir of an influential kingdom!
"I came up with the idea for the game in Summer 2016. I was trying to think of an idea for a LGBT-themed game jam, and then it hit me - I had been thinking of doing some kind of a fairytale parody for a while, and these two themes worked together perfectly. The jam game never happened, but when I was introduced with a game development task at the applied university, I saw my chance and took it. Since then, the project has grown bigger and way more professional, and I'm working almost full time on it.
I've never fit into most of the boxes the world has tried to shove me in; as a child, I liked fantasy books and swordfights, and as I grew older I got more and more interested in geeky stuff like comics, japanese popular culture and most importantly, games. I also started realizing I definitely wasn't straight, which is why the subject of the game is so close to my heart.
I hope that after playing this game, people can understand people like me better."
-Salli, Project Lead and Overlord
The game advances day-by day for a few months while your parents are traveling. Each day includes four phases.
Audience phase: Try to solve your kingdom's problems by making challenging choices!
Management phase: Give commands to your advisors so they can help you shape your kingdom the way you want.
Events phase: A neighbouring Kingdom is holding a ball - will you go? What do you do there? Events are bits of story that let you get out of your throne room. Events include special illustrations by our artists and some talented guest artists!
Sometimes there are surprises as well, like princesses who come to propose to you! Quick, think of excuses! The game gives you options to build your excuse from - but fingers crossed you don't accidentally mention something the princess likes!
You have to be careful when navigating the complicated life of a royal, since every time you fail convince a princess you have a REALLY legit reason not to marry her, the suspicion meter goes up. If it fills up completely, you're faced with a gameplay challenge, and you have to convince everyone that you really actually like girls but just haven't found the right one yet!
Being closeted may be taxing, but there's always a silver lining: you can try to pass gay-friendly laws, and make the situation easier for yourself and your subjects who face the same issues.
We're making a funny game with a gay protagonist, but the idea is not to make fun of gay people, it's about pointing out absurd situations sexual minorities have to face in their daily life through humor. Our team mostly consists of people who are a part of some sexual minority, and our core values include diversity and acceptance.
You can see our values in how we're creating our characters, for example. The princesses and princes are randomized from a selection of body types, skin tones and different outfits. They also come from different fantasy kingdoms that are inspired by fairytales and different cultures.
So, where is all this sweet sweet money going to?
Well, first of all, our crowdfunding goal is not our whole budget. The project manager, Salli Loikkanen, is investing 3000 euros of her own personal savings - so it's 5500 dollars from you, our generous and awesome backers, and at least 3000 euros from the developers. In addition to these, we're applying for project funding of about 2000-5000 euros from our local entrepreneurship society. Having done a successful crowdfunding campaign would certainly help us secure the grant! ;)
The money that we DO get from Kickstarter won't be used to pay us salary; all of the original team members are working for free and relying on savings or student benefits to survive. Basically, the whole project is fueled by instant noodles - on the same day this text was written, one of our teammates ordered 40€ worth of instant noodles from Amazon Germany (they had free shipping!).
The downside of free student labor is having no full-time employees, so progress is slower. That's why we want to bring in some talented freelancers to help us out! Sadly, they won't take noodles for payment, so here we are, asking strangers for money!
20% for taxes may seem like a lot, and it is, but we want to be honest here. We don't want to go to prison (I don't think we'd survive a day with our noodly nerd limbs), so we have to pay our taxes. Damn you, EU!"
Kickstarter is providing us with this awesome platform for crowdfunding, so they deserve their cut… also, they handle the money, so we don't really have a say here!
We're offering you guys some pretty rad rewards. In fact, they're so rad that they cost actual real cash money to produce. Also, we need some wiggle room in the budget, because you really never know when the urge to wiggle uncontrollably will strike. Or when unforeseen costs appear.
We know - nobody likes ads. But hear us out - we're all working on this game for free, and the only money we get is from the sales of the released game. It's a proven fact that marketing has a huge impact on sales. Get the picture? By helping us with marketing, you're helping us to get paid for our hard work. In addition to marketing costs, we need to pay an accountant who'll make sure we don't accidentally commit tax fraud.
We have a great writer in our team, but let's face it: this project is too big for us to handle alone. That's why we're paying two experienced writers to help us out - less stress for us, and more quality content for you!
Our artist are hardworking and talented, but they're all busy game design students as well. It's probably physically impossible for them to work any harder. Since none of us have access to a cloning device or a time travel machine, we'll need to bring another artist on board.
Receiving your rewards is easy: Just fill out a small survey and we'll send your rewards to you via email! Just... remember the survey, it's super duper important because you can't receive your rewards without filling it!
• 3$ A heartfelt thank you message from us and digital wallpapers to give your desktop a more royal vibe! You'll also be credited as a backer in the game's credits. /Includes: Thank You message, Digital Wallpapers, Name in credits/
• 7$ Full game: Early Bird. SOLD OUT Thank you!
• 10$ The full game - We'll send you a digital key to redeem the finished game on Steam* or Itch.io. *if we make it in /Includes: Thank You message, Digital Wallpapers, Name in credits, Digital copy of the game/
• 15$ Soundtrack - Our digital soundtrack to make your day a little bit more fabulous! /Includes: Thank You message, Digital Wallpapers, Name in credits, Digital copy of the game, Soundtrack/
• 20$ Buddy pack: Early Bird SOLD OUT Thank you!
• 25$ Buddy pack - For you and your friend, spouse, partner in crime or perhaps your pet lizard. Includes two copies of the game and two copies of the digital soundtrack. /Includes: Thank You message, Digital Wallpapers, Name in credits, 2x Digital copy of the game, 2x Soundtrack/
• 30$ Art book - A digital art book with super secret concept art that hasn't been revealed outside our little secret society of devs before, ingame illustrations and developer commentary! /Includes: Thank You message, Digital wäWallpapers, Name in credits, Digital copy of the game, Soundtrack, Art book/
• 38$ Buddy 4-pack: Early Bird - For you and your crew! You get 4 copies of the game to share with your friends or loyal subjects, and 4 digital soundtracks to top it off! /Includes: Thank You message, Digital Wallpapers, Name in credits, 4x Digital copy of the game, 4x Soundtrack/
• 45$ Buddy 4-pack - For you and your crew! You get 4 copies of the game to share with your friends or loyal subjects, and 4 digital soundtracks to top it off! /Includes: Thank You message, Digital Wallpapers, Name in credits, 4x Digital copy of the game, 4x Soundtrack/
• 75$ Physical deluxe package - Get a physical copy of the game packaged in a high-quality case, a very royal mini-poster, a small game booklet, a sticker set, some original, one-of-a-kind Your Royal Gayness sketches from our talented team members and a personalized "Thank You" letter from the team. /Includes: Thank You message, Digital Wallpapers, Name in credits, Digital copy of the game, Soundtrack, Art book, Physical copy of the game, Mini poster, Game booklet, Sticker set, Original sketches, Thank you letter/
• 100$ Name a character - Your name or a name of your choosing will be added to the game, and can appear as a character name for a randomized princess or prince (you choose which). We moderate the names to an extent; profanities etc. are out of the question. /Includes: Thank You message, Digital Wallpapers, Name in credits, Digital copy of the game, Soundtrack, Art book, Name a character/
• 250$ Character designer - Have you always wanted to be a prince or a princess? We'll create a custom character based on a picture provided by you (either a photo or a drawing of what you want) or a description of what you'd look like as royalty! You can choose a name and some personality traits for the character. This character will be coded into the game, and may even be romanceable (or rejectable, if it's a princess) if you wish so! (Just make sure your design could somewhat plausibly fit in a fairytale world). /Includes: Thank You message, Digital wallpapers, Name in credits, Digital copy of the game, Soundtrack, Art book, Name a character, Character design/
If stretch goals are reached, it may take a bit longer to finish the game, but on the other hand, it'll be even more awesome!
Our core team consists of Game Design students currently living in Finland, with some of us originally from places like Slovakia, Slovenia and Vietnam.
Our composer Adir van der Lugt isn't in the picture above, but deserves a special mention - thanks to him, we'll have an original soundtrack.
We're also working with some professional freelancer writers, Sydney Meeker and Sena Bryer, native english speakers from USA. An important part of our team is also Morgana Harp, who is assisting us with coding, marketing and running this campaign.
Special thanks are in order to Sam Peo, Darren Kwok, Ian Leslie and Tramy Nguyen for helping us out.
We haven't decided on a final release date yet since stretch goals may add some extra time into the development timeline, but we're pretty confident the game will be finished during Summer 2017.[JURIST] The US Supreme Court [official website] on Monday denied certiorari [order list] in Frank v. Walker [docket; cert. petition, PDF], allowing Wisconsin’s voter identification law to stand. Wisconsin’s Act 23 [text, PDF], which requires residents to present photo ID to vote, was struck down by a federal district court, but reinstated [JURIST reports] by the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit [official website] in September. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) appealed [press release; JURIST report] to the Supreme Court in January. The law will not go into effect for the April election, as absentee ballots have already been sent out, but it will be in effect for future elections.
Debate over voter ID laws [JURIST backgrounder] has sparked continuing controversy in the US. In November a federal appeals court rejected [JURIST report] a Kansas rule that required prospective voters to show proof-of-citizenship documents before registering to vote. In October the US Supreme Court allowed [JURIST report] Texas to enforce a strict 2011 voter ID law requiring voters to show photo ID at the polls. Also in October the Arkansas Supreme Court [official website] struck down [JURIST report] that state’s voter ID law finding it unconstitutional. The same month, the US Supreme Court temporarily blocked the enforcement of the Wisconsin voter ID law at the emergency request of the ACLU, due to the then-upcoming November election. The Wisconsin voter ID law began its run through the courts in July 2012 when a judge for Wisconsin’s Dane County Circuit Court ruled [JURIST report] that the voter ID law was unconstitutional and issued a permanent injunction against the law’s enforcement."Against the Wind" is a song by Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band from the 1980 album Against the Wind. Released as the second single from the album, it peaked at number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100.[1] Glenn Frey and Don Henley of the Eagles sang background vocals on this song.
Background and writing [ edit ]
During an interview on WWFX, "100 FM The Pike", Bob Seger said that "Against the Wind" came about from his days as a high-school cross country runner. The line "Let the cowboys ride!" towards the song's end is a reference to the closing lyrics of the song "Santa Fe/Beautiful Obsession" by Van Morrison.
Seger later said that the line "Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then" bothered him for a while, but that everyone he knew loved it, so he left it in. He also said that it has since appeared in several other hits by other artists, so that proved it was an acceptable lyric.[2]
Music critic Maury Dean described the theme as being about aging and dealing with "all the burdens we'll ever have to face."[3]
Rolling Stone Magazine critic Dave Marsh stated in his review of the Against the Wind album that none of the ballads (including the title track) contained any memorable lines, but he later amended that to acknowledge that the lines "Well, those drifter's days are past me now/I've so much more to think about/Deadlines and commitments/What to leave in/What to leave out" are not only memorable but also haunting in the way Seger "haltingly expresses his indecisiveness."[4]
Chart performance [ edit ]
Weekly charts [ edit ] Chart (1980) Peak
position Australian Kent Music Report[5] 92 Belgian VRT Top 30 30 Canadian RPM Top 100 6 US Billboard Hot 100 5 US Billboard Hot Adult Contemporary Tracks 8 Year-end charts [ edit ] Chart (1980) Rank Canada RPM Top 100[6] 41 US Billboard Hot 100 51
Cover versions [ edit ]
In 1999, Brooks & Dunn covered this song on the television soundtrack to King of the Hill. This version peaked at number 55 on the Hot Country Songs charts based on unsolicited airplay.
The song was also covered by The Highwaymen on their debut album.
In 1978, two years before the US release, the song was covered (translated to Spanish under the title "Contra el viento") by Argentine rock band Plus on their second album Melancolica Muchacha.[7]
The Hold Steady released a their version of the song on their 2007 Stuck Between Stations EP.
Garth Brooks for the 2013 Classic Rock album in the Blame It All on My Roots: Five Decades of Influences compilation.
In popular culture [ edit ]
The song was played in the movie Forrest Gump, where Forrest was running across the country. [8]
, where Forrest was running across the country. The song is also played in the movie For the Love of the Game, where Billy is eating chinese food (1hr30min mark).Over the weekend we gave you a heads up that your Monday wouldn’t be the normal drag your used to thanks to a PS3 game sale. Monday is here and Amazon is holding their PS3 Gold Box Deals Day.
Amazon is offering an all day Gold Box Deal of the Day, as well as Lightning deals that are only available for certain hours, and have limited quantities.
The Gold Box Deal of the Day is Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare for $28.98. This deal lasts 24 hours.
The Lightning Deals aren’t revealed until the deal goes live, but a hint is given as to what each game is:
6:00 AM PDT – “Slice and dice, bub.” = X-Men Origins: Wolverine
10:00 AM PDT – “If only Jack Ryan had his wings.”
12:00 PM PDT – “Nothing Else Matters.”
3:00 PM PDT – “Prepare for the future.”
6:00 PM PDT – “Step into the ring with the Eighth Wonder of the World.”
Can you figure out what the rest of the hints are? Comment below.You must enter the characters with black color that stand out from the other characters
Message: * A friend wanted you to see this item from WRAL.com: http://wr.al/16FNB
— Education Secretary John B. King Jr. is urging governors and school leaders in states that allow student paddling to end a practice he said would be considered "criminal assault or battery" against an adult.
King released a letter Tuesday asking leaders to replace corporal punishment with less punitive, more supportive disciplinary practices that he said work better against bad behavior.
More than 110,000 students, including disproportionate numbers of black and disabled students, were subjected to paddling or a similar punishment in the 2013-14 school year, said King, citing the Education Department's Civil Rights Data Collection.
Corporal punishment is legal in 22 states, including in North Carolina, where the decision is left up to local school boards. The State Board of Education passed a resolution in 2013 opposing the practice, but the resolution does not trump state law, which still allows it.
According to the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, corporal punishment is used in four school districts – Graham, Macon, Robeson and Swain.
In those four districts, there were 147 instances of corporal punishment in 2014-15, a 20.5 percent increase from the 122 reported in 2013-14. A total of 124 students received corporal punishment. While 108 students received corporal punishment once, 16 students received it two or more times.
More males than females received corporal punishment, with American Indian students receiving the most corporal punishment followed by white and multiracial students.
First graders received the most corporal punishment followed by 3rd and 4th graders.
The top three reasons for administering corporal punishment were disruptive behavior (82), leaving school (16) and cell phone use (12).
"The practice has been clearly and repeatedly linked to negative health and academic outcomes for students," King said during a conference call with reporters. "It is opposed by parent organizations, teachers unions, medical and mental health professionals and civil rights advocates as a wholly inappropriate means of school discipline."
Coming toward the end of President Barack Obama's term, the push to end corporal punishment builds on the administration's "Rethink Discipline" campaign to create safe and supportive school climates, King said. It also lines up with Obama's "My Brother's Keeper" initiative, meant to address persistent opportunity gaps facing boys and young men of color, he said.
Eighty organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, NAACP, Association of University Centers on Disabilities and American Federation of Teachers, signed an open letter released by the National Women's Law Center supporting an end to the practice. Students are regularly paddled for minor or subjective infractions like dress code violations, cellphone use or disrespecting staff, the letter said.
"Corporal punishment of adults has been banned in prisons and in military training facilities, and it's time we do the same for our nation's schoolchildren," said Fatima Goss Graves of the Women's Law Center.
Although its use has been diminishing, there are corners of the country where corporal punishment remains deeply woven into culture and tradition. School administrators say it has broad support from parents and preserves learning time that would be lost to a suspension.
Fifteen states expressly permit corporal punishment: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wyoming. In seven states, there is no state law prohibiting it. They are: Colorado, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, New Hampshire and South Dakota.
"There are better, smarter ways to achieve safe and supportive school environment," King said, adding that the education law passed late last year supports using funding for positive intervention and supports.
President-elect Donald Trump has not yet announced his choice for education secretary. He met last week with Michelle Rhee, a former chancellor of the District of Columbia schools.
"It doesn't actually matter who the secretary of education is or what people's view is about the election," AFT President Randi Weingarten said on the call with King. "This is a moral matter.... We must all be about safe and welcoming places for all students."The building that houses the headquarters of the global economy is a heavily guarded, 12-story beige structure in downtown Washington with a large glass atrium and water bubbling in fountains. The flags of the 187 member states are lined up in tight formation.
Visitors walking into the office building find the cafeteria on the right, where many meetings are held. There, experts in their shirtsleeves, their jackets draped over the backs of chairs, drink lattes out of paper cups and talk countries into crises or upturns. A little farther down the hallway is the Terrace, the IMF building's upscale restaurant where the director receives official guests.
On a Tuesday afternoon in late September, as the first leaves are falling from trees outside, the director, wearing a blue suit and a blue tie, is sitting on a blue couch high up in his office at the headquarters of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), outlining his idea of a new world. Some of it already exists, in the form of a new world order established in September 2008 to replace the one that was collapsing at the time. The result wasn't half bad -- but it is robust?
'The Money Is The Medicine'
These are important times for humanity. The crisis has forced everyone to see many things from a new perspective. Now the IMF is preparing for its annual meeting on Oct. 8. Can it live up to expectations, and can it police the new global economic order and keep global banks in check?
"You have to imagine the IMF as a doctor," says Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the 61-year-old director of the International Monetary Fund. "The money is the medicine. But the countries -- the patients -- have to change their habits if they want to recover. It doesn't work any other way." He smiles benevolently as he says these things, his eyes disappearing behind small cushions of wrinkled skin.
The IMF, says Strauss-Kahn, warned the world about the collapse and about the American real estate bubble and its consequences, but "politicians don't want to hear bad news." And when the crisis arrived in the fall of 2008, as predicted, it took the old world -- Europe, which always takes six months to make a decision -- too long to react.
That was the time when the world was laying the foundation for a new order.
The New World Order
There are two telephones to Strauss-Kahn's left and two to his right. The room has high ceilings, beige carpet and white curtains. An old clock and books about Mexican painting stand on the bookshelf. The IMF's director is sometimes referred to as DSK, which makes Strauss-Kahn sound like a three-letter brand like IMF or USA, and yet he speaks English with a soft French accent.
DSK leans back in his chair, weighing his words, glancing at the audio recorder and smiling. The new world order? Well, let's talk about it, he says.
Countries like China and India are becoming important, countries with rising markets that have long been stable and are clearly powerful. Whenever he is in China or other parts of Asia, says Strauss-Kahn, the leaders there tell him that they have written off Europe for now. "They say they want a strong Europe, but there is always one part of the world that is lagging behind. They say that in the past it was them, and now it is Europe. It's a shame, but the world can live without Europe."
The new world could be a frightening place. The IMF director says: "The Europeans still believe they are the center of the world, but in reality this is not clear any longer. Currently, the question is whether Europe will remain a participant in a game with many players -- that is not necessarily a given."
The Rise of the G-20
The United Nations will probably become less important; the organization is far too slow-moving and sluggish. And, if one understands DSK correctly on this point, the importance of the United States -- that egomaniacal country which is incapable of action -- will also decline. Of course, Strauss-Kahn would never speak in such terms, but he does point out that it was the United States that reacted to the 2008 crisis, not with a long-term view, but bank by bank. "They tried to solve Bear Stearns first, and then Fannie and Freddie, and really believed that each hurdle was the last one," he says.
What will become important, however, is the G-20, that coalition of the strongest economies, the center of power in a new world. The G-20 gave the IMF $850 billion (620 billion) and the mission to solve the crisis. What followed, says, Strauss-Kahn, was "the biggest global coordination ever."
Does this mean that the IMF became the first post-crisis world government?
Strauss-Kahn stretches when he hears the question, and pauses for 20 seconds before responding. He is an elegant man, a white-haired Parisian with three deep furrows in his brow, who smiles slyly and flirtatiously. He is a ladies' man, not particularly tall and even a little stooped.
Solving Global Problems
Sitting in his cool office, a room that smells of fresh flowers, he says: "No, no, the government has to consist of elected people, and that's more like the G-20. But the reality is the G20 -- or any other grouping -- doesn't operate like a government. Their willingness to work together was very strong during the crisis, but frankly I think it's fair to say that it's decreasing. The more leaders and finance ministers believe that the crisis is over -- even if they are mistaken -- the more they are concerned about their own problems and less so about coordination and consensus."
In Strauss-Kahn's view, the IMF should become an administrative unit of sorts for the G-20, an agency that "tries to find solutions for global and national problems," and comes up with plans and create values. "In the end we aim at much more than just the right financial and economic policies. The ultimate goal, of course, is world peace through economic stability." This is the way Strauss-Kahn views his organization, and the astonishing thing is that hardly anyone, with the exception of a lone professor in Boston, disagrees with him anymore.
The IMF, of all organizations?If a golden retriever gives birth, gets stung by a bee or sprayed by a skunk, veterinarians want to know.
Scientists are studying the popular breed to find out why their lifespans have gotten shorter over the years and why cancer is so prevalent.
The Colorado-based Morris Animal Foundation recently got the first lifetime study of 3,000 purebred golden retrievers up and running after signing up the first dogs in 2012. The nonprofit says the review of health conditions and environmental factors facing goldens across the U.S. can help other breeds and even people, because humans carry 95 percent of the same DNA.
"Canine cancer has become a dog owner's greatest fear," said Dr. David Haworth, president and CEO of the foundation, which invested $25 million in the study. "You don't see dogs running loose that much anymore, we don't see a lot of infectious diseases, and the vaccines we have today are very good, so our concerns are warranted."
The vets haven't learned enough yet to improve or prolong the retrievers' lives, but key factors could lie anywhere, said Dr. Michael Lappin, who has 19 patients from Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, in the study. When he graduated from veterinary school in 1972, golden retrievers lived 16 or 17 years. Today, it's nine or 10 years.
Golden retrievers die of bone cancer, lymphoma and a cancer of the blood vessels more than any other breed in the country.
Lappin plans to get his families together in a few months to see if they have found ways to make life easier for their dogs, especially because the most helpful data about cancer, obesity, diabetes and other chronic conditions won't emerge for six or seven years, researchers say.
Early exams showed 33 percent of the dogs, which are 1 to 5 years old, had skin disease or ear infections; 17 percent had gastrointestinal illnesses; and 11 percent had urinary disease.
The dogs get medication to treat the conditions, but vets can't treat them differently because it would skew the results, Lappin said.
Marla Yetka of Denver says her nearly 2-year-old golden retriever, Snickers, joined the study and has been suffering from skin problems. Yetka uses oatmeal shampoo on her pet, but she's looking forward to talking with other participants about their remedies.
"I have too many friends who have lost goldens," she said. "Is it what we are feeding them, their environments, their breeding?"
Pet owners keep tabs on everything, from a move across country or across town, a change in climate or time zone, new children at home, different food or behavioral changes. Most keep journals so they don't constantly call the vets when their dog gets a thorn in its foot, eats a spider or devours a bunch of bologna if it tears into the groceries.
The vets collect blood, waste, and hair and nail samples annually to test if the dogs get sick, hoping to uncover a common thread or early warning sign among dogs that develop cancer or other diseases.
Doctors also check for changes in temperature, blood pressure, energy, diet, sleeping patterns or other factors that could explain illnesses.
"Everyone involved will feel the burden it will take to be able to say, 'I am playing a role in stopping cancer in these animals I love,'" Haworth said.
So far, seven goldens have died of conditions such as cancer and gastrointestinal problems, and one was hit by a car, Haworth said. Another dropped out when its owner died. The dogs come from every state; about half are male and half are female; and half are fixed and half are not.
Those who brought dogs into the study, including both veterinarians, hope goldens get a shot at the longer life they used to enjoy.
"I'm glad I found the study and feel in some small way, I might make a difference," Yetka said.
Copyright Associated PressCOAG: No consensus on health, education funding but leaders agree a solution is 'necessary'
Posted
State and territory leaders are no closer to addressing the $80 billion gap in federal funding for health and education, as tax reform options remain open to investigation.
Premiers and chief ministers are facing a March deadline for agreement on tax reform, which they are hoping can address funding shortfalls in the health system.
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk described it as the nation's "number one priority" following discussions with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in Sydney today.
"The single-most important issue to families out there is the rising cost of health care," Ms Palaszczuk said.
"The modelling must be presented at that next meeting. There must be a clear path forward about how we are going to address this fundamental issue for families across our nation."
But NSW Premier Mike Baird said an interim solution may be necessary, "if we can't get there in the long term".
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews said fellow COAG leaders would strive to come to an agreement over health funding in coming months.
"I don't think we can overstate just how important an agreement that is," Mr Andrews said.
"The acknowledgment as well that this is our number one challenge and it's one that each and every one of us must step up and properly respond to."
Mr Turnbull told reporters that no consensus had been reached in regards to a "path forward" on tax reform.
State and territory Labor leaders have previously stated that they would not stand in the way of a Goods and Services Tax hike if the Federal Government took it to an election and won a mandate.
COAG leaders also noted work on medicinal cannabis and agreed to an update at their next meeting.
Topics: business-economics-and-finance, government-and-politics, states-and-territories, federal---state-issues, health, education, australiaLuis Suarez has revealed the depth of emotion that swells up inside him when the club's 'incredible' anthem, 'You'll Never Walk Alone', begins to play before matches at Anfield.
While the song is a powerful force that brings fans and the team together at any location around the world, it means something different and evokes personal memories for each individual.
For the Reds' No.7, it all relates to family; as he passes the 'This is Anfield' sign in the tunnel, climbs the short staircase out to the pitch and steps onto the grass, he glances up to his wife and children.
Taking up the story, the forward explained to FourFourTwo: "When I walk out of the tunnel to 'You'll Never Walk Alone' and look up at my wife and children in the crowd, I get very emotional.
"My daughter Delfina knows all the words. It's an incredible anthem and an unforgettable feeling, one that I genuinely didn't even think was possible to dream about when I was younger."
The Uruguayan's reaction each time he watches his latest strike hit the back of the net is occasionally as interesting as the goal itself, with Suarez displaying pure happiness.
Upon firing his first against Stoke City in January, the 27-year-old unleashed an audible roar; in the 4-0 derby rout of Everton, meanwhile, he basked in the adulation of a raucous Kop.
"I play to give joy to the fans," he said. "Of course you want to win and do your best for the club, but putting a smile on supporters' faces is a beautiful thing because they pay a lot of money to watch us play.
Watch the video here »
"Even during the warm-up, when I practise my shooting, I can hear them going 'ooh' if I score a good goal.
"It's a great feeling but, to be honest, usually when I score great goals in the warm-up they desert me in the game. Before our 2-2 draw with Aston Villa in January, I was on fire, but then nothing in the match."There would be no questions today.
It was a Friday afternoon, a dozen days after a gunman shattered windows and then lives in a shooting rampage that left dancing concertgoers dodging bullets on the Las Vegas Strip. And here was Clark County’s sheriff, Joe Lombardo, at the podium again. Cameras broadcasting live stared back at him.
He gave his name, an obligatory yet largely unnecessary ritual at this point. The 54-year-old lawman unwittingly became a household name in the aftermath of the deadliest shooting in modern American history. What that also meant: He bore the brunt of the public’s criticism as timelines changed and the gunman’s motive remained elusive even as he felt personally responsible for explaining to the world what had happened.
“Do you think I enjoy standing up there in the press conference and everybody in the world knowing who I am?” Lombardo said days earlier during an interview with The Nevada Independent. “No, I don’t enjoy that. I wish I could remain in the shadows and do what I do as the head of the agency, but that’s unfortunately not the way it is.”
But the public — and, by proxy, the media — clamored for more information about a shifting timeline that had raised more questions than answers.
Wearing his khaki-colored Metro Police uniform, Lombardo sought to put the factual discrepancies to rest. He read prepared remarks clarifying the sequence of events that occurred moments before the shooter fired upon a crowded country music festival, killing 58 people and wounding 546 others.
Then Lombardo pivoted to the information he really wanted to share: The police sergeant and other first responders who triaged at least 50 gunshot victims, using whatever materials they could find as tourniquets. The officers who stood sentinel over the deceased that night, never letting them be alone. The officer recovering from a bullet wound to his shoulder who yearned to be back at work.
He uttered another officer’s name and swallowed hard.
“Excuse me for my emotion,” he said.
The fatigue, stress and grief had finally caught up with the leader of the Las Vegas police department. Clark County Commissioner Steve Sisolak and FBI Special Agent Aaron Rouse put their hands on the teary-eyed sheriff’s shoulders. Lombardo finished his thought — commending an officer who broke his leg but remained on scene that night — and paused, his head bowed.
“So at this point,” he said, looking back toward the cameras, “I’m going to thank the community. I’m going to thank you for letting me be your sheriff and ‘Vegas Strong.’”
The emotional sheriff walked out, ignoring the shouted questions directed his way.
October 1
That Sunday night had promised to be nothing more for Lombardo than a night out at a Venetian steakhouse with a few friends.
But his phone started ringing in the middle of dinner. And it kept ringing. Something must be up, he thought, completely unaware of what was unfolding two miles south on the Strip.
He dialed back the |
, if you had previously designed layouts for a library card system, you’d have very useful insights into designing a digital equivalent. However, though it does have precedents in a variety of disciplines, UX design is not just the ‘function’ behind the visual ‘form’. It’s thinking through the entire experience a user might have — every encounter they might have with your product or service, and finding ways to improve the entire structure. Depending on what you’re working on, it may well go beyond the screen, into physical goods, services, interactions, and products — even relationships between people. That Sounds a Bit Like ‘Design Thinking!’
Ah, another trendy buzzword! Like ‘UX’, ‘Design Thinking’ is a reframing of design, so that folks who aren’t designers can understand that design is not just about making stuff pretty. The only difference is — while UX tends to be centred around digital products, Design Thinking might be applied to pretty much anything — an organizational structure, a medicine distribution project in the developing world, or a drone delivery service. Don’t get me wrong — it’s still nothing short of revolutionary for the average company. But it’s just user-centred design-done-right under another name. (Jared Spool, an expert on the subjects of usability and design, does a great job of explaining this — link in the footnotes.) So What’s the Difference Between UI and UX Design? User Interface (UI) design is a close cousin of graphic design — it’s the craft of laying out interactive and informative content on a screen, to make an interface with which people can interact. However, the interface is not the solution. UI is a big part of UX, but it’s not the ‘whole experience’. “What about all those UX / UI people who say they do both?” you may be wondering. Often, they don’t. UI designers, graphic designers, visual designers are not necessarily UX designers, but they tack “UX” on their resumes and titles because it’s a popular buzzword. “But — people experience the things UI designers create; therefore, they’re UX designers, right?” Wrong! Well — to clarify: Only in a very narrow way. The UI designs and animations on popular site Dribbble, and the latest swipey interaction patterns are just one very small aspect of UX. The average UX/UI designer does UX in the same way a house painter does architecture — not much. The BIG PICTURE
Don Norman tries to fit his brand new Macintosh in his car
We need to circle back here, and get to the root here of what UX actually means. In fact, there’s barely any reason to use the term, unless we use it at the level of design legend Don Norman, who originated the concept of ‘UX’ while working at Apple in the early 90s: “User experience” encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.” We’re not just talking about an app here. We’re talking about the entire experience of a brand or product. Norman was thinking about things like the size of the box that contained the original Apple Macintosh, so the poor new owner could fit the thing in his car. It’s a design process that should include every aspect of the product; from the first hint of it in someone’s life to their eventual deep, emotional relationship with it. Popular Slack app vs. venerable IRC What’s the difference between your average retailer and Apple’s massive lead among the top 10 U.S. retailers by sales per square foot? UX.
What’s the difference between the ancient IRC (Internet Relay Chat, youngster!) and multi-billion dollar company Slack? UX.
Microsoft’s SharePoint — losing market share and billions in revenue — is failing because of bad UX. Box is taking its place. Why? You guessed it: UX. Very few companies understand this, and even fewer actually manage to execute on it. With digital technology becoming generic and ubiquitous, the feature war is now over. Companies can only differentiate themselves on the experience they provide. Given that most of the ‘experiences’ companies currently provide are rubbish, there’s a lot of work to be done — which might be where you come in. 10 Key UX SkillsDuring the 1950s, millions of American children got caught up in the Davy Crockett craze. Driven by the iconic Disney series starring Fess Parker, American cities and towns were soon crawling with kids sporting coonskin caps and toting long, toy rifles.
Though most other children outgrew that trend, Paul Andrew Hutton never really did.
“I just got hooked on everything about Davy Crockett and then the West,” Hutton said. “I read everything about it that I could as a kid.”
Over the next several decades, he turned that passion into a career filled with accolades and achievements. He wrote and edited award-winning, commercially successful books. He served as executive director of the Western History Association for 15 years and president of the Western Writers of America for another two years. And while juggling all that, he taught students at the University of New Mexico as a professor of American Western history.
Hutton got his first taste of true historical scholarship as a high school student in Indianapolis. He excelled in that subject above all others and served as president of the history club there. Yet college was not a foregone conclusion for him.
“I was kind of a poor kid,” he said. “My parents couldn’t send me to just any college. But I was fortunate to be in Indiana, where you could go to the state university and get a first-class education [at low cost].”
While there, his love of history and the American West was further cemented.
“I considered becoming a lawyer, but I loved history so much that I thought that’s what I should do,” he said. “And I had great teachers. We had a very strong history department.”
While there, Hutton worked with one of the all-time greats of American Western history, Oscar Osburn Winther, on his honors senior thesis. Unfortunately, Winther passed away before Hutton finished, so Indiana professor Martin Ridge took his place as thesis director, and eventually became his academic mentor.
Because of the quality of the history department and his professors, as well as the inexpensive yet strong in-state education he received, Hutton wound up staying at Indiana to earn his bachelors, masters and doctorate in history.
“It meant my graduate work went quicker,” he added. “I actually had a job long before many of my other friends at graduate schools around the country.”
He didn’t leave Bloomington immediately, however. He landed his first job through Ridge as editorial assistant at the Journal of American History, which is published to this day at IU. Not long after, he submitted his own works on history to a variety of publications — and much to his delight, many of them got accepted.
“My two first articles said it all about how my career was going to go,” he said. “The first one was in the Western Historical Quarterly, which was a great coup for me in the academic world. And the second article, which actually grew out of that first one, was published in TV Guide. At that time, it was the largest circulation magazine in the world, and it paid $1,500 for that article back in 1977.”
His breakthrough book was Phil Sheridan and His Army in 1985. This historical account of the cavalry general who served in the Civil War and campaigns against the Native Americans won the the Ray Allen Billington Prize from the Organization of American Historians, the Evans Biography Award and the Spur Award from Western Writers of America.
He’s since written countless articles and books that delve into American history — particularly that of the exploration and settlement of the West. Also, he’s been involved in one way or another in more than 150 TV documentaries on networks like PBS, A&E and the History Channel.
Most recently, Hutton published The Apache Wars: The Hunt for Geronimo, the Apache Kid, and the Captive Boy Who Started the Longest War in American History. It’s a serious, compelling historical work that’s also performed well commercially. It sold around 15,000 copies in a single month, he said. (For more on Hutton’s book and other authors connected to the Big Ten, check out our summer reading list.)
Hutton has experienced that tension between popular history and academic credibility throughout his career, and he’s found his colleagues tend to look down their noses at the former.
“They have a name for it: ‘David McCullough history,’” said Hutton, referring to the best-selling non-fiction writer. “To me, David McCullough is magnificent. He’s everything that’s right with history. I’ve often joked that my colleagues are most impressed by a book they can’t understand. That drives me nuts.
“Because I benefited so much from a state education and always taught at a state university, I kind of view it as my job to communicate history to the broadest possible audience,” he added.Hear the radio version of this story.
Update at 11:10 a.m. Tuesday
A notice posted Tuesday at the homeless camp at Fort Negley tells squatters that Metro Parks will begin enforcing its camping ban on Sept. 15 — although officials said they're willing to meet one more time with homeless advocates.
The one-page posting cites a section of Metro Code: “No person shall tent or camp or erect or maintain a tent, shelter or camp in any park, except in those areas specifically designated by the Board for such purposes.”
The notice goes on to offer aid to residents of the tent village, including moving assistance, storage space, emergency shelter and a 24-hour crisis line.
Several advocacy groups have scheduled times to be on site in the coming week to help arrange for more permanent housing and other basic needs.
A Metro Parks board meeting at noon Tuesday did not include the camping situation as an agenda item, but more than two dozen homeless advocates and tent village residents attended.
They interjected and spoke to the board for about 14 minutes before Parks Director Tommy Lynch agreed to meet next week to discuss giving them more time.
But he said the Mayor's Office, Metro Social Services and the Metro Homelessness Commission had already agreed to the Sept. 15 camp closure date.
Original Post:
Chris Scott F. — as his byline appears in Nashville’s homeless newspapers — has built at least a half-dozen flooring systems in the woods between the Adventure Science Center and the Civil War-era Fort Negley.
He has been dragging wooden pallets into the woods there for the last three years. He pries the boards apart and nails them back together — only much tighter, like a sprawling hardwood deck. Then his fellow campers stake their tents atop these risers and keep dry.
Each circle of tents occupies its own clearing, like cul-de-sacs in what has become a tent village subdivision.
“This is an ingenious idea. This works,” he says. “I’ve got wall-to-wall carpeting, I’ve got toilets. We’ve got wildlife. We’ve got the birds. We’ve got the sounds of the city. We’re not hurting anybody.”
But this homeless camp — the city's most elaborate — could soon be dismantled, with the squatters ordered to clear the woods. Some say it’s long overdue. But at the same time, a counter movement argues that a well-run tent community might actually be a viable type of housing.
Chris Scott F. stands less than 5 feet tall, with long hair, a penchant for excitability and a reputation for workmanship that earned him a nickname: The Captain.
“I guess I helped out some train kids and they were the first ones to call me Captain,” he said. “I put them up in some of my tents. … I’ve put people up here and I’ve watched people get out of here.”
How "The Captain" got his nickname.
He’s like an all-purpose city manager. He hauls trash bags away. He tears out vines that creep up the trees so he can string tarps above the tents. And out on his bike, he tows a trailer to pick up jugs of clean water.
It’s all for a community of about 30 people living on the hill. The Captain says it’s a stable, safe place — more accommodating than some shelters and a stepping stone to permanent housing or jobs.
“The idea is: give people a start. These people, some of them have nothing and they have no place to start,” he said.
Now, facing removal, he’s proposing a radical idea: make the tent village permanent on this land, which is owned by Metro Parks, which typically does not allow overnight camping.
“All they have to do is decide it’s worth the effort to try a prototype,” says The Captain. “We could do something amazing. The entire nation would turn around and say, ‘Look what Nashville has done!’ ”
But it’s not that simple, said Tommy Lynch, director for Metro Parks.
“If we willingly ignore the responsibilities that we have at doing our jobs, then it opens the city up to liability,” Lynch said.
While the parks board chose not to clear the camp during the winter, more people have since arrived. There’s evidence of squatting inside nearby Greer Stadium, former home of the Nashville Sounds. And preservationists have complained about disturbances to Fort Negley.
“You have a sense of humanity and compassion. And homelessness is not a simple issue,” Lynch said. “If it was a simple issue … there would be a template to resolve it.”
But there’s just not a way for Metro to oversee a camp site, he said. In fact, Lynch doesn’t call it “camping” if the intent is to stay indefinitely.
With the clock ticking, homeless advocates have been visiting the camp to figure out where people can go.
Lindsey Krinks, of Open Table Nashville, recently arrived near sunset carrying a clipboard and a sketched map. She said campsites are the only option for some people stuck on housing waiting lists.
And this camp has its perks.
“We’re centrally located here,” she said. “There’s meals and showers and laundry within walking distance, which is huge. There’s bus lines so people can get to their appointments, whether that’s housing, case management, health care.”
The alternative — clearing the camp — seems worse to her.
“We’ve heard some people say, ‘Well, we’ll have to go to another camp site.’ So they’re just moving further off the grid,” Krinks said.
That goes for camper Anthony Caylor, who has come to feel safe at the camp.
“There’s not really no troublemakers up here. And it’s a pretty decent environment,” he said.
Caylor got a bus pass from Krinks, but his housing outlook is grim.
“[Krinks] said it could be two-to-six months to get an apartment. But if they close this down, I’ll just take my tent somewhere else and wait on housing,” he said.
Hear Anthony Caylor discuss the feel of the homeless camp.
Relocating could be even more of an ordeal for The Captain — who’s deeply invested and still hammering away on his latest split-level flooring system.
“A million people have come up with all these solutions to solve the homeless problem — end homelessness — and none of them has worked. I’m offering up a solution,” he said, voice rising. “If they want to tear this down, they better bring chainsaws!”
Camp supporters gained hope this month when the Department of Justice said an Idaho law that bans public camping could be unconstitutional. But, so far, Nashville’s legal department says that opinion doesn’t apply here.
If nothing changes, Metro Parks could clear the land in the next week, then create hiking trails between the Adventure Science Center and Fort Negley at the top of the hill.Image caption The man was injured outside Funky Box in Liverpool
A Liverpool nightclub has lost its licence after a man had several facial features bitten off during an attack on the street outside.
The 31-year-old victim, from Wavertree, lost his nose, ears and lip outside Funky Box in Fleet Street on 20 August.
Laurence Richard McGinn, 28, has been charged with section 18 wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm.
Liverpool City Council's licensing sub-committee revoked the licence with immediate effect on Monday.
Merseyside Police had applied to the local authority to have the licence revoked.
In a report prepared for the meeting, councillors were told that "in the opinion of a Superintendent of Merseyside Police the premises are associated with serious crime and serious disorder".
The club was already the subject of a police review following several serious assaults, the report added.
Mr McGinn appeared before magistrates last month and is due to appear at Liverpool Crown Court on 28 November.France's cabinet launched "preventive" measures at public sites and on transport services on Thursday after the beheading of French hostage Herve Gourdel by IS-linked extremists in Algeria.
British police said counter-terrorism units had arrested nine suspected members of a banned organization, mostly in London, including one suspect identified by the British Press Association as the radical preacher Anjem Choudary (pictured in 2012).
In the past, Choudary has denied inciting terrorism.
British Prime Minister David Cameron consulted, meanwhile, with his cabinet ahead of a parliamentary vote on Friday on whether British planes should join the US-led airstrikes against IS.
France carried out another round of airstrikes on presumed IS targets in Iraq on Thursday - its second set of raids using Rafale jets since last Friday.
Almost simultaneously, US, Saudi and Emirati warplanes bombed oil installations in eastern Syria in a bid to cut off a significant source of funding for the IS group.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the US-led strikes killed at least 14 IS fighters and at least 5 civilians.
French flags at half-mast
French President Francois Hollande called for "national unity" as he met with his cabinet and decided to have flags flown at half-mast nationwide, including in Nice, Gourdel's home city.
The mountaineer was abducted on Sunday while hiking in a national park in eastern Algeria. Nice's mayor, Christian Estrosi, said Wednesday's murder of Gourdel by IS-linked Jund al-Khilifa abducters in Algeria was a "terrible shock."
Hollande's office in a statement said "preventive measures against the risk of terrorism will be strengthened at public sites and on transport."
Britain: nine suspects arrested
Britain's Metropolitan Police said the nine suspects were arrested in London on suspicion of being members of a banned organization and "encouraging terrorism."
Choudary protesting in London in 2012
Police declined to give personal details, but Britain's Press Association and major British news outlets identified the group as the Islamist al-Muhajiroun organization and said one of those arrested was Anjem Choudary. He led the group until it was banned four years ago.
A police statement said 18 premises had been searched in London and one in the central English city of Stoke-on-Trent.
UN resolution
On Wednesday, the UN Security Council passed a resolution demanding that countries take action to stem the flow of foreign jihadists to Iraq and Syria.
On Sunday, IS spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani had issued a recorded 42-minute audio threat, urging "believers" to kill Americans, French, Australians, Canadians "or any other disbelievers" of countries that join the US-led military coalition.
Netherlands: 'higher' threat
The Netherlands government announced on Wednesday that it would deploy six F-16 warplanes for the campaign against IS inside Iraq. Belgium is also set to offer six F-16s, dependent on parliamentary approval. Australia will also send eight fighter jets.
Dutch Deputy Prime Minister Lodewijk Asscher acknowledged that the Netherlands would "gain a higher profile among jihadis."
"We are ready," Asscher said. "The threat profile is monitored permanently and our security services are prepared."
Official terror threat assessments are at the second-highest levels in both the Netherlands and Britain.
Paris has warned 30 of its embassies across the Middle East and Africa of an increased threat.
No uniforms in public
On Thursday, Dutch soldiers were told not to wear uniforms on public transport.
Dutch defense ministry spokeswoman Marloes Visser said "several statements" made earlier this week by suspected radicals were being "monitored."
She denied that the clothing advisory was prompted by the Dutch F-16 announcement.
On Tuesday, a Syria-based Dutch jihadist fighter calling himself Muhajiri called for action against the Netherlands
Dutch state broadcaster NOS said the video voiced in Dutch had apparently been made in the Syrian city of Aleppo.
Germany: Muslims distance themselves
Germany, which is also alarmed by the presence of radicalized nationals in Syria, last Friday promoted a "day of action" during which Muslims distanced themselves from terrorism.
Berlin has said Germany will largely focus on arming and training Kurdish Peshmerga fighters battling IS militants across northern Iraq.
The Muslim Council in France on Thursday called for a rally of French Muslims to take place on Friday against the "barbaric" beheading by IS-linked Algerian jihadists.
ipj/lw (kna, AfP, Reuters, AP, dpa)The R9 M295X is a very elusive Mobility Radeon that has yet to be launched (technically). It does however feature in Apple’s new iMac 5k and that means we can get authentic benchmarks for this particular GPU without waiting any longer. R9 M295X is almost certainly based on the Tonga Architecture and will either be codenamed Tonga XT or Amethyst XT.
AMD’s Mobility Tonga GPU Benchmarks Surface – Faster than R9 M290X and GTX 780m
Common sense and precedence dictates that the R9 M295X will be codenamed Tonga XT, but file dumps dating over 4 months back give the R9 M295X the codename of Amethyst XT. Since codenames are not really important this far into a product’s lifecycle, we will stick with the obvious nomenclature. Mobility Tonga is based on the Tonga Architecture and is much more powerful than the R9 M290X. It is also more powerful than than the GTX 780m. Sadly however, the reviewer in question wasn’t really interested in the GPU of the device and only used Cinebench, a tool which only measures OpenGL performance and unfortunately changes its scoring methods with nearly every iteration. So while we do have the actual legit benchmarks courtesy of Danny Winget over at youtube, our comparison is severely limited. Without further ado, the benchmark and comparison:
There is very little data which I can use to compare results of the Cinebench test. Only benchmarks conducted with the R15 Version will be relevant and no one really uses Cinebench for GPU benchmarking. The only two relevant GPUs that I could dig up were the GTX 780m and the GTX 770. We can also very safely assume that the R9 M295X will score higher than the R9 M290X. The results, everything considered, seem to be pretty impressive. They easily outperform the GTX 770 and the GTX 780m, a very decent desktop GPU and the former mobility champion. The primary problem is that I do not have Cinebench R15 results for the GTX 980M and the rest of the Maxwell Mobility series, so you guys will just have to use your imagination on that. AMD should do an actual launch sooner or later, but before that happens, reviewers should be able to give us the full insight on Tonga R9 M295X GPU.
AMD Radeon R9 M295X Tonga GPU Specs Sheet:
AMD Radeon R9 M290X AMD Radeon R9 M295X AMD Radeon R9 275X AMD Radeon R9 280X AMD Radeon R9 290X GPU Core Neptune XT Tonga XT / Amethyst XT Tonga Tahiti XT Hawaii XT GPU Process 28nm 28nm 28nm 28nm 28nm GPU Cores 1280 2048 2048 2048 2816 Core Clock 900 MHz 800 MHz ~800 MHz 1000 MHz 1000 MHz VRAM 4 GB GDDR5 4 GB GDDR5 2-4 GB GDDR5 3 GB GDDR5 4 GB GDDR5 Memory Clock 1200 MHz 1375 MHz 1375 MHz? 1500 MHz 1250 MHz Memory Bus 256-bit 256-bit 256-bit 384-bit 512-bit Memory Bandwidth 153.6 GB/s 176 GB/s 176 GB/s 288.0 GB/s 320 GB/s TMUs / ROPs 80 / 32 128 / 32 128 / 32 128 / 32 176 / 64
#AMD Mobility Tonga benchmarks are out thanks to iMac reviewer. But the choice of synthetic could be better. http://t.co/nGnWhrRKDp — Usman Pirzada (@usmanpirzada) October 26, 2014Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
The last time Reto Berra started an NHL game, he was a member of the Colorado Avalanche. His head coach was Patrick Roy. His opponent?
The Mike Johnston-led Pittsburgh Penguins.
So yeah, been a long time.
Tonight, Berra will start for the first time since the aforementioned game — played on Dec. 9, 2015 — when the Panthers host the ‘Canes in Florida. Berra’s start comes with No. 1 netminder Roberto Luongo dealing with a hip injury, and No. 2 James Reimer needing a night off (he’s been the goalie of record in eight straight).
Berra, 30, was acquired from Colorado via trade last June and has made one appearance for the Panthers this year, playing 25 minutes in relief of Reimer back on Mar. 7. That came after a lengthy stint with Florida’s AHL affiliate in Springfield, where he went 12-14-2 with a.910 save percentage and 2.53 GAA.
Berra’s in the last of a three-year, $4.35M deal (signed with the Avs back in 2014), so this audition is fairly important. If he can prove enough to be a capable NHL backup, he might find work this summer.
For the ‘Canes, Cam Ward starts in goal.
Elsewhere…
— Henrik Lundqvist is closing in on a return from injury, but not there yet, so Antti Raanta starts again as the Rangers visit New Jersey. Cory Schneider goes for the Devils, looking to turn around a terrible month of March (0-5-0, 3.81 GAA,.882 save percentage).
— Even though Marc-Andre Fleury recorded a shutout on Sunday, Pittsburgh will go with Matt Murray tonight in Buffalo. No word yet on a Sabres starter.
— Another big Atlantic Division tilt, as the B’s host the Sens (one night after they lost in Toronto). Looks as though Bruce Cassidy will go back to Tuukka Rask, who made 26 saves on Monday. The Sens are going with Craig Anderson, his third game in four nights.
— The red-hot Brian Elliott, currently on an 11-game winning streak, goes for Calgary tonight in Washington. The Caps will counter with Braden Holtby.
— It’s Louis Domingue versus Andrei Vasilevskiy as the Coyotes host the Lightning.
— Al Montoya starts for the first time since Mar. 9 as the Habs host the Red Wings in Montreal. No word yet on a Detroit starter, though Jimmy Howard is expected to get the call.
— Michael Hutchinson, who’s hasn’t start since Jan. 16, gets a rare opportunity when the Jets host the Flyers. Steve Mason, who’s been Philly’s go-to for most of March, will be in goal.
— Corey Crawford, fresh off an OT win against Toronto on Saturday, goes for Chicago. The visiting Canucks have yet to name a starter, but Ryan Miller is likely after Richard Bachman played over the weekend against Edmonton.
— Good matchup in Minnesota, as Martin Jones and the Sharks take on Devan Dubnyk and the Wild.
— Jake Allen, who’s rebounded fantastically to salvage his season, gets the call as the Blues visit Colorado. Calvin Pickard‘s in for the Avs.Foreign policy is one of the most divisive areas of policy for the Labour Party. Issues are framed around binaries that coincide with different factions of the Party – pro-nuclear or anti-nuclear, pro-EU or anti-EU, interventionist or anti-war, Israel or Palestine. The release of the Chilcot report and the EU referendum has brought this into stark focus.
To many it is often considered a niche area of policy. I have often been told it’s ‘not a doorstep issue’.
The EU referendum turned all of that on its head. And there are some important lessons for the Labour leadership to be learned.
We now ostensibly have a unity candidate to challenge Corbyn’s leadership. Smith has set out a series of foreign policy proposals – a second EU referendum, a return to an ‘ethical foreign policy’, and the introduction of a new war powers act – but the challenge for any Labour leader now is much more fundamental.
The challenge is to make the case for our core values of cooperation, solidarity and internationalism again.
Arguably we got ourselves into a position where a majority of the country voted to leave the European Union because for years we failed to make the case for these core values and forge a new progressive vision for Britain’s place in the world. We believed the battle had been won, and we stopped talking. “Not a doorstep issue” was a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Values were conspicuously absent from the debate during the campaign, and the Remain and Stronger In campaigns were too late to the table. The argument had already been lost. The Leave campaign were able to frame their argument as ambitious global vision for Britain. Is it really such a surprise that we voted to Leave?
The result of the EU referendum left me with a profound sense of sadness. A sadness first and foremost for all the people who believed a vote for Leave would be an answer to their problems and concerns. It was their way to express dissatisfaction with the status quo.
But I also felt like my worldview had been shattered. The result was a triumph for a more regressive and isolationist one. What should have been a vote about how we best engage with the world became a small-minded exercise in who had the best ‘facts’ and political slogans.
We now need strong foreign policy leadership which is based on these core values and isn’t afraid to raise the debate about Britain’s place in the world.
So how should a Labour leader do this?
Firstly, a Labour leader needs to revive the conversation around these core internationalist values in a much more systematic way. He should integrate these back into our Party’s messaging and use them in all his speeches including on domestic issues. These values should be part of the top lines, should be part of every Shadow Cabinet brief.
We live in an interconnected and interdependent world. Domestic challenges are rarely the result of domestic inputs alone. Our energy, jobs, and future prosperity are all affected by influences beyond our borders. It is incumbent upon politicians and activists to use these values and make them relevant when we are talking about our economic development, our social policy, our ability to tackle poverty and inequality, or our potential to be a world leader. We are truly stronger when we work together. This should be the basis of our narrative.
If Labour does not do this, the public will go to other sources for its leadership and information on foreign policy and international issues. This has given fodder to views and opinions from polemic single interest groups – not more rounded views. In our current context, we cannot go two more years without promoting these values if we are to forge a proper relationship with the EU.
The wider challenge we face is a long-rumbling crisis of centre-left parties across Europe, and more broadly, a crisis of western democracy. A lack of trust in political institutions and visible rises in inequality in the context of austerity and a declining welfare state have created anger. Anger at the ‘system’ — a system which is not delivering for citizens. The unfortunate result of this anger is a growing fear of the ‘other’, a fear which is legitimised through nationalist and populist movements.
Large parts of the country have had no answer from politicians for the past 30 years to what is happening to their communities. There has been no vision nor offer to address deindustrialization and the adverse affects of globalization – and this will only get worse with the speed and scale at which technology is changing our economy. It is no wonder that immigration and the EU became scapegoats.
So secondly, not only do we need a robust defense of our internationalist values, but also a proactive approach to ensuring that the benefits of globalization are more evenly distributed, that job opportunities and support are available to communities that feel left behind. And this needs to be reflected in our messaging. We must reframe the debate on globalisation to focus on opportunities, not just threats, and the power of democratic government to challenge vested rich and powerful transnational interests.
I’ve been struck by the interest shown in Brexit from people around the world I’ve spoken to. For many of them it is a demonstration of the same worrying trends that are emerging in their own countries – and what might happen.
People around the world have the same worries and fears. It is when we pander to these fears rather than tackle them head on that we slide backwards.
We are at a crucial tipping point. Unless we begin to defend the values that we hold so dear, that define generations of struggle and provide the best hope of prosperity for the next, then we run a serious risk.
The next generation will suffer the consequences of rising nationalism and isolation. History shows us that when these trends prevail everyone suffers. It is Labour values of cooperation, solidarity and internationalism that can save us from backsliding.
In the wake of Brexit, Tory politicians are queuing up to say that now, more than ever, Britain must be an outward facing nation engaging with the world.
It’s time for Labour to recapture that space.Musical Family Tree asked several local jazz musicians to reflect on the legacy of David Baker, who recently passed away at the age of 84.
Baker practicing at home in Indianapolis in the late 1950s. (Photos courtesy of Monika Herzig, author of "David Baker - A Legacy in Music" as well as a colleague, former student and family friend.)
David Allee, musician, owner of the Jazz Kitchen, Indy Jazz Fest director
David was one of the most underrated musicians of the Indiana Avenue era. He had it all — street cred, doctoral diplomas. [He was] a genuine guru, a sensai of jazz, if you will. I personally am always amazed by how much David could accomplish. Composing, performing, teaching, touring and much more. One could argue that jazz may have died if it were not for David’s ability to show the way in making jazz studies an avenue for so many to contribute to the art of jazz.
Personally, his involvement and support of the Jazz Kitchen since its inception in 1994 is special for me. No matter how busy he and his wife Lida were, they always had time to share their knowledge, both on stage and off. As time went on, we collaborated during Indy Jazz Fest for a Freddie Hubbard tribute. His firsthand knowledge and superb writing were the perfect fit. Just a couple of years back, we were honored to be a part of a community celebration saluting David on his 80th birthday.
Everyday I see the mark of David Baker. His students are musicians, teachers and fans that are expanding the music. He will be dearly missed but never forgotten. R.I.P. David.
Baker with guitarist and friend Wes Montgomery.
Ben Lumsdaine, member of Sophie Faught Trio, Diane Coffee, Spissy and Mike Adams At His Honest Weight
David Baker had my back and supported my ideas when I felt very alone and confused during my last year of school. Knowing I had his support was a serious comfort. He was egoless and made time for every student. John Coltrane lived at his house for a time. That's crazy! Rest in power DB.
David Singley, musician
I've been trying to come up with one David Baker story, and it's really difficult because there are so many to tell!
I was the first guitarist to be admitted into the master of jazz studies program at IU, and the first guitarist to be an associate instructor in the jazz studies department. I spent three years in his ensemble, all thanks to David's belief in my talent and ability.
He was incredibly gracious and kind when meeting my parents for the first time. I remember that it was shortly after my father had had a second heart operation and David's concern was obvious and genuine. My parents were charmed.
And like other students, I remember being admonished "no flat 6's on a minor 7 chord!" more than once. I also remember being called on "interesting note choices" more than once.
But, for now, what really comes to mind is the time that, probably in my third and final year at IU, David started chiding me (in his own, inimitable, profane fashion) to "stop playing those licks outcha book! Play you! Just play you!” Of course, I was horribly confused as it had taken me 2+ years of practice to play those “licks outcha book” in all keys and at any tempo, and now he yelled at me for playing them? I’m glad to report that, as the years went by, I became more and more aware of what he was really trying to tell me, and more and more grateful for such a profound and enduring lesson.
The dean of jazz.
A secondary story to that one is about five or so years after graduating, I set up a private lesson with David when I knew that I was going to be passing through Bloomington on my travels. We spent 2+ hours in his basement going over exactly the kinds of things for me to practice to reach that mythical, mystical goal of “just play you.” While I may not remember the exact details of what that entailed, I will never forget the spirit with which they were conveyed, nor will I ever forget the essential humanity and compassion being bestowed upon me that this heavyweight of jazz education felt it vitally important that I learn how to speak from my soul through my instrument!
God bless you DNB (as we sometimes called him, but never to his face)! You were truly one-of-a-kind! May you reunite with the Montgomery brothers, and J.J. and Dizzy and all the rest. I think I can hear the laughter from here!
Baker with fellow Indianapolis trombonist J.J. Johnson in 1988.
Joel Tucker, musician
I remember my first interaction with David Baker. It was my freshman year. I was carrying a trombone, a guitar, an amp, and a bag full of pedals, and I was really hustling to get to class on time. I got to the MA and started frantically pressing the elevator button because I was running late. I heard an "ahem" and looked behind me to see David Baker standing there. He crossed his arms, and with a stone cold face said one of his famous |
White House has seized on the Grassley-publicized connection between Fusion GPS and Prevezon to suggest that the Steele dossier was actually the result of a Russian operation—which would suggest Trump is not a Kremlin favorite but a victim. “The Democrat-linked firm Fusion GPS actually took money from the Russian government while it created the phony dossier that’s been the basis for all of the Russia scandal fake news,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said after Grassley’s hearing.
Trump, in a July 29 tweet, went further. Citing a breathless Fox News report on the committee hearing, the president asserted, contrary to the consensus of the US intelligence community, that “Russia was against Trump in the 2016 Election.”
Democrats see an effort to gin up controversy over of the Steele memos to protect Trump. “They tried to conflate two things so that they could create the false narrative that the Russians were meddling on both sides,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a Judiciary Committee member, told Mother Jones.
Swalwell and other Intelligence Committee Democrats note that Nunes decided to issue the subpoenas to the FBI and Justice Department without first asking if these agencies would voluntarily provide the information. They suggest Nunes did this to create the appearance that the FBI and Justice Department were not cooperating, cooking up another distraction.
“If this is an honest pursuit,” says Swalwell, “why not seek it from those agencies in voluntary fashion?”
The subpoenas were issued over objections from Democrats, according to Swalwell and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the senior Democrat on the Intelligence Committee. “Whenever we go outside of doing things collaboratively, I am immediately suspicious about what the intent is,” adds Swalwell.
Nunes’ latest action is a red flag: In March, after he was exposed collaborating with White House officials in a ham-handed effort to support Trump’s false claim that former President Barack Obama “wiretapped” Trump Tower, Nunes announced he would “step aside” from the Russia probe. His renewed role, Democrats say, suggests committee Republicans are resuming the more partisan approach they softened when Nunes was sidelined.
“He should not be involved,” Swalwell argues. “Every time he does that he adds an asterisk to the integrity and credibility of the investigation.”
Schiff notes that committee Republicans have been less eager to issue other subpoenas. For instance, they have not agreed to demand the White House hand over material on conversations between Trump and former FBI Director James Comey, who Trump fired after Comey resisted his requests related to the bureau’s Russia investigation.
“There we should subpoena the White House,” Schiff said Tuesday on MSNBC, “but they have not been willing.”Editors Note: On October 27, the Catalan regional parliament voted 70-10 to declare independence from Spain. This comes after the Spanish government attempted to stop the independence referendum, in which 90% of the Catalans who voted favored independence. In this article, Prof. Sorens examines the legality and morality of secession.
A large region of Spain called Catalonia has announced October 1 as the date of a binding referendum on its independence from Spain. This is the culmination of eight years of independence activism, regional elections, and public consultation. The Spanish government says the referendum is illegal; the Spanish Constitution declares Spain to be “indivisible.” If the referendum vote succeeds, should Spain allow Catalonia to secede? And if the Spanish government forbids it, how should other governments respond?
Protecting Citizens’ Rights
The first way to think about these questions is to see which course of action better protects citizens’ rights. Suppose first that the Catalan government will be roughly as respectful of citizens’ rights and liberties as the Spanish government is. (Independentists argue that it will be more respectful; unionists dispute this.) In that case, we can focus narrowly on the right to live under a government of one’s own choosing.
People don’t talk about this right much, but it’s extremely important. If you live in a Western country, your government disposes of 40–60% of your income, subjects you to thousands of criminal statutes, and regulates everything from your intimate family relations to your contracts in the marketplace. Your relationship with your government is, whether you like it or not, the most significant relationship in your life: no one else has the power or legal authority to put you in jail, after all. So why shouldn’t your relationship with your government be as consensual as possible?
Working from the premise that it is more just to allow people to live under a government they prefer, we can see the attraction of deciding controversies over sovereignty with a referendum. If more Catalans prefer to live under a Catalan state than wish to live under the Spanish state, then it is better to allow independence. If fewer do, then it is better to forbid it.
Defining the Threshold for Referendum Success
Some scholars have argued that independence referendums should have a greater than 50% plus one threshold for success. The motivating idea here seems to be that the rights of those inclined to oppose independence are more important than the rights of those inclined to support it — and this idea is not as implausible as it sounds. Independence could mean oppression of the minority. Protecting a greater number of people’s rights could involve violating more significant rights.
In the case of Catalonia and Spain, it is difficult to argue that Catalonia is likely to violate more rights than Spain does. (There is a pro-independence Marxist party in the Catalan Parliament, but there is also an even larger semi-Marxist party, Catalonia Yes We Can, that opposes independence, and there are also far more right-wing extremists in the anti-independence camp than in the pro-independence camp.) Moreover, the Catalan pro-independence coalition has said that after independence, all Catalan citizens will have the right to dual nationality, retaining their Spanish citizenship. This is an important move by the Catalan government because it reduces any legitimate reasons for those who oppose independence to complain about injustice.
Catalonia could go even further and allow its citizens to choose which government they will pay certain taxes to in exchange for eligibility for excludable services. By “excludable services,” I mean those that do not have to be provided for everyone in the territory, as defense, roads, and police do. Social welfare programs and education are examples of excludable services (“private goods” or “club goods” in the language of economics). If pro-Spanish Catalans are allowed to retain the Spanish link for these services, then there is all the more reason to concede a 50%-plus-one threshold for independence.
The Legality and Morality of Catalan Secession
Let’s look at some objections to the idea of secession.
First, what about the illegality of secession under the Spanish Constitution? Let’s be clear about what constitutions do and do not do.
Constitutions do not tell citizens what to do and impose penalties on those who don’t comply. Constitutions constrain and authorize government. They may authorize government to impose penalties on citizens, but they do not require it. “Indivisibility” may mean, at most, that government officials are prohibited from breaking up the country, but it does not mean that government officials must punish citizens who withdraw their consent from the state.
Catalonia has devised its independence process to allow for a citizen-led constituent assembly after a successful independence referendum. Legally speaking, there is no requirement for either the Catalan or Spanish governments to punish citizens who complete the independence process.
Second, under some circumstances, breaking the law is justifiable. If the law is unjust, and breaking the law would not threaten the rights of others or violate any moral duties toward oneself, then it is morally permissible to break the law. A law proclaiming the indivisibility of the state is an unjust law because it does not permit citizens to withhold or withdraw consent: it forces them to be subjected to a legal system to which they never agreed. Breaking even an unjust law shouldn’t be done casually, especially by government officials, because it could undermine public order. But if those risks to the rights of others are low enough, then it can be justified.
Upholding the Spanish Constitution
But what about the fact that over 90% of Catalans voted in favor of the Spanish Constitution in 1978, which contained the indivisibility clause? Many Catalans say they voted for the constitution under duress, because the alternative to the constitution was continued dictatorship. This is a valid point. But even if it had not been adopted under duress, there are two additional points to consider.
First, the Catalans who voted for the Spanish Constitution are largely not the same Catalans voting for independence now. A previous generation cannot bind a future generation. I should not be able to make political decisions now that will bind my daughter decades from now.
Second, a principle of common law that has a good basis in ethics is that you generally can’t require specific performance from a contract. If I sign a contract agreeing to work for you, and then back out, you can’t force me to do the work anyway — that would be slavery. What you can do is sue me for damages. A promise not to secede is like this. At most, breaking the promise would entail compensation for damages, but you can’t force someone to remain a part of your group — or your state — against their will.
In conclusion, the more Catalonia does to guarantee respect for the rights of all its citizens after independence, the more confident we can be that Catalonia’s independence should be recognized following a successful majority vote.Slate is launching a new weekly show, with a twist: “Conundrums” is being produced entirely in virtual reality, with actors and other celebrities joining Slate Culture Editor Dan Kois in the virtual world with the help of more-or-less lifelike avatars.
First up Thursday is Carrie Preston, who is known for her roles in “True Blood” and “The Good Wife.” Kois will spend some 25 minutes quizzing her on a series of conundrums. Is it better to have loved and lost, or not loved at all? Should one fight one horse-sized duck, or 100 duck-sized horses?
Preston will have one minute for each of these questions, and the audience will be able to chime in with real-time comments. Oh, and there may be virtual beer drinking in a nod to series sponsor Sixpoint Brewery.
“Conundrums” is the first professionally-produced Facebook Live show of its kind to make use of Facebook’s social VR app Spaces as a production environment. Facebook officially launched Facebook Live streaming for Spaces Wednesday, initially billing it as a way for owners of the company’s Oculus Rift headset to reach more of their friends on Facebook, even if these friends don’t own VR headsets yet.
Related Future of Storytelling Pop-Up VR Arcade Is Coming to Manhattan Schell Games' 'Until You Fall' Is VR Sword Fighting Game
Slate editor in chief Julia Turner told Variety this week that the publisher had been thinking about using VR for a live show for some time. “We‘ve been looking at VR as a medium for journalism for the past several years,” she said. However, most VR journalism is focused on empathy-inducing documentaries, something that didn’t quite gel with Slate’s opinion-focused brand.
Instead, Slate was looking to do something closer to what it has done in the podcasting space, said Slate Director of Product David Stern. “What you get in VR is in many ways very similar to what you get in podcasts,” he said, arguing that both mediums could offer a direct and immediate connection to interviewers and their guests.
Initially, Slate was toying with the idea of building its own VR-based video production environment. But when Facebook first previewed Spaces last year, the team quickly realized that this would be a much better option.
Of course, one could conceivably also produce a show like “Conundrum” with a Skype or Facetime chat. But Turner argued that the result wouldn’t be the same without VR. “It creates a kind of intimacy that feels very different from a video call,” she said. “It feels like you are in a new space together.”
Facebook first introduced Spaces as a way for up to three friends to meet up with the help of their avatars in VR in April. Spaces users can look at videos together, teleport to 3D spaces, take selfies of their avatars and even scribble with the help of virtual pens.
Kois will make use of some of those features to keep his guests on their toes, and Turner said that the medium itself is supposed to keep the show playful and fun as well: “VR brings out the kid in everyone.”I previously blogged about the horrific death of a 14 year old who was lashed to death on the orders of an Islamic cleric. So what has now happened?
An initial autopsy conducted after Hena’s death claimed that the girl suffered no external or internal injuries. Once that was announced, The Daily Star, a Bangladeshi newspaper, made the results public and suggested there was a cover-up in the teen’s death.
To resolve this, the High Court then ordered her body exhumed for a second autopsy. That examination was carried out by a team of doctors at a hospital in Dhaka, the capital.
“Multiple injuries were found. The girl died because of bleeding,” Deputy Attorney General Altaf Hossain told the BBC’s Bengali service.
Hena was sentenced to the public whipping for adultery after she was accused of having sex with a 40-year-old married cousin named Mahbub Khan. But Hena’s family and neighbors said the girl had been raped.
Khan was also found guilty of rape by elders in the village of Chamta, in Shariatpur district, about 55 miles from Dhaka, the BBC said. But despite this finding, Hena was flogged, which just goes to illustrate how barbarbic Islamic Sharia law is; it was the local cleric who ordered it. Khan was also sentenced to a whipping but he escaped.
Khan has now been arrested by the authorities, the BCC and Daily Star reported. He is expected to be charged with rape and could face murder charges if the court finds his actions led to his young cousin’s death, the BBC said.
Four other people, including a Muslim cleric, have been arrested in the case, and more arrests are possible.
Not everybody there is a religious nutcase, some common sense does prevail. Bangladesh’s high court last year outlawed punishments under Sharia. Hena is the second person to die since that ruling. A 40-year-old woman died in December after she was publicly beaten
You will find the defenders of Islam claiming, “Oh thats not us, thats them”, but the reality is that this is where Sharia law leads you. Its not justice, nor is it moral. The Bangladesh High Court has recognised this, and thats why they have ruled against it and declared Sharia to be illegal. Applying archaic rules that are claimed to have been dictated by a non-existent supernatural entity will only bring misery, poverty, abuse, oppression and death
When faced with claim that Islam is a religion of peace … be skeptical, the available evidence time and time again tells a very different story. People can and should be free to believe whatever they wish, but they must also be forbidden from imposing all such nonsense on others, not doing so leads to tragedies like this.
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Like this: Like Loading...The new fee, which is not refundable if an application is rejected, will come into force in the next few days
Journalists will be charged $8,000 to apply for a visa, even if it is rejected, to visit the island of Nauru where the Australian government is holding hundreds of asylum seekers in detention.
The Global Mail is reporting the new fee, up on the $200 it cost for a visa in 2013, will come into effect in the next few days after the Nauruan parliament voted to approve the increase.
A spokeswoman for the Nauru government said the move was solely for “revenue purposes” and was yet to come into effect.
The website’s photographer, Mike Bowers, applied for a visa to visit the island in November and on Tuesday was reportedly sent an email from the director of Nauru’s government information office, Joanna Olsson.
“Sorry for the late response but yes we are granting media visas. The fee is $8,000 per visa, single entry valid for 3 months. The visa fee is not refundable if the application is not successful,” the email said.
Bowers initially thought the quoted fee was a mistake but it was confirmed to both him and another staff member at the Global Mail to be $8,000.
The opposition leader, Bill Shorten, said he had "no idea" whether the Australian government had any role in pushing for the visa fee increase, but argued the move may be intended to deter journalists from visiting Nauru.
"There's more than one way to bar the scrutiny of the press," he said. "It could be a revenue raising measure or it could be a measure aimed at discouraging Australian journalists from reporting to Australia how Australian taxpayer dollars are being used."
Asked whether the Australian government requested the change, the Nauran spokeswoman said: "I haven't been told anything to suggest that."
Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young criticised the Nauruan government's decision, saying it was designed to make it difficult for the media to access Nauru and to get information back to Australia.
"This is of course part of Tony Abbott's strategy of shutting down public information about how Australian taxpayer money is being spent on the cruel and harsh detention camps on Nauru," she told reporters in Adelaide.
Offshore processing of asylum seekers on Nauru was re-introduced by the Gillard Labor government in 2012.
In July, an accommodation building at a processing centre on the island was destroyed when asylum seekers began rioting, which Salvation Army workers put down to the “degrading” conditions they were being held in.
The practice of offshore processing and the conditions asylum seekers are held in have been criticised by the United Nations refugee agency and in December it was announced the Australian government was ending the Salvation Army’s contract to provide humanitarian services on Nauru.
Nauruan government officials have been contacted for comment.Summary
"and I'm home" is the duet character song for Kyoko Sakura and Sayaka Miki by their seiyuu Ai Nonaka and Eri Kitamura. It is one of the bonus contents of the Volume 5 BD/DVD set and plays at the end of episode 9 with a new ED image.
BD Booklet with Lyrics and Credits
Staff
Singers: Sayaka Miki featuring Eri Kitamura and Kyoko Sakura featuring Ai Nonaka
Composer and Lyricist: wowaka
Arranger: Toku とく
Music Producer: Shinji Yamauchi ( 山内真治, Yamauchi Shinji ) from Aniplex and Takayasu Kuroda ( 黒田貴泰, Kuroda Takayasu ) from CreativES
from Aniplex and Takayasu Kuroda from CreativES Recorded and Mixed by: Shunroku Hitani ( 檜谷瞬六, Hitani Shunroku ) from Ixy Music ( イクシーミュージック )
from Ixy Music Sound Produced by: estlabo
Trivia
Wowaka, who composed the lyrics and made the arrangements for the song, posted a couple tweets relevant to it.
そんな訳で魔法少女まどか☆マギカBlu-ray&DVD第5巻に収録・第9話「そんなの、あたしが許さない」のEDは美樹さやか [喜多村英梨]・佐倉杏子 [野中藍] が歌うTV未放送の楽曲となり、完全生産限定版の特典CDには同曲のFull ver.とインストが収録されます。とのこと。Source So yes, the ending song for the Blu-ray and DVD Volume 5 version of Episode 9 "That, I Cannot Allow" will be a song never before broadcast, sung by Sayaka Miki (Eri Kitamura-san) and Kyoko Sakura (Ai Nonaka-san). There will also be a limited edition CD being released simultaenously with the full version and the instrumental. So yeah. I composed, wrote lyrics for, and arranged the ninth original ending song "and I'm home" for the Puella Magi Madoka Magica Blu-ray and DVD Volume 5, being released 8/24. Vocals: Sayaka Miki (Eri Kitamura-san) and Kyoko Sakura (Ai Nonaka-san).
喜多村さんも野中さんもとても気さく、かつ丁寧で謙虚な方で歌録りも適度な緊張感のもとスムーズに行えました。すごいいい曲になったんでぜひ聴いてもらえたらと思いますー。Source Kitamura-san and Nonaka-san were very good-natured. Thanks to their politeness and kindness, the recording went smoothly despite a bit of tension. And I think it turned out to be a really good song, so you should listen to it.
Lyrics in Japanese and English
Original Romanization English Translation
錆びついた心、 音もない世界、何を見てるの?
またねを言える顔を探すよ
それを繰り返すだけ
Sabitsuita kokoro, otomonai sekai, nani o miteruno?
Matane o ieru kao o sagasuyo
sore o kurikaesu dake
(Kyoko) With two hearts rusting together, in a world without sound; what do you see?
I'm searching for the face who will say "see you again,"
I'll just be doing it over and over again.
気付けばそこには ひとりきりで泣く後ろ姿
辛いような、
寂しいような、 場所。
Kizukeba soko ni wa hitorikiri de naku ushiro sugata
Tsurai youna,
sabishii youna, basho.
(Sayaka) If you would only notice that right there; was a figure from behind crying all on its own.
(Kyoko) It was a rough place,
(Sayaka) and a lonely one, 手を繋いでいたいんだ
Te o tsunaide itainda
(Duet) but we joined our hands.
何度目の気持ちだろう
ここにある温もりは
間違いでも構わない、傍にいること
涙の音、ため息の色
今、確かめる現在地
Nandome no kimochi darou
koko ni aru nukumori wa
Machigai demo kamawanai, soba ni iru koto
Namida no oto, tameiki no iro
ima, tashikameru genzaichi
(Duet) No matter how many times you feel that way,
there will always be warmth here.
Even if it was a mistake, I don't care, I'll always be by your side.
With the sound of tears and the colors of a sigh,
I'm sure this is where we are now.
冗談みたいな毎日
見たい、見たい、未来
Joudan mitai na mainichi
mitai, mitai, mirai
(Duet) A jestful everyday life;
I want to see it, I want to see it, that future.
強がりの声も掠れたな、 と 夢に落ちるの
抱えた膝、目を落とすと
すぐに崩れてしまいそうで
Tsuyogari no koe mo kasureta na, to yume ni ochiru no
Kakaeta hiza, me o otosu to
sugu ni kuzurete shimai soude
(Sayaka) When the bluff of false courage in my voice began to falter, the dream began to end
Holding my knees,
when my vision fades, I know I'll quickly collapse.
このまま、このまま ふたりきり駆け込む遠い出口、
まだ、期待しているの。
さあ 笑って見つめ合うんだ。
Konomama, konomama futarikiri kakekomu tooi deguchi,
mada, kitai shite iru no.
Saa waratte mitsume aunda.
(Kyoko) If it stays like this, if it stays like this the two of us will have to rush to the only furthest exit.
(Sayaka) Even now I still have hope.
(Duet) Now, let's smile and gaze at each other.
単純で無邪気な顔、
くしゃくしゃの思い抱いて
迷い込んだ場所さえ優しすぎて
Tanjun de mujaki na kao,
kushakusha no omoi daite
mayoikonda basho sae yasashi sugite
(Duet) With a simple and innocent face,
let's embrace our disheveled feelings.
Even this place where we've lost ourselves feels so gentle.
何度でも名前を呼ぶよ
不確かな未来でも
離せないもの、思うだけ心が痛いよ
ここにいるよ
ここにいるよ
帰る場所はここだよ?
Nando demo namae o yobu yo
Futashika na mirai demo
hanasenai mono, omou dake kokoro ga itai yo
Koko ni iru yo
Koko ni iru yo
Kaeru basho wa koko da yo?
(Duet) I'll keep calling your name no matter how many times,
even if the future is uncertain.
It's hard to say goodbye, it hurts every time I think of you.
I'm right here.
I'm right here.
Please come back and be with me.
いつだって変わらない
思いを残すの。
Itsudatte kawaranai
omoi o nokosu no. (Duet) It won't ever change;
these emotions which have been left behind.
Lyrics in Other Languages
Original Russian Translation Danish Translation Portuguese Translation Chinese Translation French Translation
錆びついた心、 音もない世界、何を見てるの?
またねを言える顔を探すよ
それを繰り返すだけ
(Кёко)В мире тишины, Где слились в такт сердца, Нет никого,
Кто б прошептал: "Увидимся ещё"...
Но средь прибоя времени искать я буду вновь и вновь.
(Kyouko) Med to hjerter der ruster sammen, I en verden uden lyd, hvad ser du så?
Jeg leder efter ansigtet der vil sige "vi ses igen"
Jeg gør det bare om og om igen.
(Kyoko) Com dois corações ligados juntos, em um mundo sem som, o que você vê?
Eu estou procurando o rosto que vai dizer "Te verei de novo",
Eu continuarei fazendo isso várias e várias vezes.
(杏子) 锈迹斑斑的心灵,寂静无比的世界, 你到底看见了什么？
寻找着能将再见说出口的表情,
只是不断将此重复罢了
(Kyouko) Avec ces deux coeurs battant à l'unisson, dans un monde dénué de sons; que vois-tu?
Je recherche ce visage qui me dira "on se reverra"
Je continuerai à chercher encore et encore.
気付けばそこには ひとりきりで泣く後ろ姿
辛いような、
寂しいような、 場所。
(Саяка) Ах, если б ты заметила мятежную душонку, Что скрылась за спиной, рыдая во весь голос...
(Кёко) Как жесток сей мир.
(Саяка) И одинок.
(Sayaka) Hvis du bare ville se at der lige der var en figur med ryggen til, der græd helt for sig selv
(Kyouko) Det er et råt sted.
(Sayaka) Og et ensomt et.
(Sayaka) Se você puder apenas perceber que ali; era uma figura que por trás chorava sozinha.
(Kyoko) Era um lugar áspero,
(Sayaka) e também solitário,
(沙耶加) 回神之时伫立于此, 只剩下孤单哭泣的背影
(杏子)在这个好似艰辛,
(沙耶加)又好似寂寞的地方,
(Sayaka) Si seulement tu avais voulu remarquer qu'ici; il y avait un visage qui pleurait à chaudes larmes.
(Kyouko) Cet endroit était rude.
(Sayaka) et il était également vide. 手を繋いでいたいんだ
(Дуэт) Давай же руки мы сплетем.
(Duet) Men vi samlede vores hænder.
(Duet) Mas nos unimos nossas mãos.
(合) 我想与你一同牵手走下去
(Duet) Mais nous avons joint nos mains.
何度目の気持ちだろう
ここにある温もりは
間違いでも構わない、傍にいること
涙の音、ため息の色
今、確かめる現在地
(Дуэт) Забудь о бремени мучений,
Ведь здесь всегда найдешь тепло.
И если это был лишь сон - мне всё равно.
Впредь буду я с тобой,
Слезою по щеке, и вздохом, взглядом,
Останемся мы вместе навсегда.
(Duet) Ligemeget hvor mange gange du har det sådan,
vil der altid være varme her.
Selvom det var en fejl, så er jeg ligeglad, jeg vil altid være ved din side.
Med lyden af tårer og udseendet af et suk,
Jeg er sikker på at det er her vi er nu.
(Duet) Não importa quantas vezes você se sinta assim, haverá sempre calor aqui.
Mesmo que isso tenha sido um erro, eu não me importo, eu sempre vou estar ao seu lado.
Com o som de lágrimas e olhares suspirantes,
Tenho certeza que isso é onde estamos agora.
(合)这到底是第几回的心情了呢, 而存在于此的温暖
就算是误会也无妨 只要彼此相伴
眼泪的音色 叹息的色彩
现在 确认于此的现居地
(Duet) Malgré le nombre de fois ou tu te sentais mal,
ça sera toujours chalereux ici.
Même si c'était une erreur, peu importe, je serai toujours à tes côtés.
Avec les larmes qui ruissellent et les soupirs,
Nous allons rester ensemble pour toujours.
冗談みたいな毎日
見たい、見たい、未来
(Дуэт) Весёлые, цветные дни.
Как же хочу, хочу увидеть я, Сей рай.
(Duet) Et vittigt hverdagsliv;
Jeg vil se den, jeg vil se den, den fremtid.
(Duet) Uma vida de brincadeiras todos os dias;
Eu quero ver, eu quero vê-lo, esse futuro.
(合)仿若玩笑般的每一天,
好想要预见的 好想要预见 那未来
(Duet) Une vie quotidiene dans la joie;
Je veux y croire, je veux y croire, à ce futur.
強がりの声も掠れたな、 と 夢に落ちるの
抱えた膝、目を落とすと
すぐに崩れてしまいそうで
(Саяка) Лживая, немая храбрость разбилась о мою мечту. И вот уже дрожат колени,
И свет померк -
Вновь упаду.
(Sayaka) Da det falske mods bluf i min stemme begyndte at vakle, begyndte drømmen at slutte.
Jeg holder mine knæ, når mit syn falmer, ved jeg at jeg vil kollapse hurtigt.
(Sayaka) Quando o blefe de falsa coragem na minha voz começou a falhar, o sonho começou a acabar
Segurando meus joelhos, quando falha minha visão, eu sei que logo irei desabar.
(沙耶加)逞强的声音也终究声嘶力竭, 堕落于梦境之中
一旦抱紧双膝，闭上双眼，仿佛立刻就要崩坏一般
(Sayaka) Lorsque le courage factice que je m'efforcais à exprimer s'est essouflé, le rêve à commencé à prendre fin
Me recroquevillant, quand ma vision s'efface, en sachant que je m'effondrerai rapidement.
このまま、このまま ふたりきり駆け込む遠い出口、
まだ、期待しているの。
さあ 笑って見つめ合うんだ。
(Кёко) Коль такова судьба, коль такова судьба, Искать возьмёмся мы один исход.
(Саяка) Но если так, надежду не покину.
(Дуэт) Давай же встретимся глазами, улыбаясь.
(Kyouko) Hvis det forbliver sådan her, hvis det forbliver sådan her, Vil vi to være nødt til at skynde os mod den fjerneste udgang.
(Sayaka) Selv nu har jeg stadig håb.
(Duet) Lige nu, lad os smile og stirre på hindanden.
(Kyoko) Se permanecer assim, se ela permaneça assim nós duas teremos que correr para a única saída mais distante.
(Sayaka) Mesmo agora eu ainda tenho esperança.
(Duet) Agora, vamos sorrir e nos olharmos.
(杏子)就像这样 就像这样, 你我两人跑向遥远的出口
(沙耶加) 还抱有着希望呢,
(合)来吧 相视而笑吧
(Kyouko) Si je reste tel quel, si je reste tel quel, Nous nous précipiterions seulement vers la fin aussi loin soit elle.
(Sayaka) Mais même maintemant j'ai encore de l'espoir.
(Duet) Alors, sourions tout en se regardant l'une l'autre.
単純で無邪気な顔、
くしゃくしゃの思い抱いて
迷い込んだ場所さえ優しすぎて
(Дуэт) Со светлым и невинным взглядом,
Укроем наши растрепанные чувства.
В чертоге, где нашли судьбу, утративши себя.
(Duet) Med et simpelt og uskyldigt ansigt,
Lad os omfagne vores sjuskede følelser.
Selv dette sted hvor vi mistede os selv føles så blidt.
(Duet) Com uma cara simples e inocente,
Vamos abraçar nossos sentimentos descabelados.
Mesmo este lugar onde nós perdemos a nós mesmas é tão gentil.
(合)单纯天真的脸庞,
拥抱着混乱不堪的思念
就连迷路的地点 都无比温柔
(Duet) Avec des visages simples chargés d'innocence,
Embrassons nos sentiments effrénés.
Même cet endroit désolé ou nous sommes parait si doux.
何度でも名前を呼ぶよ
不確かな未来でも
離せないもの、思うだけ心が痛いよ
ここにいるよ
ここにいるよ
帰る場所はここだよ?
(Дуэт) Не прекращу взывать к тебе, кусая губы в кровь,
раз грядущее несёт одну лишь боль.
Твой образ гложет мою душу, И слышится жестокое "Прощай".
Останусь здесь,
Останусь здесь.
Прошу, вернись, побудь со мной!
(Duet) Jeg vil blive ved med at kalde dit navn ligemeget hvor mange gange, selvom fremtiden er usikker.
Det er hårdt at sige farvel, det gør ondt hver gang jeg tænker på dig.
Jeg er lige her,
Jeg er lige her.
Kom tilbage og vær sammen med mig!
(Duet) Eu vou continuar chamando seu nome, não importa quantas vezes,
mesmo se o futuro é incerto.
É difícil dizer adeus, dói cada vez que penso em você.
Eu estou bem aqui,
Eu estou bem aqui.
Por favor volte e fique comigo!
(合) 无论几次都会呼喊你的名字,
就算面对不可确定的未来
只要想起那些不愿放手的东西就会心痛
我就在这里哦
我就在这里哦
你的归所不是就在就在这里哟?
(Duet) Je continuerai à crier ton nom sans cesse.
Même si le futur est incertain, il est difficile de te dire adieu car je souffre en pensant toujours à toi.
Je suis là,
Je suis là.
Je t'en prie, reviens et reste à tout jamais avec moi!
いつだって変わらない
思いを残すの。
(Дуэт) Ведь неумолимы чувства те,
что брошены во тьму.
(Duet) Det forandrer sig aldrig,
Disse følelser der er blevet efterladt.
(Duet) Nunca vão mudar;
essas emoções que foram deixados para trás.
(合)无论何时都不会改变,
留下永恒的思念.
(Duet) Elles ne changeront pas,
ces émotions qu'on a laissé derrière notre passage.
Gallery
In the Madoka movie |
who have the blood of our innocent people on their hands. Our message for the peace-loving people of these countries is that they have to see the reality of Afghanistan and all the other countries the US has invaded. What they see as rare news of the catastrophic situation in these countries, is the everyday reality for the people.
They need to pressurize their governments to change this invasions and occupation policy, and stand in solidarity with the people who are the victims of these wars. This international solidarity will strengthen the fight for freedom and democracy in these countries.
They should know that the tax they pay is used by their governments to make Afghanistan and other war-torn countries as hell which will directly impact their lives and make Western countries unsafe, like what we witness today in European cities.SMASH FASCIST FEAR
On the 19th of January 2013, artists, academics, scholars, immigrant communities, antifascist collectivities, workers unions, etc are calling for a day of antifascist action in Greece and worldwide, with a big assembly and a concert in Syntagma Square. Lots of musicians are taking part, with the list and the initiative being open until now.
After a message the “19th of January 2013” sent him, Michael Thompson (aka Freestylee) has accepted the plea for him to offer them a work of his, exclusively created for this day, in order to reinforce the call for international antifascists solidarity (there are already mobilizations being programmed outside Greek embassies on the same day 19 January).
The organizers of 19 January would like to thank him from the depths of our hearts. His immediate positive reaction can give a boost to artists, creators, etc to help with their work this antifascist movement.
The initiative is accessible in the internet:
1. in facebook: http://www.facebook.com/19JanuaryATHENSvsFASCISM
2. in twitter: @antifa19jan
3. in this blog: http://athensantifa19jan.wordpress.com/
We ask designers to submit a poster to support and promote the initiative!
Contact: http://www.facebook.com/19JanuaryATHENSvsFASCISM
Please, share widely…
Comments
commentsCAIRO, Egypt — Once focused on ousting their former leader, Hosni Mubarak, protesters in Cairo have found a new target in recent weeks: Israel.
Egyptians have been directing their fury toward Israel since a deadly incident on Aug. 19, during which Israeli security forces killed five Egyptian officers in a brief cross-border raid into the Sinai Peninsula.
The Israelis had been searching for armed militants who had attacked and killed eight people on their side of the porous frontier.
In Egypt's capital, the public uproar over the killings has yet to subside. Thousands have gathered outside Israel’s embassy in Cairo, burning Israeli flags and demanding the expulsion of the country’s ambassador, despite an implicit statement of regret from Tel Aviv.
On Friday, Egypt's capital saw one of the largest demonstrations in recent weeks. Israeli diplomats were evacuated Saturday after Friday's protests turned violent.
But it isn't just Israel that is the focus of protesters' wrath. Some Egyptians are also turning on their own government’s handling of the diplomatic row.
Why? Egypt’s military-led interim authority, which assumed power when Mubarak fell on Feb. 11, aren't listening to the masses, say protesters — a complaint similar to those they voiced about Mubarak.
GlobalPost in Egypt: It's still the Mubarak way
After the anti-Israel protests, Egypt's leaders constructed a 9-foot-tall concrete barricade outside the Israeli embassy in Cairo, ostensibly to prevent neighborhood damage by protests.
Protesters view the barrier as yet another indicator that their new military rulers, like Mubarak, are ignoring the will of the people and using force to block dissent on the streets.
Moreover, the wall suggests that the new Egyptian government isn't likely to change its tune on Israel, despite vocal popular opposition.
Tarek Amin, 19, another protester outside the embassy, said the interim government is all-too remniscent of Mubarak's administration.
“Since the revolution, Egyptians have had little ability to exercise our national dignity when it comes to Israel. So, nothing has really changed,” said Amin.
On Friday, thousands of mostly young, secular activists descended once again to the streets around Tahrir Square — the epicenter of Egypt's uprising in January — to demand greater political reform and a return to civilian rule in the country.
Much of the anger in Tahrir was directed squarely at Egypt's army, once seen as the safeguards of the revolution. Though, protesters also voiced their displeasure with Israel, destroying parts of the barrier outside the embassy.
"We are going to destroy the wall outside the Israeli embassy today!" screamed one man just outside Tahrir, proudly displaying a small sledgehammer painted in the red, white, and black colors of the Egyptian flag.
Several hours after the midday Friday prayers, hundreds of protesters began marching across the Nile River to the district of Giza, where the Israeli embassy is located.
Chanting "God is great" and "the people demand the removal of the wall," hundreds of activists began chiseling at the concrete barrier with hammers, wooden chairs, and metal pipes.
By nightfall, scores of activists could be seen trying to uproot entire metal streetlight poles from a sidewalk near the Nile bridge leading to the embassy, to use as battering rams to finish demolishing the 300-foot long wall.
Egyptian security forces formed a cordon around the wall in the early afternoon on Friday, but ultimately did not step in when protesters began destroying large parts of the wall.
In response to the violent turn that protests took Friday, Israeli diplomats were evacuated from Egypt.
Egypt became the first Arab country to formalize relations with Israel in 1979, though relations between the two neighbors has been frosty ever since.
Mubarak maintained the peace treaty with U.S. support throughout his three decades in power, presumably to preserve regional stability, although a majority of Egyptians viewed the terms of the accords with skepticism.
GlobalPost in Cairo: Egypt struggles to lure tourists back to the country
But it wasn’t until after Mubarak was toppled in February that Egyptians began to more openly express their dissatisfaction with their country's policy on Israel.
As many as 54 percent of Egyptians want the treaty annulled, according to a nationwide survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in April.
The growing tension hit a breaking point with the deaths of Egyptian soldiers in Sinai.
“The people demand the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador,” screamed hundreds of protesters outside Israel’s embassy, shortly after the Aug. 19 attacks.
One of the demonstrators, Ahmad al-Shahat, was so furious that he ripped down Israel’s national flag from where it flew above the embassy — a feat which required scaling up the side of the 13-story apartment building that houses the embassy on its top floor.
The 23-year-old “Flagman,” as he is now referred to in the local media, instantly gained celebrity status and was even rewarded with an apartment and a new job by his regional governor, according to newspapers.
“I did it to please millions of Egyptians and Arabs,” al-Shahat told reporters at a press conference last month.
Despite the popularity of “Flagman,” the country’s military rulers have shown little willingness to dramatically alter Egypt’s foreign policy vis-à-vis Israel in the post-Mubarak era.
Security forces deployed batons and tear gas to crush a demonstration in May that called for an end to the country’s long-standing sale of natural gas to Israel.
Government assurances that Egypt’s border with Gaza would be opened following Mubarak’s departure — after nearly four years of closure — have not yet been fully realized.
GlobalPost in Isreal: Taking Israel's national pulse
Critics have also complained that Egypt’s military carries too much weight when political decisions are made by the new government.
The country’s civilian leaders announced their recall of Egypt's ambassador to Israel at the height of the August protests, but were eventually overruled by the military, according to Emad Gad, a researcher at the state-funded Al-Ahram Center think tank in Cairo.
If the interim government is ignoring the sentiment on the street, upstart politicians may be starting to listen.
Several candidates, parties, and political movements — from seculars to socialists to the once-banned Muslim Brotherhood — have taken a more populist stance on the recent crisis in Sinai.
Amr Moussa, the former Arab League chief and possible presidential candidate in upcoming elections, criticized the government’s response to the crisis, and renewed calls to summon Egypt’s ambassador from Tel Aviv.
“Israel must be aware that the days when it kills our children without getting a strong, appropriate response are gone for ever,” Moussa wrote on Twitter in August.
But for many Egyptians, a visible street protest is the most effective way to encourage change.
Ahmed Amin, 25, was one of the many Egyptians who recently tagged graffiti along the concrete barricade outside Israel’s embassy in Cairo. The entire length of the wall — roughly 300-feet — is now completely covered in the red, white, and black colors of Egypt’s flag.
Most of the graffiti, like “Down with Israel!” and “To the Israeli ambassador: get the hell out of our country!” attacked the neighbor to the north.
Amin’s message, however, was directed squarely at Egypt’s military leaders. It encouraged continued demonstrations in spite of the barricade.
“Our government may have built a tangible, concrete wall to prevent us from protesting here,” said Amin. “But they will never be able to build a wall around our minds.”No, Mr. Trump, You Can’t Replace F-35 With A ‘Comparable’ F-18
By DOUG BIRKEY
President-Elect Trump’s recent announcement that he is considering acquiring the F/A-18 Super Hornet in place of the F-35 Lightning II does not add up for a leader who seeks “to make America great again.” Too much is at stake for the United States to rely on a fighter aircraft design whose roots extend back to the Nixon Administration. While the President-Elect’s concerns regarding the cost of weapons procurement is wholly valid, such decisions must be weighed in the context of current security demands.
Air supremacy, the mission fulfilled by the fighter planes, plays a pivotal role in warfare. Without control of the sky, no military operation can succeed. Planes like the F-35 represent the lynchpin on which ground power, sea power, and airpower can effectively engage. Want proof of this? Simply look at June 6, 1944, D-Day. By controlling the sky, the Allies were able launch a decisive invasion on the beaches of France that effectively sealed Nazi Germany’s fate. This effort would never have worked had the landing forces been subject to robust enemy air strikes or had Rommel’s panzer reinforcements been free to race to the beaches on road and rail networks undamaged by Allied air attack.
However, America’s ability to control the sky currently stands at risk. The majority of the fighter aircraft serving with the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps are 1960s and 1970s-era designs. Enemy nations have invested considerable sums in theirdefensive capabilities — better radars, better missiles, better computers, command, & control — which means that planes like the F/A-18 are likely to get shot down in a conflict. If Mr. Trump is concerned about saving money, the country should be investing in systems that can execute their missions and return home intact to fight another day. Buying decades-old designs is a recipe for disaster: aircraft shot down, pilots killed or captured, and objectives left unmet.
That is why Presidents on both sides of the aisle, Congress, and service leaders have pursued the F-35 for nearly two decades. Over those years, the program has made somecostly stumbles — but no acquisition program is perfect, and the larger they are, the more problems they have. Nevertheless, today the F-35 is on track to provide a huge capability for a comparatively reasonable price: $85M by 2019. Decades-old designs like the F/A-18, F-15, and F-16 cost well within that range or more depending on what upgrades to the basic fighter are included.
It is also crucial to recognize that the F-35 doesn’t just do the same things better (though it does): It does things the legacy fighters just can’t do at all. First and foremost, planes like the F/A-18 will never be very stealthy because their designs were never built to evade radar, as evident in their shapes, construction materials, or avionics. Modernization cannot fix this problem: Stealth has to be built into a design from day one.
On top of this, the older aircraft were designed before the information age. One of the F-35’s most important attributes is its ability to collect, process, and disseminate information with assets across the battle arena. The positive effect of this is huge, like the difference between the brick-sized cell phones of the 1980s and a modern iPhone with many times the capabilities packed into much less space. Yes, they both can make calls, but the latter’s ability to provide key information anywhere, anytime has fundamentally enhanced the way in which we live our lives. Turning back the clock really is not an option.
Smart phones have also combined activities that used to require multiple independent systems: stereos, cameras, address books, calendars, desk top computers, GPS, and more. The same holds true for the F-35, because it does the job of multiple legacy planes. If Mr. Trump thinks the F-35 is expensive, he might want to consider the cost of buying and sustaining separate aircraft to execute the missions of air superiority and strike; close air support; vertical take-off and landing for the Marines and allies; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; cyber/electronic warfare; surface-to-air missile suppression; and more. There is no way this alternative is cheaper.
National security interests demand modern combat aircraft that are capable of executing their missions. The country also has a moral imperative to equip those in uniform with planes that will get them home safe. It’s a dangerous delusion to seek “savings” in buying decades-old designs that won’t even make it to the target.
Failing to build a modern, capable military invites our enemies to pursue aggressive action. It is no mistake that China is pushing the boundaries in the Pacific and Russia is destabilizingneighboring regions: They sense the US is weak and are taking advantage of the situation. We must redress these circumstances. Is it a good idea to try and get best value from acontract negotiation? Of course. However, it’s also crucial to buy capabilities that are capable of fighting effectively and winning. The F-35 is the only fighter currently in production in the United States that can do the job.
Doug Birkey is executive director of the Mitchell institute for Aerospace Studies, an affiliate of the Air Force Association.Washington, DC (TFC) – Like many trans-critical feminists, I have a serious problem with transwomen who demand access to female-only spaces. They’ll often use the following arguments:
“It’s transmisogynistic to exclude us from your feminist meeting!”
“It’s offensive for you to be suspicious of me just because I have a penis!”
“I’m a rape victim too, so I need to be in your safe space!”
So I would like to use this time, to defend the concept of transwomen-exclusive, female-only spaces. Literally it’s this simple: when a woman says “do not cross this line,” it means do not cross this line.
Better yet, I’ll give you some metaphors, because I know at least one person out there is going to be intentionally obtuse:
– You don’t demand access to the funeral of a stranger, because you know that the people gathering there to mourn, share the specific lived experience of mourning the dead person
– You don’t demand access to the birthday party of a stranger, because you know that the people gathering there to party, share the specific lived experience of knowing and loving the birthday person
– Likewise, you should never demand access to a gathering of females, because you know that the people gathering there to talk, share the specific lived experience of being oppressed based on their female anatomy.
Certain events exist, to serve the needs of specific people, regarding a specific issue. Sometimes, that specific issue is the issue of being a woman who has a vagina/uterus/ovaries/etc. Sometimes, we want to talk about our experiences of misogyny, and about our own bodies, without being corrected every 5 seconds by the Trans-Lingo Police. And we absolutely have that right. Just like transwomen have the right to make their own safe spaces, for transwomen-only.
That’s it, that’s all that needs to be said.
The fact that this even has to be explained, reminds me of conversations I’ve had with MRAs who can’t understand that there are contexts — many, in fact — in which their penises are not relevant to women. (Oops, did I say that out loud??)
But apparently, a group of women can’t simply say no and expect you to respect that. That isn’t good enough! Those women have to give you a good reason why you shouldn’t violate their boundaries!
This is what rape culture looks like. This is male-socialized entitlement.
And this is why, nowhere in this article, did I use the common defenses I see other gender-critics using (like “what if one of the women at this female-only gathering is a rape survivor?”). While it’s valorous to consider trauma survivors as needing extra attention and care, using Schrodinger’s Rape Victim as a defense only reinforces the idea that women have to justify their desire for private spaces, or that the trauma of women is a fit bartering tool (“I’ll trade you one PTSD for a 30-minute feminist meeting”). What if nobody in the female-only space is afraid of being raped? You know what, we’d still have the right to assemble as we please, without the intrusion of a male-bodied person.
To all my fellow trans-critical feminists, please consider the following: women don’t need a convincing reason before being granted privacy, agency and safety. We don’t need a reason at all. And to play into the transgenderists’ game of “Well, why shouldn’t transwomen be included in everything women do?!” by providing arguments to pacify the aggression and entitlement of the male ego, is counterproductive. Like, come the hell on. Do we really have to keep explaining to males that not everything is about their penis? Not everything is made for them?
It’s baffling to me when transwomen cry “transmisogyny” only moments after emotionally manipulating and punishing women for wanting to create a circle for people with a specific shared experience. The only misogyny I see here, is male-bodied and male-socialized people demanding that women put their own feelings aside, stop having boundaries, and let them into an intimate space, despite having done nothing to earn that trust. That’s misogyny. And we fail to see it for the predatory behavior it is, because we’ve all been well-trained to hear a woman say “no,” and interpret it as “convince me.”
I, for one, am tired of justifying my boundaries. The only people who should be justifying themselves here, are the transwomen that blatantly and violently refuse to back off when a woman says “no.”
Some great (well, disturbing) further-reading on the topic:
Trans* Women in My PTSD Group – a sexual abuse survivor describes how the behavior of trans women at her PTSD support group served as an obstacle to her healing
Why Women’s Spaces are Critical to Feminist Autonomy – the revolutionary aspects of female-only spaces, effectively explained, and with beautiful prose to boot!
Building Bridges – some thoughts from a transwoman on respecting women’s spacesWutaishan, in the mountains of China's northern Shanxi province, has long been a sacred site for Buddhists. They hike mountain paths, and visit temples dating back to the 8th century. On one mountain path, a group of middle-aged guys hang a rainbow of prayer flags between two trees, and watch, satisfied, as they flutter in the breeze. One declines to be interviewed. He's a government official, and wants to keep his practice of Buddhism private. The other, former pharmaceuticals salesman Zhang Jiankun, 42, is downright loquacious. "I used to smoke, drink, gamble, fight and chase women. I used to like to do all this all day," he says. "And then, by the time I was 30, I had money — but I also had hypertension, and liver damage from all the drinking. I'd take clients out, so I'd drink every day. And I was fat." Now, he says, he's slimmed down, quit drinking, and can climb these mountains with no problem. He credits his embrace of Tibetan Buddhism 11 years ago with helping him clean up his act. "Many people are trying to find balance, and at some point I realized that material prosperity doesn't mean your spiritual life is rich," he says. "I wanted freedom, but to have freedom, you need wisdom. I found that Buddhism helps you attain the wisdom to pursue freedom." Zhang took some of his wealth, and spent six years in Tibet, meditating and studying Buddhist scripture. By the time he came back, he says, he was calmer, kinder and nicer to his parents. "They appreciate the way I am now," he says. "I used to have bad temper. I used to leave them alone and go out drinking. Now they like me, and miss me when I'm not around. They think now I'm finally acting like the head of the family, and taking care of them. This is all thanks to the mercy of Buddhism." Like many Chinese, Zhang believes Tibetan Buddhism is a purer form than the variety battered and eventually coopted over 60 years of Communist Party rule in the rest of China. Not that Tibetan Buddhism escaped unscathed. Under Communist Party rule, thousands of Buddhist temples in Tibet have been destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of Tibetans killed — and others, especially monks and nuns, imprisoned. The Party long considered Buddhism and other religions superstitious nonsense, and has only recently eased up. "We were told there was no such thing as God, and that we were sort of born to be atheist. It was a very sad thing that we lost our freedom of choice," says former journalist Lin Gu, 38. "But I guess the anxiety to seek the ultimate answer to life is always there for me. That's why I keep searching." Lin is part of the generation that grew up with China's economic boom and the notion that to get rich is glorious. As a journalist, he says, he's seen where that's led. "For example, I see in today's China, people can get easily frustrated," he says. "I can see we have this outcry against this rampant social injustice. In a society where we can easily get angry, frustrated and depressed we need such a thing as Buddhism to find our inner harmony to regain our balance and to make us feel better equipped especially psychologically to cope with such an increasingly changing world." By some estimates, at least one in four Chinese actively practices Buddhism, with the upwardly mobile and creative classes increasingly embracing Tibetan Buddhism, in particular. Indeed, it's become positively trendy. But not all who come in search of meaning know what the essence of Buddhism is. At one Wutaishan temple a young businesswoman from Shanghai, Chu Hui, lights long incense sticks. She holds them to her forehead and bows deeply toward the temple. She says she came once before to make a wish, and had to come back, because the wish came true. "If you make a wish and it become reality, you have to come back to offer thanks," she says. "Otherwise, they will be some disaster — maybe." Chu Hui admits that she's not actually Buddhist — just interested. Many of the visitors here are similar, says senior monk Shi Yanping. "People are trying to find a way to connect their heart to Buddhism," he says. "But many don't understand Buddhism. They think burning incense, and falling on their knees and knocking their head on the ground is Buddhism. But the real practice of Buddhism it to find it in your heart." Shi Yanping puts on a tea kettle, as he talks about how he came to Wutaishan almost 20 years ago, as a young man. He's happy to talk about his life, and about Buddhist precepts. But when I ask how he, as a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, feels about the restrictions the Communist Party has placed on its practice, he says he doesn't know what I'm talking about. "Neither Chinese nor Tibetan Buddhism face any restrictions in China," he says. " Some people may have taken advantage of freedom of religion to make mistakes, or commit wrongdoings. But it doesn't mean the practice of religion faces any restriction. I ask if he thinks it's "wrongdoing" for Tibetan Buddhists to display photos of the Dalai Lama. No, he says. Then what about the many Tibetan Buddhists who've been arrested for doing exactly that? "This is the first I've heard of it," he says, with a polite smile. Today is the first time to hear this." Most Tibetans in China couldn't say the same. Ever since a March 2008 uprising in ethnic Tibetan parts of western China, which lasted weeks, the Chinese government has been cracking down hard. It has flooded ethnic Tibetan areas with military police, tried to get monks to renounce the Dalai Lama, and arrested those who show signs of following him. And even before the crackdown, in 2007, the government passed legislation banning Tibetan spiritual leaders from reincarnating without Chinese government permission. The government hopes to select the next generation of Tibetan Buddhist leaders. Already, in 1995, it disappeared and replaced the real Panchen Lama — the second most revered Tibetan Buddhist leader, at the time a six-year-old boy recognized as the reincarnation of the previous Panchen Lama, who became disillusioned with the Communist Party and who died suddenly and prematurely. When the Dalai Lama dies, it is traditionally the Panchen Lama who recognizes his reincarnation. So by controlling the Panchen Lama, the Chinese government hopes to control Tibetan Buddhism. The Dalai Lama has called what the Chinese government is doing "cultural genocide." "The situation of Tibet – the Chinese Communist propaganda create a very rosy picture," he said on a recent visit to Japan. "But, actually, including many Chinese from Mainland China who visit Tibet, they all have the impression, things are terrible." This year, at least 11 Tibetans have set themselves on fire in protest. The Chinese government has called this "terrorism in disguise." It's convinced that Tibetans are scheming to separate from China — and the Dalai Lama is leading the charge. The Dalai Lama has long said this isn't the case. He says while Tibet used to be independent, he accepts it's now part of China. He just wants more autonomy for Tibetans — which the Chinese government won't give. It has called the Dalai Lama a criminal, a separatist, and a "wolf in monk's robes." And yet, growing numbers of Chinese embrace him as a spiritual leader. They just have to tread carefully when talking about him. Reta Dinchenpujun is a "living Buddha" — a reincarnated practitioner, back to help others attain enlightenment. I ask if he's been asked to denounce the Dalai Lama. He gives me a level look, and sidesteps the question. "I'm not particularly interested in politics," he says. "No one can ask me to do or not to do something in my life. I belong to myself." He pauses, gives me another look, and adds a thought. "Of course, the Dalai Lama is a spiritual role model for all Tibetan Buddhists — as every Dalai Lama has been throughout history." Chinese lay practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism can be even more careful when talking about the Dalai Lama. But when it comes to talking about the transformative powers of Buddhism, they can be passionate. "I hope Buddhism will bring a revolution to our minds in China," he says. "I do think in China what we need most is love, mercy and forgiveness and reconciliation. Given a very chaotic bitter past we are carrying with, a very complicated historical legacy is on the shoulder of every one. We need Buddhism to become tolerant, to reach out to others, to say 'I'm sorry I'm wrong' and to say 'I forgive you and I love you.'" That's his dream, anyway, he says, and he's quit journalism to teach at a Buddhist University. Still, a little journalistic skepticism remains. Lin hopes China will move in that direction — but when he looks around at what modern life in China is like now, he still has his doubts.• Check out the latest Fantasy reveals
WILL 2017 be the year the Suns get some luck and make a climb up the ladder? If they can keep their best players on the park, they should improve and we will have plenty of players in the mix for our Fantasy squads.
Aaron Hall (MID, $635,000) was the highest averaging player last season – excluding Brayden Fiorini – however he frustrated his Fantasy coaches, not just Rodney Eade, by spending time playing for the reserves side.
One of the new co-captains, Tom Lynch (FWD, $520,000) is the 11th highest-priced forward available after his best season to date.
Gold Coast recruited well during the off-season. Adding some experienced players to a healthier list coupled with natural improvement, the Suns can climb the ladder and post some positive Fantasy numbers along the way.
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It goes without saying that Gary Ablett (MID, $611,000) is up there with the greatest of all time – in both general football terms and of course Fantasy football. Just to recap, from 2007 the Little Master has averaged 98.5, 111.7, 118.7, 119, 112.1, 124.8, 114.6, 119.1, 94.5 and 101.2. Sensational numbers although he has been restricted by injury in the past few seasons. Ablett is tracking well in the early stages of this pre-season and knowing how good he is at his best, the dual Brownlow medallist will still be among the elite again in 2017.
We have already started tracking the pre-season of Kade Kolodjashnij (DEF, $437,000). The 21-year-old was among the best defenders in 2015, his second season, when he averaged 84 from 22 games. Kolodjashnij missed games on two separate occasions last season when struck down by mystery abdomen issues and concussion. A new diet has him in check and he is feeling the fittest he has in this three years at the club and is destined to improve on his 72.4 average from 2016.
Touk Miller (MID/FWD, $493,000) was promoted to a regular midfield role in the latter stages of the 2016 season. The opportunity came about due to injury and coach Rodney Eade proclaimed that Miller would be a certain starter in 2017, no matter which players were available. Fantasy-wise, his numbers soared, averaging 104.3 for the last eight weeks of the season, making his price based on his 81.6 average a lot lower than his most recent output.
Both Pearce Hanley (MID, $506,000) and Michael Barlow (MID, $583,000) joined the Suns during the off-season and have been among the Fantasy elite in the past. Their stocks have dropped since being stripped of dual-position status, but Hanley and Barlow are both priced approximately $100K cheaper than their best seasons.
The Suns went into the NAB AFL Draft with four picks inside the top 10 and hunting for players to help rebuild their depleted midfield. The pre-season matches in February and March will be telling as they jockey for position but if Jack Bowes (FWD/MID, $232,000) gets the nod for round one, then lock him in. Bowes' dual position status gives him the edge over Will Brodie (MID, $234,000) in the Fantasy stakes.
Dogged by ongoing PCL trouble for the past two years, David Swallow (MID, $355,000) has regained fitness and confidence in his knee. The 24-year-old is training and should be set for round one. With a 30 per cent discount, he is simply too cheap to ignore.
Brayden Fiorini (MID, $512,000) played two games last season with his second basically making himself irrelevant in Fantasy Classic for next season. As prices are based on their previous average, even with a 24 per cent discount, the 111.5 average prices the 19-year-old in a range where there are better options for those dollars. It wasn't a real surprise that Fiorini scored 166 in his second match. He averaged 25 disposals, six marks, three tackles and 104 Fantasy points in the NEAFL. Note to self: don’t get sucked into his high average for your Classic team, or into drafting him too early in Elite!
Player Pos 2017 Price Aaron Hall MID $635,000 Gary Ablett MID $611,000 Michael Barlow MID $583,000 Jarryd Lyons MID $539,000 Tom J. Lynch FWD $520,000 Brayden Fiorini MID $512,000 Pearce Hanley MID $506,000 Touk Miller MID/FWD $493,000 Tom Nicholls RUC $466,000 Matt Rosa MID $457,000 Jack Martin DEF/FWD $453,000 Michael Rischitelli MID $447,000 Kade Kolodjashnij DEF $437,000 Jarrod Harbrow DEF $427,000 Matt Shaw MID $424,000 Steven May DEF $414,000 Jesse Lonergan MID $405,000 Mitch Hallahan MID $398,000 Brandon Matera FWD $396,000 Peter Wright FWD $392,000 Alex Sexton MID $384,000 Daniel Currie RUC $381,000 Ryan Davis FWD $380,000 David Swallow MID $355,000 Sam Day DEF/FWD $354,000 Adam Saad DEF $349,000 Keegan Brooksby DEF $340,000 Callum Ah Chee FWD $336,000 Jarrad Grant FWD $334,000 Jarrod Witts RUC $328,000 Joshua Schoenfeld MID $305,000 Sean Lemmens DEF $304,000 Darcy MacPherson FWD $290,000 Trent McKenzie DEF $285,000 Rory Thompson DEF $279,000 Jesse Joyce DEF $255,000 Ben Ainsworth MID/FWD $244,000 Jack Scrimshaw DEF $238,000 Will Brodie MID $234,000 Jack Bowes MID/FWD $232,000 Jack Leslie DEF $208,000 Mackenzie Willis DEF/MID $178,000 Cameron Loersch FWD $150,000 Brad Scheer MID $150,000 Max Spencer DEF $150,000
Follow @AFLFantasy on Twitter and like us on Facebook to stay up to date this pre-seasonI have never owned a pH meter before, having been put off by the price and their reputation for being fragile and temperamental. At only $18, the Milwaukee PH600 seemed like a good way to test the water (so to speak). So far I haven't had a need to invest in anything more expensive. I have been using this meter to create hydroxide precipitates and found it to be very stable and reliable. I recalibrate it every day, but it is only ever off by 0.1 or 0.2. The calibration is single-point, but I find that if it shows 10.0 in a 10.0 reference solution, then it will read 6.9 or 7.0 in the 7.0 reference solution.
Just don't put the meter in very hot (e.g. boiling) water, the probe will crack like mine did. It still gives correct readings but I'm ordering another of the same model just in case I do something stupid again.
It's true, as per some of the other reviews, that calibrating this device by sticking the supplied screwdriver in a small hole in the back while watching the front is a bit inconvenient, but to be honest one gets the hang of it pretty quickly, and I can't really think of a better design. If the hole was in the front or on the side, then it would be more exposed to water drops, at least in my process which involves taking measurements while stirring. And the simple, manual, analogue interface of turning a potentiometer is hard to improve upon.
The meter arrived dry, but I put some pH 7.0 reference solution in the cap as soon as I opened the package, and as I said it works fine now.
Update:
I dropped my second one in salt water and it died. Even after removing the batteries, washing it in distilled water, and drying it, it still wouldn't go back to work for me. So I bought an $80 waterproof Hanna meter (HI98127). The Hanna one is temperature-calibrated, which I found out is important for what I am doing. It also has 2-point calibration. This requires standard buffers (7.0, and either 10 or 4) and is not as flexible as the screwdriver method, but actually works pretty well. And the probe can be separately replaced. I guess Milwaukee still gets five stars for the price, but think about whether robustness to splashes and temperature variations is important to your application.The most important difficulty for utilitarianism is that it emphasizes consequences exclusively. Utilitarians claim that “the ends always justify the means,” and therefore we can do anything to maximize utility as long as the consequences are good. For example, imagine that our neighbor opens our mail every day before we get home and then meticulously closes and replaces it with such skill that we cannot tell it has been opened. He derives great satisfaction from this activity and we never find out about it. When we are out-of-town and give him the key for emergencies, he rummages through our mail and personal effects, carefully replacing them before we return.
(Part I & II)
The Problem with Consequences
He finds these activities immensely pleasurable, we never find out, and the net utility increases. An act utilitarian says he acts morally. But isn’t there something wrong here? Should our privacy be sacrificed to the net utility?
Act utilitarians are willing to sacrifice privacy, rights, or even life itself to the net utility. Imagine a country sheriff who has been charged with finding the perpetrator of a |
who did some of the earliest major work on the "midterm effect" in congressional elections and whose Polarized: Making Sense of a Divided America just released. So me and the numbers go back a ways.)And in a larger sense, arguing the tables was kind of pointless as a competitive exercise, because if a publisher really did sell more copies to Diamond than the tables indicated, the Order Index Number meant thatpublisher would have sold more. So the rankings of the individual books wouldn't have changed. As time went on, we heard those concerns less frequently. The numbers spoke for themselves, and as time went on and more data was collected, I got a little better at getting out of their way and letting them have their say.I was promoted out of day-to-day work onin 2003, but I continued to provide my monthly report to the magazine for publication — and then to's website, for several years after that. During that time, I left the company to write comics and novels full time, launching Comichron in March 2007 to give my research a permanent online home. The magazines are long gone, but the history has not been lost.All during that time, Diamond has increased the amount of information it's made available. In 1998, responding to DC about the same issues noted above, it began publishing market shares based on what it actually sold, meaning reorders were part of the equation and comics that never shipped weren't. In February 2003, it shifted to reporting the number of copies shipped in its ranking tables, rather than preorders. That put a stop to books making the charts that never came out.And all along, it added to the number of graphic novels it reported sales on, from the Top 10 to the Top 25, then 50, then 100, then finally 300. Comics bestsellers went accidentally to 400 items for a while a couple of years ago, but while I reported those extra titles, I continued to keep 300 as the benchmark grouping.Milton Griepp returned to publishing in the early 2000s with ICV2.com — literally,— and began running estimates.ofhas also published his own estimates for many years, most recently at. We have conversed and compared notes on occasion, particularly when we see some warning flag in the data that suggests accidental misreporting. We all want the information out there to be correct.There has always been, and will continue to be, criticism that the monthly figures do not include this or that portion of the comics market. That is absolutely true, but it is also acknowledged in the fine print on every page — as well as on our FAQ page Furthermore, I go to great lengths in my verbiage to be specific about what we're referring to. I've written the phrase "North American comics shops" more often than I can remember. It is not the case that every headline on this site has been as specific as it needs to be; nor can I guarantee that everyone who draws upon the charts will bring along the caveats in their own analyses. Probably the most common error involves reporting the categories; our sales figures for the Top 300 comics have often been described elsewhere as the sales figures for all comics. (In reality, as noted, we only got a figure for all comics in a month for the first time last week.)I've tried hard not to repeat my early errors of making the numbers say too much; I rely on aggregate changes to a great degree. I've tended not to run trendlines on individual titles, as some analysts have; there's a lot of noise at the individual-issue level, a lot of it caused by the calendar. Two consecutive issues of a title can sell exactly the same number of copies, yet if one issue comes out the first week of the month and the other comes out the last week, the number of copies shipped will appear much different. I did present the figures for that manner in the Standard Catalog of Comic Books, but that was in the context of an attempt to record every fact known about each comic book.I also don't spend a lot of time worrying with thebetween publishers, although I recognize that is a favored pastime among many. Having survived the 1990s covering the market, I think the important races are with our own past performance; if the industry isn't succeeding in aggregate, "who's winning" isn't that important.And yes, I do believe the monthly sales reports remain both valid and reliable measures. I'm very confident that the figures are reporting what Diamond says they are; I've seen enough comparison data from publishers to dispel any doubt. Diamond's share of periodical sales, more than 90%, makes that part of the charts highly reflective of the whole market; and while its share of the graphic novel business is smaller, at around 35% it is by far the largest chunk for which we have access to monthly numbers. That's definitely worth looking at. (Digital will remain a conundrum for some time, I suspect — but that's a different column.)I'd also like to talk about what I've observed about the state of the market in that time, but that, too, feels like a different column. In the meantime, I'll be here keeping watch on the data — and feeling, sometimes, like a numbers-geek version of the knight guarding the temple in. The numbers might be just a rusty cup, but they also just might be important. You never know!So that's the tale of twenty years of monthly sales charts — all of which you can see her e — and which are themselves just one data set I'm working with. I'm continuing to add material to the site, and I have enough of the monthly data to fill out many years before 1996 — including making a guess about the months when the charts went dark; those will appear here in the future. There are some additions and updates coming for the site which I'm excited about sharing in the days to come. (And we do have a Tip Jar if you've found the work useful.)For now, let me thank you for following these reports — and also all the folks at Diamond and the publishers who've made them possible over the years. Be sure to drop in next month for the September sales report as we're able to publish our first 20-year comparisons in the Diamond Exclusive Era!Please enable Javascript to watch this video
ST. LOUIS, MO (KTVI) - A federal judge has charged a St. Louis man with making bomb threats against Jewish organizations across the country as part of his efforts to harass his ex-girlfriend.
Juan Thompson, 31, is charged with cyberstalking. Prosecutors say he tried to intimidate a woman by threatening JCCs across the country. The cyberstalking charge means Thompson faces a maximum sentence of 5 years in prison.
The FBI and US Attorney's Office in New York began investigating a series of threats across the country to schools, community centers and other organizations that help service the Jewish community. They say Thompson appears to have made at least eight of the JCC threats.
Prosecutors say the threats were part of a campaign to harass and intimidate his victim. Investigators say the threats began just after his girlfriend ended their romantic relationship in July 2016. The US Attorney's office say he sent defamatory emails, faxes to her employer, false reports of criminal activity by the victim, and threats to JCCs in her name.
An email containing false accusations about the victim was traced back to Thompson's social media in July. Investigators say Thompson falsely claimed that the victim had child pornography in October. An IP address associated with that report was also traced back to his home. He told law enforcement that his email was hacked when confronted in November.
In January and February 2017, the US Attorney's office says that threats to at least eight Jewish Community Centers were made as part of his campaign of harassment. They say the Anti-Defamation League received an emailed threat at their midtown Manhattan office. The e-mail said, "(Victim’s name and birthdate) is behind the bomb threats against jews. She lives in nyc and is making more bomb threats tomorrow.” The next day, the ADL received a phone call claiming that explosive material had been placed in the ADL’s midtown Manhattan office.
Some threats to Jewish Community Centers appear to have been made in Thompson's name. Prosecutors say this was an effort to claim that the victim was trying to frame Thompson. The JCC in Manhattan received an email on February 7 from an anonymous account that read, “Juan Thompson put two bombs in the office of the Jewish center today. He wants to create Jewish newtown tomorrow.”
A Twitter account that appears to have been used by Thompson in February 2017 was also used to accused his victim of JCC threats. A tweet from the account reads, “(Victim's name), though I can’t prove it, even sent a bomb threat in my name to a Jewish center, which was odd given her antisemitic statements. I got a visit from the FBI. So now I’m battling the racist FBI and this vile, evil, racist white woman.” On February 26, 2017, the Thompson Twitter Account posted “The hatred of Jews goes across all demos. Ask NYC’s (Victim’s employer). They employ a filthy anti-Semite in (victim). These ppl are evil.”
The @SecretService visited me looked at my tweets, questioned my politics b/c some awful white woman I date reported me. I won't be silenced — Juan M. Thompson (@JuanMThompson) February 27, 2017
“Thompson’s alleged pattern of harassment not only involved the defamation of his female victim, but his threats intimidated an entire community. The FBI and our partners take these crimes seriously. I would also like to thank the NYPD and the New York State Police, who continue to work shoulder to shoulder with us as we investigate and track down every single threat and work together to achieve justice for our communities that have been victimized by these threats,” said FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge William F. Sweeney Jr.
A St. Louis Jewish Cemetery was vandalized in February. Close to 200 gravestones were toppled. Jewish cemeteries in New York and Pennsylvania were also recently desecrated. There are also dozens of recent threats against organizations that service the Jewish Community. These incidents are still under investigation.
Thompson was arrested in St. Louis Friday morning. FBI agents and police could be seen carrying evidence from his mother and stepfather’s home in north St. Louis.
Tyrone Lampkin, Juan's stepfather, said Thompson had not been in their home in a month. He indicated agents removed many electronic devices, including phones owned by family members. Lampkin said he's surprised about the allegations against his stepson and doesn’t know anything about the relationship that appears to have sparked this all.
“I seen it on the news. Don’t get me wrong, I watch, but I didn’t know it was him and they’re saying it was him," Lampkin said.
The initial hearing in federal court lasted only minutes. Thompson told the judge he thought he could afford an attorney that he “has a little money.”
Afterwards, Karen Aroesty, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, said she doesn’t know if this can be called a hate crime, but she does know the impact of the threats was felt by many people.
Aroesty said, “You feel a bit out of control you feel scared just plain and simple you feel like you’re being targeted for who you really area whether you’re a civil rights advocate or Jewish whatever the reason is I feel very, very personally targeted.”
Thompson family members and friends who were in the court room said Thompson was a straight ‘A’ student, the oldest of 10 children, and the first in his family to go to college. The said he’s ever done anything against the law, not even jaywalking. He’s due back in court next Wednesday.
JUAN THOMPSON, 31, of Saint Louis, Missouri, charged with cyberstalking woman by, among other things, communicating threats to JCCs — Adam Goldman (@adamgoldmanNYT) March 3, 2017
JUAN THOMPSON, 31, of Saint Louis, Missouri, charged with cyberstalking woman by, among other things, communicating threats to JCCs — Adam Goldman (@adamgoldmanNYT) March 3, 2017NEW YORK (Reuters) - A 51-year-old man decapitated himself in New York’s Bronx borough by chaining his neck to a pole, getting into his car and stomping on the gas, police said on Tuesday.
The gory scene in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx, where the man’s head and body lay on the street after the incident on Monday, was under investigation as an apparent suicide.
Police said Tomas Rivera, of Port Jervis, New York, about 70 miles northwest of New York City, went to Longfellow Avenue in the Bronx at about 9:20 a.m. and wrapped a chain around a pole.
He then entered his white Honda Pilot and put the other end of the chain around his neck, according to police. Once inside the car, he hit the gas pedal, causing the chain to yank off his head, which flew back onto the street.
The car continued down the street until it hit a parked car, and the impact ejected Rivera’s body onto the street.
Police said it was unclear whether he had left a suicide note.The Mayor’s Youth Showcase of Achievement will award over $25,000 in cash and prizes to middle and high school students. 48 different students in middle and high school will be awarded in eight different categories ranging from Academic Achievement to Overcoming Adversity to Performing Arts. The deadline for the completed nomination packet must be postmarked no later than April 20, 2018 at 5:00 p.m. The Showcase of Achievement Award Ceremony will be held on May 17, 2018 from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. at The Mahaffey Theater in Downtown St. Petersburg. All nominees will receive two free tickets to attend the night of the show.
The event runs from 10 a.m. until 3:00 p.m. and is free and open to teenagers in grades 6-12. Teens can participate in beach games, bungee bounce, water joust, foam arena, flag football, two twenty-five foot waterslides, live performances, DJ, prizes, and more. Call 892-5060 for more information.
Scrubbin' Da Burg is an annual community service project where TASCO middle school camp sites from the St. Petersburg Parks and Recreation Department unite in an effort to beautify St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg Parks and Recreation Department partners with the Cohort of Champions, the St. Petersburg N-Team, City of St. Petersburg Neighborhood Services, St. Petersburg Police Department, St. Petersburg Fire Rescue and Pinellas County Schools to identify projects. This event includes approximately 800 TASCO middle school summer camp participants. Teens spread across the community to paint houses and other structures, wash fire trucks, spread mulch, pickup trash, clean, dust, clear debris, landscape and more. For the culmination of a Scrubbin' Da' Burg project, teens come together at the St. Petersburg Coliseum for lunch and to enjoy a slideshow of the projects they have completed, as well as for an awards ceremony and proclamation announcement addressed by the Mayor of St. Petersburg and attended by other City of St. Petersburg dignitaries. This wonderful event provides the teens with a great sense of pride, ownership and community involvement.
TASCO will provide a safe and welcoming environment where gamers of all backgrounds can participate in various gaming experiences such as, video games, board games, free use of the TASCO Center for Technology computer lab, chill lounge, and can participate in prize giveaways throughout the night.
"Level Up" is the premier gaming spot for teens in middle and high school. Teens will be able to converse, share, and explore the gaming culture. Teens will learn, unite, and play in an enjoyable atmosphere.
Hire us for your next birthday, graduation, or holiday party. We play all the hottest hits from all genres.
What are you doing this Valentine’s Day? Come hang with TASCO as we host our 15th Annual Valentine’s Semiformal at J.W. Cate Recreation Center, 5801 22nd Avenue North, on Saturday, February 9, from 7-11 p.m. for teens in grades six to nine. The night include a DJ spinning the hottest new songs, including live entertainment on the main stage, a photo booth, video games, $100 best dressed contest for girls and guys and much more! The $10 admission includes dinner. Dress code is semiformal. No shorts or jeans permitted. The school with the most attendance wins a free field day provided by TASCO. Come hang with your friends and represent your school. The event always sells out fast, so don’t wait. Tickets are available at the TASCO Center for Teen Technology, 1320 Fifth Street North and, at your local recreation center or at the door, if available.
Summer
Extreme
Beat the summer heat and come hang out with TASCO this summer. We offer seven different events at various locations over the summer, two of which are open to the public:
TASCO GAME EXTRAVAGANZA AT THE COLISEUM
Middle and high school teens, kick off your summer with TASCO Teen Programs! Our first summer extreme event is the Game Extravaganza on Thursday, June 14, 2018, at the historic Coliseum, 535 4th Ave. N., from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. with hundreds of teens in attendance. Inflatable games, video games, bungee jumping, 3 vs. 3 basketball tournament, air brush tattoos, live DJ performances and Silent Disco. The cost is $5 per participant.
TASCO TEEN MUD WARS
Middle school and high school teens, get down and dirty with all your friends at TASCO Teen Mud Wars on Thursday, July 19, 2018 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Lake Vista Park 1401 62nd Ave. S. Battle it out for a top spot in the dirtiest mud competition in the U.S. Bring a team consisting of 10 competing players and two alternates or join a team when you arrive. There must be a minimum of four (4) females to play each event. Teams compete for $500 and trophies. Activities include tug-of-war, obstacle course, eliminator and mud football to name a few. Bring a change of clothes, towel and sunscreen. Concessions will be sold. The cost is $5 per participant.Rules should make clear which party will try governing first, when the legislature will open, what a vote of nonconfidence is, what will trigger next election, etcetera
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Today, Democracy Watch called on B.C. party leaders and the lieutenant governor to agree on eight public, written rules for a minority government, as more than 80 percent of Canadians want. While B.C. may not have a minority government after the recounts in some ridings and the official provincial vote count is finalized in a couple of weeks, agreeing on the rules now will help ensure the legislature runs fairly and democratically through to the next election.
The rules should make clear: which party will get to try governing first; when the legislature will open; when it can be closed; what a vote of nonconfidence is; when and how the opposition parties may get a chance to govern; and when and how the next election can be called before the fixed election date. (See below for the eight rules)
The current rules are unclear because they are unwritten constitutional conventions—even constitutional scholars disagree what lines they draw. The vagueness in the rules effectively allows the elected premier and ruling party to abuse their powers and violate the rules, as the only way to stop violations is for the unelected, unaccountable lieutenant governor to decide that a violation has occurred and to try to stop the elected premier from doing what they want.
Lieutenant governors in other provinces have almost never stopped a premier from doing whatever they want, and have allowed premiers to abuse their powers by not opening the legislature after an election, shutting it down arbitrarily for months, and calling snap elections in violation of fixed-election-date laws. The Governor General allowed Prime Minister Harper to call a snap election in 2008 in violation of the (too vague) fixed-election-date law, to prorogue Parliament in a very questionable minority-government situation, and to declare many votes in Parliament as confidence votes even though they were clearly not confidence votes.
In England, Australia, and New Zealand, political-party leaders and MPs agreed years ago to clear public rules so what happens after an election is fair for all the parties, and for voters. Most countries in the world also have clear public postelection rules.
As well, a survey of more than 2,000 Canadians by Harris-Decima in November and December 2012 showed that 84 percent of adult Canadians want enforceable rules to restrict key powers of the prime minister and provincial premiers.
The Governor General also said last August in an an interview with the Hill Times that he thought these unwritten constitutional conventions should be written down.
“There are no legal or other justifiable reasons for B.C.’s political party leaders and lieutenant governor to fail to approve eight key rules for a minority government,” said Duff Conacher, cofounder of Democracy Watch. “It is clearly in the public interest that the rules be approved to stop unfair abuses of power by the ruling party that violate the rights of the legislature and the democratic will of the majority of voters.”
After the eight rules are enacted into law, the B.C. legislature should, as the legislatures in England, Australia, and New Zealand have, examine and enact other fairness rules to ensure the legislature and MLAs can hold the government accountable. The rules should cover the following key areas: what can be included in omnibus bills; the freedom and powers of individual politicians to vote how they want on resolutions and bills; how members of legislature committees are chosen; and what a cabinet can do during an election campaign period until the next cabinet is chosen.
“As long as the rules for the legislature are unwritten and unclear in B.C., the premier and ruling party will be able to abuse their powers and the legislature’s ability to hold the government accountable will be undemocratically restricted,” Conacher said.
Following are the eight key rules for minority government:This time, let’s veer into an area wherein I actually know a thing or two! The matter of whether humanity might someday… or even should… meddle in other creatures on this planet and bestow upon them the debatable “gift” of full sapience—the ability to argue, ponder, store information, appraise, discuss, create, express and manipulate tools, so that they might join us in the problematic task of being worthy planetary managers.
These scribbles were created (as you might guess) as part of an interview. These scribbles were created (as you might guess) as part of an interview.
What first inspired you to write about uplifting?
Some other authors (e.g. H.G. Wells, Pierre Boule, Mary Shelley, and Cordwainer Smith) dealt with this general concept before, but always by assuming the process would be abused -- that the humans bestowing this boon would spoil things by enslaving their clients of creations. Of course that is one possible (and despicable) outcome. Those were good "warning" stories with wholesome messages.
But that vein is overworked, so I wondered -- what if we someday begin modifying higher animals -- and I think we clearly will -- guided by the morality of modern liberal society? Filled with hyper-tolerance and eager for diversity? My uplift novels portray a future in which sapient dolphins and apes serve on our councils, offer their own styles of wisdom, art and insight, enriching an Earth civilization that is no longer only human.
It's an attractive outcome......but the path to get there is fraught with dangers and moral hazards.
How close do you think we genuinely are, scientifically, to being able to uplift certain species? And is there a scientific imperative to do so?
We are rapidly tracing the genetic mutations that empowered a sub-population of Homo erectus to transform into something theretofore never seen on Planet Earth - or possibly anywhere in the galaxy. It appears that only a few dozen protein and regulatory genes made the crucial difference. Already, some of these alterations are being tried in laboratory mice, so we can better understand some tragic human ailments.
There are - at present - rules against doing such insertion experiments on higher creatures like apes. But when the prospect looms closer, can you doubt trials will begin? If it isn't allowed in the open, western scientific community, then it will happen in secret, elsewhere. Frankly, I'd rather see this realm explored in the open, under relentless transparency and scrutiny, than let it turn into some secret, Michael-Crichton-style excuse for I-Told-You-so regrets.
A recent article in Popular Mechanics: If You Give a Mouse a Human Speech Gene, It Learns Faster. Mice that receive a human version of a speech and language gene display accelerated learning! Don't expect these findings to lead to a rush of smarter, "uplifted" animals—though they might just reveal something new and fascinating about the evolution of human speech and language.
"What surprised me most was that the humanized gene actually improved the animal's behavior rather than messing up the system," says behavioral neuroscientist Kyle Smith. Science writer Charles Q. Choi notes, “The gene for the protein called FOXP2 has been firmly linked to human speech and language. Humans with just one functional copy of this gene experience difficulties in learning and struggle with spoken and written language. The gene itself is not unique—chimps have a version of it. But because the human and chimpanzee lineages diverged roughly 6 million years ago, they don't have two key changes in amino acids that humans have evolved."
Will "uplift" include resurrecting ancient - extinct species? And so, it begins. I portray this happening with Neanderthals, in my recent novel EXISTENCE. Now that we have a Neanderthal genome, what's to stop someone from doing this? Especially doing it in stages? I am at this moment involved in a research group hoping to insert Neanderthal genes into tiny clusters of neurons to see how differently they behave. It is a small step, but it might shed light on why our cousins were so conservative in their lifestyles and too change-resistant to adapt.
Likewise, I think we'll see mammoths restored in stages, with maybe just ten genes at a time inserted into elephant embryos. There will be protests! The work will be driven underground! (As I portray in Existence.) But someone will do it.
You talk about how'many other species on Earth appear to be stuck under a firm glass ceiling' - can you expand on this?
A while back, we were told that only humans used symbolic speech and tools. Later, it was only dolphins and chimpanzees who could parse simple sentences. In recent years, both rudimentary language skills and tool use have been documented in grey parrots, corvids (ravens), sea lions, elephants, every variety of ape, and even prairie dogs! Some people -- admirably empathic folks -- have declared that "this means we humans aren't so special, after all." And yes, in a sense it does mean that. Certainly, it is right that we expand our respect for Nature's other wonders and fight to preserve them.
But there is another way to look at this. If so many species -- all coming from different directions -- appear to have plateaued at about the same level, then it implies that both Darwin and Mother Nature are generous, but only up to a point. "This far, you may rise easily, many of you! But no higher. There is a glass ceiling through which you may not pass!"
Think about it. If so many species achieved rudimentary linguistics and tool use today, would it not have been equally likely for the top-brainy dinosaurs? Were velociraptors equally endowed? Can we ever know? Alas, because none of them managed to put together a space program, all dinosaurs helplessly perished.
But it goes beyond that. If getting past the barrier is rare, then don't we owe it to our neighbors and cousins to turn around and offer a helping hand?
What are your takes on ethical arguments against uplifting?
Those arguments are strong and persuasive and perhaps compelling! For example, here's one: "Other species have their own honor and dignity and beauty and styles of intelligence!"
Yes, I agree on all counts. And if commencing a program of uplift on, say, Tursiops dolphins would cause all of those things to vanish, then I would say stop. But that is zero-sum thinking. And it is fallacious.
We must preserve and help the bright dolphins and elephants and parrots and sea lions foremost by restoring and expanding their habitats and natural populations. But any uplift project would work only with a small, selected sub-population that would soon be a new and different species, on its own path of destiny. All the richness of the old root stock would be preserved. You can retain the old -- and everything worthy of respect -- while creating the new.
Likewise, the proclamations that uplift would be typical "human arrogance, playing god," seem easy to answer. How about typical "human generosity"? Lending a hand to others across nature's chasm, so they might then join us building starships?
Or so their ingrate teenagers might eloquently blame us for their adolescent angst, sneering "Hey! I didn't ASK to be this smart!" Or so their ingrate teenagers might eloquently blame us for their adolescent angst, sneering "Hey! I didn't ASK to be this smart!"
The one argument against uplift that I find most compelling is the simplest. Yes, the goal is a beautiful one, to vastly expand the diversity of Earth's sapience, with dolphin and chimp and bonobo and gorilla and even elephant sages sitting on our councils and sharing unique insights? Great. I portray them having problems, in my novels, but the product is still a lovely dream. (To be clear, while artificial intelligence might be possible, uplifted sapience is demonstrably beyond plausible, even very likely.)
All of that sounds fine. Only... in order to get there, the chosen sub-populations will have to go through generations of awkward fits and starts. No matter how carefully and lovingly we move ahead, there will be some pain. And I can understand folks who declare that they would - on that account alone - oppose uplift, no matter how wondrous the final outcome might be.
In the end? I (very) respectfully disagree. All generations are built for one purpose... the one fine goal that Jonas Salk spoke-of... to be good ancestors. To suffer what we must, for our grandchildren. I can think of no greater function than to sow, so that those descendants may reap.
Dolphin parents make similar choices every day. If they could envision what their heirs might become... the earthly and alien seas they might explore... I think they would volunteer.
Aside from the ethical reasons you've presented, what would be the benefits - commercially or scientifically - in doing so?
The oceans of planet Earth are a vast mystery, filled with both physical wealth and unique treasures to preserve. We are trying to learn to be good planetary managers (often stymied by other members of our own, short-sighted species.) But I doubt we could fill that role all by ourselves, anywhere near as well as if sapient dolphin partners (and critics) were by our side. The same holds for countless other opportunities for both profit and wisdom. (I believe that -- and portray in stories -- descendants of elephants might be the perfect living inhabitants of asteroidal colonies!)
Our biggest danger is not the one preached by Michael Crichton and so many others -- human ambition and hubristic pride. No, our biggest danger comes from zero sum thinking. Proclaiming that we cannot seek - and sometimes achieve - the win-win. Doing well while doing good.
What measures can be taken to protect the rights of animals if uplifting as a practice is pursued?
I've been a little unkind to Michael Crichton in this interview. But in fact, every single one of his dire-danger scenarios preaches a single valuable lesson, and it is not "don't do new things." If you read the books and watch the movies, you soon realize that the true lesson is: "don't do new things in SECRET."
The only possible way that uplift, or any other grand project, can be done well is if it is performed in the open, subjected to relentless criticism by opponents who seek out every flaw, every danger and mistake. Only then, ironically, will the project move ahead with some strong chance of minimizing the pain... and maximizing the benefits for all.
Anything else you'd like to say on the matter?
I think you'll like my novella " Aficionado." It takes a while to get to the uplift part.
Above all, let's not paint our kids in a corner, binding them to our vows, based on this generation's obsessions. Those kids will be smarter and better than us. If we make a civilization of decency, tolerance, maturity, thoughtfulness and fun... then they will answer all of these questions better than we slightly advanced cavemen ever could.Although the biotech industry is poised to be one of the greatest beneficiaries of the legal cannabis movement, investors must be cautious with many of the companies focused on this opportunity.
While opportunity is vast, it is also expensive and many of these companies do not have the capital needed to execute on its strategy. We have highlighted three biotech cannabis firms below in order of favorability and will continue to monitor how they execute on their plan from here.
The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly
Yesterday, InMed Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (IN.CN) (IMLFF) announced a major step in its strategy after it entered a R&D collaboration with ATERA SAS of France.
Unlike some its competitors, InMed is focused on partnering with top-notch organizations and ATERA is a leading tissue engineering company specializing in the development of advanced human tissue models.
Under the terms of the agreement, ATERA will evaluate the efficacy of InMed’s lead compound, INM-750 and will investigate the beneficial effects of topically applied INM-750 at ultra-structural cellular and molecular levels.
Today, Israeli based Therapix Biosciences (TRPX) and CURE Pharmaceutical (CURR) signed a memorandum of understanding to enter a research collaboration with Israel’s largest private medical services center, Assuta Medical Centers. The companies will collaborate to advance, research, develop and commercialize potential therapeutic products in the fields of personalized medicine and cannabinoids.
Under the agreement, the companies intend to formalize the pooling of professional, scientific, financial resources and expertise, to benefit from each of its respective advantages and capabilities to develop new therapeutic products in the fields of personalized medicine and cannabinoids. Specifically, CURE and Therapix will provide support and expertise in the development of pharmaceutical products, while Assuta will support the early research and development of potential projects through its research and facilities.
NEMUS Bioscience, Inc. (NMUS) had another setback today and issued an update in regards to a private placement with Schneider Finance LLC for the sale of 1,000,000 shares of Series E Preferred Stock for gross proceeds of $20,000,000.
The financing was supposed to close by today and as of today, Schneider Finance LLC did not provide funding to close the transaction and requested an extension of the closing date. NEMUS plans to continue to work with Schneider Finance to close the transaction.
Authored by: Jason SpataforaAfter nearly 57 years, the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena closed permanently Thursday.City leaders held a closing ceremony to bid the iconic venue farewell. The building that Bruce Springsteen affectionately dubbed "the dump that jumps" was sent off with one last national anthem and a champagne toast."We are celebrating its glorious past and looking forward to an even more glorious future," L.A. County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas said.The arena, which played host to some of the 20th century's biggest moments in sports, politics and rock 'n' roll, closed to make way for the construction of a $250 million soccer stadium, a museum, restaurants, and retail and office space."This was the original home of the Lakers before the Forum was built. The Clippers called it home for a number of years. John F. Kennedy - the Democratic convention in 1960, so it has a special place," said Joe Furin, the arena's general manager.The project is expected to create thousands of jobs and generate almost $130 million annually from stadium operations."The history that is here is great, but transformation is great too," said former city councilman Tom LaBonge, who emceed the closing ceremony.For Welton McDonald Becket, it's a bittersweet day. His father built the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena along with many of L.A.'s iconic buildings."Of course, I'm not for it, but I see that it's progress and the sports arena has outlived its time. It's 57 years old and most buildings' lifelines are 50 years," Becket said.Demolition of the arena is set for next month, and the new stadium is expected to be completed by March 2018.by Stephen Eric Bronner
Surrealism had the longest tenure of any avant-garde movement, and its members were arguably the most “political.”1 It emerged on the heels of World War I, when André Breton founded his first journal, Literature, and brought together a number of figures who had mostly come to know each other during the war years. They included Louis Aragon, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Phillippe Soupault, Yves Tanguey, and Tristan Tzara. Some were “absolute” surrealists and others were merely associated with the movement, which lasted into the 1950s. The intervening years saw a shift from the original concern with the purely intuitive to a somewhat more rational—and perhaps more political—standpoint. But there were always journals intent on providing philosophical justification for surrealist artistic experiments, including La Revolution surrealiste and Le Surrealisme au service de la revolution. These were also edited by Breton. His novel Nadja (1928) is in this regard far less important than his countless essays, speeches, and manifestos.
Other writers offered important pronouncements and views about the character, interests, and politics of surrealism. Nevertheless, André Breton was its leading light, and he offered what might be termed the master narrative of the movement.2
No other modernist trend had a theorist as intellectually sophisticated or an organizer quite as talented as Breton. No other was [as] international in its reach and as total in its confrontation |
reported last year that Southern Technical College and others had enrolled students without proof that they finished high school. Two Southern Technical College campuses have also been flagged by the Department of Education for issues of financial responsibility as of December 2015. One campus received the government's lowest possible financial rating for the 2012 school year (the most recent data), a score shared by only 40 of 3,400 colleges across the country. From 2011 to 2012, the college was subject to a Department of Education review to confirm that the school met Federal Student Aid requirements. In a review of two years of data, the department found over $200,000 in liabilities because of compliance issues, including incorrect financial-aid calculations and invalid high-school diplomas.
What Happened to Their School's Accreditation: Again, not much. None of the college's campuses have had their accreditation suspended or revoked. And in 2012 three of the college's campuses were put on the accrediting agency's "honor roll."
How Much Federal Aid Their School Received: $36 million during the 2013 school year.
What They Say: Euliano told ProPublica in an email that there is no conflict of interest within ACICS' council. "Any insinuation that there is any 'home cooking' or that our peer review process is somehow 'the fox running the hen house' (it seems like that is where you are going) is absolutely 100% false," he said. (Read his email.) Euliano also described the department review as "not out of the ordinary" and the liabilities that were found "small compared to the amount of aid processed." Euliano sold the college in 2012, staying on for a year to help with the transition.
Bennett said in an email that the low financial score was a result of the sale and that it wasn't a good indicator of the company's fiscal viability. He also said that landing on the department's list of schools with financial-compliance issues is "not always representative of any wrongdoing/findings from the department." The Department of Education has described the list as a "caution light."
COMMISSIONER FRANCIS GIGLIO
When He Served: 2009–2012.
Where He Also Worked: Lincoln Educational Services. Giglio is vice president of compliance and regulatory services.
What His School Was Getting Heat for: The New York attorney general opened an investigation into Lincoln Educational Services in 2011, to see whether the school misrepresented the quality of its education, tuition costs, program accreditation, and its ability to find jobs for students.
What Happened to His School's Accreditation: Yet again, nothing really: None of the college's campuses have had their accreditation suspended or revoked.
How Much Federal Aid His School Received: $200 million during the 2013 school year.
What He Says: "If, in fact, in that institution there was some type of conviction or determination that there was fraud, waste, or abuse, then that person would no longer be on the commission," Giglio told ProPublica. "But in the meantime, there's always the opportunity for that person to say, 'This is fiction, these students have said these things, but this isn't truly what's happening.'" Giglio said that his company has not heard from the attorney general since the college sent in the requested documents. The attorney general's office declined to comment.
COMMISSIONER JEANNE HERRMANN
When She Served: 2009–2015.
Where She Also Worked: Globe University/Minnesota School of Business. Herrmann is chief operating officer.
What Her School Was Getting Heat for: Job-placement numbers and marketing tactics. In 2013, a former Globe University dean won a whistleblower lawsuit against the school. The dean said she had been fired after complaining about fraudulent job-placement numbers and misleading recruiting practices. The Minnesota attorney general filed a lawsuit against the school in 2014, accusing the colleges of misrepresenting job opportunities to students. That suit is ongoing.
What Happened to Her School's Accreditation: Not much. None of the college's campuses have had their accreditation suspended or revoked.
How Much Federal Aid Did Her School Received: $74 million during the 2013 school year.
What She Says: Jeanne Herrmann did not respond to request for comment.
COMMISSIONER GARY CARLSON AND EDWIN COLON
When They Served: 2006–2011 and 2009–2014.
Where They Also Worked: ITT Technical Institute. Carlson was vice president of academic affairs at ITT until his retirement in late 2010. Colon was director at an ITT Technical Institute Campus until May 2014, according to his online résumé.
What Their School Was Getting Heat for: Job placements and recruiting practices. An ongoing whistleblower lawsuit, brought in 2007, alleges that the school submitted false claims to the government to receive more financial aid. In 2010, a Senate committee began an investigation into ITT, eventually finding that the company used aggressive recruiting tactics and that many of its students left without finishing their degrees. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau also opened an investigation in 2013. It filed suit a few months later, accusing the company of predatory lending. In 2014, ITT was hit with a dozen investigations by state attorneys general. The suits from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the attorneys general are ongoing, according to the company's most recent SEC filings.
What Happened to Their School's Accreditation: And again... not much. ACICS has not revoked or suspended any of the college's campuses.
How Much Federal Aid Their School Received: $796 million during the 2013 school year alone.
What They Say: "I don't think that everybody that's under investigation is always immediately guilty," said Gary Carlson. "When we paintbrush one whole industry as being bad because of some not following the rules, it's probably a mistake." Edwin Colon did not respond to request for comment.
In response to the list of commissioners from scrutinized schools, Anthony Bieda, vice president for external affairs at ACICS, described the council as "highly ethical" and "committed public servants who receive no pay for their service." Bieda said the commissioners were either nominated or appointed before the scrutiny of their companies occurred.
"If issues related to the commissioners' institution were raised in a council meeting, the commissioners always and diligently recuse themselves from the discussion and any subsequent decision," Bieda said. He added that "the commissioners themselves were not under scrutiny or accused of wrongdoing."
Ultimately, the make up of the accreditation boards reflects the industry itself, warts and all.
"The way the agency commissioners are selected, it stands to reason that an agency that covers what we'll call at risk schools will have commissioners from at-risk places," said Susan Phillips, the chair of a Department of Education committee that reviews accreditors.
This story originally appeared on ProPublica as "Who's Regulating for-Profit Schools? Execs From for-Profit Colleges" and is re-published here under a Creative Commons license.All of the volunteers gained weight, regardless of which diet they followed. Those on the normal-protein diet gained about 13 pounds, and those on the high-protein diet increased their weight by about 14 pounds, but these two groups gained muscle mass while those on the low-protein diet did not.
All three groups gained about 7.7 pounds of body fat. Those on the low-protein diet gained about half as much weight, but they also lost an average of 1.5 pounds of lean body mass, and body fat accounted for about 90 percent of the extra calories stored as fat compared to a 50 percent gain in body fat for those eating the normal- or high-protein diet.
At the end of the study the volunteers who had been consuming the normal- or high-protein diets had a higher resting energy expenditure, which means they were burning more calories while their bodies were at rest. Muscle mass increases the body's ability to burn calories. Resting energy expenditure stayed the same for those who ate the low-protein diet.
Summarizing the results of the study, Dr. George Bray, chief of Pennington's Division of Clinical Obesity and Metabolism said: "Calories from fat and carbohydrate were stored as extra calories. Protein calories did not affect fat storage directly, but did increase energy expenditure and changes in lean body mass."
This small study has some large implications. The typical diet in the United States is high in fat, high in carbohydrates, and low in protein. The results of this study suggest that overeating on this type of diet can cause people to gain body fat, even if they aren't gaining a lot of weight.
The results also imply that the epidemic of obesity may be worse than statistics show since even people at lower weights can have excess body fat. Body composition -- or the make-up of a person's weight -- may be a more important indicator of health than weight as measured on a bathroom scale. Excess body fat is linked to a greater risk of chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, coronary artery disease, and stroke.
Also implicated in this study are the federal government's recommendations for minimum protein intake. The current minimum recommendations are 46 grams per day for females and 56 grams per day for males. These recommendations may not be high enough to maintain a person's lean body mass. In the study, at least 78 grams per day were needed to avoid the loss of muscle, something that is never a good idea. Most people probably need about 20 percent of their calories from protein each day, which is 100 grams for someone eating 2,000 calories a day.
How do you achieve a balanced diet that is high in protein and low in fat? Plan a diet that is chock full of fruits and vegetables of every color in the spectrum, and include lean protein such as the white meat of chicken and turkey, fish, eggs, low-fat milk and yogurt, and beans. Not only are these foods low in fat and high in protein, but they are packed with essential nutrients and phytochemicals. They are also low in calories so you can eat enough to fill you up and still stay within your calorie budget. And don't forget to include carbohydrates, mostly in the form of whole grains.
The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Image: Yuri Arcurs/Shutterstock.
This article originally appeared on TheDoctorWillSeeYouNow.com, an Atlantic partner site.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.By Raul
Previous coverage on Sunlust Pictures, LLC v. Nguyen (FLMD 12-cv-01685):
Matthew Wasinger, feeling deceived by Prenda, is willing to answer questions
On 12/6 Prenda’s Florida local to-be counsel Matthew Wasinger filed his response to Syfert’s motion for sanctions against him in which he states:
The undersigned is willing to answer the questions set forth by Mr. Syfert in his Motion upon Order by the Court and a finding of this Court that answers to these questions would not violate any potential ethical duty to Sunlust Pictures. The undersigned would truthfully answer any questions as directed by the Court under oath.
…it is now blatantly clear that I was mislead by Prenda Law regarding the overall handling of this case.
…the undersigned has significant concerns of the operation of Prenda Law that prevent the undersigned from continuing to represent the SUNLUST PICTURES, LLC in good faith, and as a result require him to withdraw in accordance with Rule 4-1.16(a) of the Florida Rules of Professional Conduct.
Defendant asks for around $10,000 in attorney fees
Also on 12/6 Syfert filed a motion for attorneys fees, which totals approximately $10,000 including costs, and where he points out that:
After filing and before service, the Defendant in this action voluntarily offered up his computer for inspection by agents of the Plaintiff and claimed innocence and a lack of knowledge. Despite the volunteering and cooperation and claim of innocence, the Plaintiff through its agents continued the case were unwilling to address actual issues of liability, and instead intended to proceed solely on the tenuous action of negligence. The further bad faith at the hearing, by presenting a corporate representative without any authority, showed an objective frivolousness by continuing the litigation despite any reasonable offers of cooperation or settlement.
Syfert also points out the charade of Steele’s “non-involvement” in the affairs of Prenda:
Counsel for Defendant filed two bar complaints against Mr. Steele for his involvement with Prenda Law, and he has consistently denied involvement with Prenda Law while he is within the State of Florida. While he is in Illinois or safely behind a telephone extension in Miami, he has embraced his involvement with Prenda Law and made multiple appearances on their behalf in the Northern District of Illinois. If challenged, Defendant can produce the affidavits various federal practice attorneys throughout the United States who have tried speaking with Paul Duffy at Prenda Law, and have only been able to speak with John Steele.
Syfert goes on to warn the court that:
Despite the objection of many attorneys, the Court within the Northern, Middle and Southern Districts have liberally granted early discovery to a Plaintiff alleging harm through the infringement that can occur in bittorrent swarm. Given their potential liability, limited damages, Sunlust and their counsel should be more wary of the consequences of attempting to violate the public confidence by pursuing massive amounts of claims. Plaintiff should further be deterred from advancing fraud upon the court in the furtherance of their claims.
Judge is angry; case dismissed
And finally, the official Judge Scriven’s order dismissing the case:
Before the hearing, Paul Duffy sent a letter to the Court claiming he was the sole principal of Prenda Law and that the Court’s directive that a principal of the firm appear was, therefore, directed at him. […] He also questioned how he would be of any assistance to the Court since he was in no way affiliated with this matter and did not represent anyone in the case. […] However both Mr. Torres and Mr. Wasinger stated that Prenda Law was in fact involved in this case, albeit through another individual, Brett Gibbs, who resides in California…
Further, the Court finds that Plaintiff itself failed to comply with this Court’s Order and attempted to deceive this Court when it sent Mr. Lutz, who had no knowledge of the company and had no authority to speak on behalf of the company, to pose as its “corporate representative.” Finally, the Court finds that Prenda Law, the law firm both counsel stated retained them to serve as local counsel on behalf of Plaintiff, misrepresented its role in the case and relationship to the Plaintiff.
The beauty of this situation is that Prenda/Steele have painted themselves into a corner in that they cannot oppose either the motion for sanctions or attorneys fees without risking another hearing before Judge Scriven.
FollowupsGwenda Kaczor for The Chronicle
I used to wonder what was worse: Republican politicians ignoring women’s issues or Republican politicians talking about them. The recent speech by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is a welcome exception: Her address on the need to reform campus sexual-assault procedures was empathetic and judicious. She offered a way forward that should appeal to fair-minded people across political and cultural divides.
"One rape is one too many," she said. But, she added, "One person denied due process is one too many."
She acknowledged the suffering of both victims of sexual assault and those falsely accused of assault: "Every survivor of sexual misconduct must be taken seriously. Every student accused of sexual misconduct must know that guilt is not predetermined." Those are non-negotiable principles, and she promised to revamp the current system for adjudicating cases of campus sexual assault, which she called "broken."
That broken system was created by a letter from a little-known public official. No one in the House or Senate voted for it, and no judge reviewed it. The public was not notified in advance and did not discuss it before it was issued. On April 4, 2011, Assistant Secretary of Education Russlyn Ali sent out her now-famous "Dear Colleague" letter to colleges across the country.
The letter advised them to determine guilt in sexual-assault cases by the lowest standard possible — a preponderance of evidence — and to "minimize the burden on the complainant." It said nothing about the rights of the accused. Informal measures for resolving "he said, she said" confrontations were ruled out of order. "In cases involving sexual assault," Ali instructed, "mediation is not appropriate even on a voluntary basis."
Ali thought college administrators were doing too little to protect students from the reported epidemic of sexual violence and harassment on campus. I have argued elsewhere that these reports were exaggerated, and that most college officials did take the problem seriously, but I don’t question her sincerity. I do question her judgment and her right to regulate by fiat. Secretary DeVos was right to say, "Instead of working with schools on behalf of students, the prior administration weaponized the Office for Civil Rights to work against schools and against students."
Colleges were panicked by Assistant Secretary Ali’s "Dear Colleague" letter and rushed to meet the new requirements. They revamped their disciplinary committees and hired Title IX officers to run programs with titles like the Office for Sexual and Gender-Based Dispute Resolution. According to Emily Yoffe, Harvard has 55 full- and part-time Title IX coordinators. Princeton has 41.
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Fearing Title IX investigations and loss of federal funding, many colleges set up extrajudicial sex courts, where defendants could be found guilty of a crime even if there was a 49.9 percent chance that they were innocent. At last count, more than 150 lawsuits have been filed since 2011 by students (mostly young men) alleging unfair treatment in a campus sexual-assault proceeding.
Consider the case of "John Doe," a 21-year-old Asian-American senior at Amherst College. In December 2013, he was expelled for sexual assault. The young woman, whose roommate was dating Doe at the time, brought charges nearly two years after the alleged event. He vehemently denied them, and her story kept changing. First she described the encounter as consensual, then said it began consensually and turned nonconsensual, then said it was assault. The college acknowledged that he was blackout drunk at the time, and that she wasn’t — which means, if anything, that she may have violated sexual-assault policy. In a Kafkaesque trial, without benefit of counsel, cross-examination, or appeal, he was found guilty and expelled.
But then, with the help of a lawyer, the accused student gained access to text messages that the young woman had sent during and immediately after the alleged assault. The texts make it clear that she initiated the encounter. She texted a friend afterward, worried about what would happen if her roommate found out: "She’ll never speak to me again." The friend had a suggestion: "Put all the blame on [Doe]." But she dismissed that, saying "[My roommate] knows me — pretty obvious I’m not an innocent bystander." And then she texted another male student and invited him over for sex, immediately after her alleged rape.
When John Doe presented Amherst with the exculpatory texts, it refused to reconsider. A spokesman explained that the college’s disciplinary process was consistent with federal requirements and fair to all parties. "That process was followed in this case," he said.
Current federal requirements threaten principles at the heart of the American legal tradition. Due process does not guarantee justice, but without it injustice is nearly certain.
The spokesman was right about following the federal requirements. And that’s the problem. Those requirements threaten principles at the heart of the American legal tradition. Due process is guaranteed by both the Fifth and the 14th Amendments to the Constitution. Those accused of a crime have the right to an unbiased and speedy trial, to be notified of the charges and evidence against them, to cross-examine adverse witnesses, and to be represented by a lawyer. Due process does not guarantee justice, but without it injustice is nearly certain.
DeVos does not plan to answer the "Dear Colleague" letter with a letter of her own. "The era of ‘rule by letter’ is over," she said in her speech Thursday. She promises to use a fair and transparent procedure — the "due process" that regulatory agencies are ordinarily required to follow, which Ali’s "Dear Colleague" letter ignored — involving experts and advocates from all sides. DeVos showed an openness to a range of proposals for reforming campus procedures from groups across the political spectrum, including the American Bar Association and Harvard law professors. Her revamping of Title IX could turn out to be a rare occasion for bipartisan cooperation.
Unfortunately, the initial signs are not good. #StopBetsy is trending on Twitter. Prominent Democrats are lining up to denounce the secretary. Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, tweeted: "Betsy DeVos’ proposal is about to make campuses less safe. New York State stands with survivors." But shouldn’t New York State also stand with due process and the Constitution?
Given our poisonous political atmosphere, many will view even a sane and necessary reform as illegitimate. In their zeal to oppose all things Trump, liberal political leaders and college administrators may abandon a generation of students to what DeVos rightly called a "failed system."
Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She is the author of several books, including The War Against Boys (Simon & Schuster, 2000).Eye of Science/SPL
External advisers to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have thrown their support behind a therapy that genetically engineers a patient’s own immune cells to target and destroy cancers.
In a unanimous vote on 12 July, the panel determined that the benefits of CAR-T therapy outweigh its risks. The vote comes as the agency considers whether to issue its first approval of a CAR-T therapy, for a drug called tisagenlecleucel, manufactured by Novartis of Basel, Switzerland.
The FDA is not obligated to follow the recommendations of its advisers, but it often does.
Novartis is seeking approval to use tisagenlecleucel to treat children and young adults who have a form of leukaemia called acute B-cell lymphoblastic leukaemia, and who have not responded sufficiently to previous treatment or have relapsed since that treatment. In the United States, about 15% of children and young adults with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia relapse.
Studies have shown that CAR-T therapies can produce lasting remissions in such cases. In one key trial of tisagenlecleucel, which started in 2015, 52 out of 63 participants — 82.5% — experienced overall remissions. The unpublished trial had no control group, so investigators cannot yet say with certainty how much effect the treatment had. But many participants of such trials have remained cancer-free for months or years.
Many of the FDA’s advisers were effusive in their praise. “This is a major advance, and is ushering in a new era,” said panel member Malcolm Smith, a paediatric oncologist at the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Timothy Cripe, an oncologist at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, called it one of the most exciting things he has seen in his lifetime.
But the therapy poses serious risks. During the 2015 tisagenlecleucel trial, 47% of participants experienced an extreme inflammatory reaction known as cytokine release syndrome, severe cases of which are called cytokine storms. The syndrome — characterized by symptoms such as high fevers and organ failure — can be life-threatening. But Novartis says trial clinicians were able to manage the reaction successfully in all cases.
Neurological problems such as seizures and hallucinations were also relatively common but temporary, the Novartis team reported. This is in stark contrast to some other CAR-T trials that have, over the past year, reported the deaths of several participants from severe brain swelling. Novartis’s therapy is not identical to the CAR-T cells used in those trials, which were administered in adults, but the deaths cast a pall over the entire field.
Thorny issues
CAR-T therapies also present a gnarly regulatory challenge for the FDA: how do you assure the potency and purity of a complex, living drug that must be made fresh for each patient?
FDA advisers spent half of the 12 July meeting learning about how Novartis has attempted to standardize, as much as possible, a treatment based on cells taken from individual people. To generate a batch of tisagenlecleucel, white blood cells are purified from a sample of a patient’s blood and shipped to a central processing centre. There, staff use a virus to insert into the T cells genes that encode a cellular receptor — called a chimaeric antigen receptor — that will recognize leukaemia cells.
The cells are grown in culture before they are reintroduced into the patient. It takes Novartis about 22 days to manufacture each person’s treatment.
Several committee members expressed concern about the uncertainties that still swirl around the therapy. These include the risk that the virus used to engineer the cells could acquire the ability to replicate, or that improper insertion of the foreign gene could turn the T cells cancerous. The panel also noted the uncertain effects of engineering and reintroducing a mix of different kinds of T cells and other immune cells.
CAR-T therapy is high-risk, and little is known about any long-term toxicity effects. But the young patients who would receive it have few alternatives, and those alternatives carry risks of their own, said Bruce Roth, an oncologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, and chair of the FDA advisory panel. “Although I have some concerns about late toxicity, you have to be a long-term survivor to be concerned about late toxicity”, he said. “And I think that’s what this drug gets us.”If you felt insecure about flying in Phoenix after a threat occurred at Sky Harbor airport earlier this week, fear no more – God is on your side!
According to the Phoenix New Times, an image of Jesus Christ has appeared on a ceramic tile near a security checkpoint near Terminal 3, which serves American, Delta and other airlines.
But whether it’s on a tortilla, burnt toast or in a cloud formation, the Catholic Church is careful to recognize any of the appearances right away.
“The Church doesn’t automatically put its seal of approval on every apparition,” Father John told me.” They typically wait a few years before weighing in on its significance.”
The image has already attracted many visitors, some who even spend all day making sure the image doesn’t get stepped on.Denton’s newest radio station will be up and running this Summer. KUZU is a Low Power FM radio station, which means they are significantly different than most you have likely tuned in to before.
Low Power FM means that this radio station will be a community-based, non-profit organization. LPFM stations have a limited broadcast range, but the community impact could (and we think, will) be tremendous. The Federal Communications Commission approved LPFM stations in 2000, although lobbyists fought for this new wave of radio to not have a place on air, claiming it’d interfere with commercial radio’s full-power signals.
In 2011, President Obama signed the Local Community Radio Act, which opened the way for local stations to operate and broadcast in their communities and on public airwaves. (Thanks, Obama!) In 2013, the FCC started accepting applications for new LPFM stations and some of those are currently being reviewed. By the end of 2015, more than 500 LPFM stations have been fully licensed, which according to Radio Survivor is a 68% increase in the number of stations in 2013.
KUZU is cool for many reasons. First, the channel will be broadcast online as well so whenever you’re travelling outside of Denton (God forbid) you can tune in on your phone or another internet-wielding device. Second, this thing’s going to be run by (essentially) you. In the words of Beyonce, “I might get your song played on the radio station.” And by “I” - I mean you.
After speaking to KUZU’s board of directors, we couldn’t be more excited with the following statement:
“The community at large will be involved. DJ’s, producers, musicians, artists, authors, citizens, students, and children will all have a voice on KUZU. We are charged with the ideal and task of representing, informing, educating, and entertaining the people of Denton. The community-generated programming will be as varied as the personalities of those on the air, covering music, art, debate, and local events. This freeform oriented structure should give rise to challenging shows that will shed light on subjects and music seldom heard.”
Starting in July, KUZU will run 24/7 on 92.9 FM. They will, in fact, need your help. So, how can you help? Follow them on social media. You can check out their Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Website. Go out and say “hi” - they’ll have a booth at 35 Denton this coming weekend. They’ll also be launching a Kickstarter in the months to come.
Stay tuned for more information, and in the meantime, spread the word about KUZU. Where will you KUZU?Friday’s announcement that the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize went to The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) represents just the latest step in the long relationship between the Oslo-based Norwegian Nobel Committee and nuclear technology.
ICAN, which played a key role in the negotiations that led to the recent signing of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons at the United Nations, scored the prize in honor of “its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons.” It’s the latest group of people involved in world nuclear-disarmament efforts to be recognized with the Nobel Peace Prize, an award that’s also been presented to such advocates in 1959, 1962, 1974, 1982, 1985, 1990, 1995 and 2005.
But disarmament and non-proliferation are not the only parts of the nuclear past that have been recognized by the Nobel Committee.
In the first decades of the prize’s existence, for obvious reasons, it was much more likely to see nuclear technology recognized in science categories, as awards went to those whose work would make nuclear weapons possible. A prominent example is the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to Enrico Fermi for work that led to the discovery of nuclear fission. He was a leader of the Manhattan Project, the American lab that produced nuclear weapons, and TIME called him “the world’s foremost nuclear physicist” in 1945, while his New York Times obituary described him as “an architect of the atomic age.” The Nobel Committee has given out more than 30 prizes honoring various research that enhances the study of nuclear activity, dating all the way back to 1903. (A list of such prizes up until 2000 can be found here.)
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But as the science and implications of nuclear weapons started to be better understood — almost immediately from the time they were first used — efforts to regulate the use of them increased, and so did the Nobel Prizes on the other side.
In fact, in 1946, one year after the first wartime use of nuclear weapons, TIME noticed nuclear scientists were “conspicuously absent” from the list of lineup of honorees that year.
As the magazine pointed out, there was deep history behind that decision: Alfred Nobel is said to have endowed the Peace Prize specifically as “penance” for having introduced dynamite into the world; it would thus be “embarrassing” for the prize committee to honor the inventors of something being hailed as “super-dynamite.”
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And so the Peace Prizes for disarmament activists began.
One of the earliest people to receive the Peace Prize for such efforts was Philip Noel-Baker, who won the 1959 Peace Prize in part for his visions for an international agreement to curb the spread of nukes, which was published in the manifesto The Arms Race: A Programme for World Disarmament.
In fact, it was Baker’s work that inspired the American cardiologist Bernard Lown to start a group called International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), which was in turned recognized with a Nobel in 1985. “His views had a profound intellectual impact on me,” Lown told People in 1985. “He spelled out the consequences of nuclear war like some ancient Hebrew prophet.” And IPPNW would, in turn, launch ICAN, this year’s winner.
The Peace Prize has also gone to people who have tried to keep the peace as world leaders and diplomats. For example, Eisaku Sato, former prime minister of Japan, won in 1974 for maintaining that his country shouldn’t have nukes and for having signed, on behalf of the nation, the nuclear arms Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). That treaty, which went into effect in 1970, has been described by the United Nations as “the only binding commitment in a multilateral treaty to the goal of disarmament by the nuclear-weapon States.” And in 1990, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev got the prize for his role in landmark treaties designed to reduce arms supplies instead of just capping them.
And yet, the work of activists did not stop the spread of nuclear weapons. As TIME noted in a feature on the diplomats who shared the 1982 prize for their work on disarmament, it was awarded at a time when the world had amassed nearly 5,000 intercontinental ballistic missile launchers, up from 500 in 1962.
The organization says it will continue to honor those who work to ensure peace in the atomic age, frankly, for “as long as the risks of nuclear proliferation and nuclear war continue to exist.”
Write to Olivia B. Waxman at olivia.waxman@time.com.Despite the fact that the days of big gaming companies producing games for the NES are long gone, that has never stopped dedicated fans from giving gamers the chance to relive the feeling of receiving a brand new game for their Nintendo Entertainment System. Too Many Games, a gaming convention held in Oaks, PA this year from June 15th-17th, is a known hotspot for previously unreleased games making their way into the hands of fans. and this year is no exception.
Yes good folks, that is an independently produced NES game
Enter, Miracle of Almana (アルマナの奇跡/Arumana no Kiseki). Originally released by Konami in Japan on August 17, 1987 for the Japan-only Famicom Disk System, this was one of many games from Konami that never made it outside of Japan during the original run of the NES/Famicom.
Miracle of Almana is an action platformer game, in which the player, who takes the roll of an unnamed hero who bears a remarkable resemblance to Indiana Jones, must recover the Almana, a mystical red jewel, that was stolen from an unnamed village by a dastardly thief.
Gone are the days where your only insight into a game was the back of the cover
As “Faux Indiana Jones”, you must make your way through 6 levels of cavernous caves, filled to the brim with various types of cave-dwelling creatures, and evil henchmen who wish to put a stop to your efforts. To fend off his would-be attackers, Faux Indy starts the game with a set of 30 throwing knifes at his disposal that he must use wisely until he can acquire some other weapons like the handgun, bomb, mace, or boomerang.
In order to ascend and descend his way through the treacherous depths of the caverns, Faux Indy relies on not only his superb jumping skills, but also his trusty grappling hook. This incorporated a somewhat unique gameplay element to this game, because not only must he rely on it on many occasions to pass otherwise impassable sections of the game, but the mechanics by which the hook is used are a little quirky. The hook can only be launched from a diagonal position, and not straight up, so keep this in mind as you scale the walls.
Go Go Gadget Grappling Hook!
For those who are not fortunate enough to get their hands on a Famicom or a Famicom Disk System, Miracle of Almana is just one of oodles of games that will sadly never be playable on your own TV, except for when dedicated fans take it upon themselves to release games like this. Almana is not the first game to receive such treatment though, as other Japan-only Famicom games like Final Fantasy 2, Boku Dracula-kun (Kid Dracula), Spaltterhouse, and others, have received similar treatments in the past. What makes this release of Almana so epic is the packaging. You already saw the box, but oh, there is more than meets the eye.
Mother of God! There’s even a Styrofoam insert! *squee!*
Anyone who has ever opened an brand new NES box knows exactly what I’m talking about, and why having a little piece of Styrofoam in there is awesome! If you did not know any better, this could easily pass for an officially released game from our friends at Konami back in 1987. From the dust sleeve case, to the manual, to the full-size insert poster, which is identical to the original poster image from the Japanese release, this package is simply too awesome!
This is an extremely exclusive run of the game, with only 30 copies being sold only at Too Many Games for $50 each. If you simply have to get your hands on one, I recommend you make the trip to TMG in two weeks! Not only can you score this awesome package, but you’ll have a fantastic time as well! Click the link in our sidebar to check it out!This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Keeping quiet about the events of “Here Was a Man” was an exercise in restraint for me. For weeks, Josh and I have discussed Wild Bill Hickok (Keith Carradine). We’ve explored his relationship with Charlie (Dayton Callie) and Jane (Robin Weigert) and wondered at whatever drove him to come to Deadwood. And now, with one capricious act of violence, the head of Bill’s story arc has been cut off.
In his wake, several characters step into the spotlight. This week marks the first episode written by a woman, Elizabeth Sarnoff, and the results are immediately apparent. Alma Garret (Molly Parker) receives more lines in “Here Was a Man” than she has in the last three episodes. We learn about the circumstances of her marriage, that she was married to the late Brom |
British, French and Dutch navies of the late 18th Century, the question of nourishment was on the minds of the warring admirals.
A solution to the conundrum of how to feed thousands of men while far away from a country's food supplies was one vital to national supremacy.
For 300 years, ordinary seamen had been eating salted meat and hardtack (biscuit), and malnutrition had killed more than half of all the British seamen serving in the Seven Years' War in the 1750s, says Sue Shephard, author of Pickled, Potted and Canned.
It meant, she says, the British and French were not only competing at sea and on land in the Napoleonic wars, but also vying to come up with a miracle food. In Paris, a financial incentive was offered.
The miracle maker took the unexpected form of a confectioner from Massy, south of Paris.
Nicolas Appert devised the method of heating food in sealed glass jars and bottles placed in boiling water. This was effectively sterilisation, decades before Louis Pasteur showed the world how heat killed bacteria.
Despite the impracticalities - glass was heavy, fragile and liable to explode under internal pressure - Appert has gone down in history as the "father of canning", despite not being the first to use tin plate.
He was awarded 12,000F by the French Ministry of the Interior - thought to be at the personal behest of Napoleon Bonaparte - on condition that he made his discovery public and in 1810 he duly published his findings in The Art of Preserving Animal and Vegetable Substances.
The French public and press were loud in their praises - "Appert has found a way to fix the seasons" said one paper. The French Navy used his method, but it was in England that Appert's idea was fully exploited and improved.
Within months, British merchant Peter Durand was granted a patent by King George III to preserve food using tinplated cans.
Tin was already used as a non-corrosive coating on steel and iron, especially for household utensils, but Durand's patent is the first documented evidence of food being heated and sterilised within a sealed tin container.
His method was to place the food in the container, seal it, place in cold water and gradually bring to the boil, open the lid slightly and then seal it again.
In some quarters, he is hailed as the "inventor" of the tin can, but a closer look at the patent, held at the National Archives in London, reveals that it was "an invention communicated to him by a certain foreigner residing abroad".
Extensive research by Norman Cowell, a retired lecturer at the department of food science and technology at Reading University, reveals that another Frenchman hitherto uncredited by history, an inventor called Philippe de Girard, came to London and used Durand as an agent to patent his own idea.
The smoking gun that unmasks Durand can be found in the almost illegible handwritten diary of Sir Charles Blagden, a fellow of the Royal Society.
Within these pages, in a big red book entitled CB/3/6 in the society's library, it is revealed that Girard had been making regular visits to the Royal Society to test his canned foods on its members.
And on 28 January 1811, Blagden explicitly says it is Durand's patent in name only.
Girard was forced to come to London because of French red tape, says Cowell, and he couldn't have taken out the patent in England at a time when the two countries were at war.
"The philosophy in England was entrepreneurial, there was venture capital. People were prepared to take a risk and go bankrupt. In France if someone had a good idea they took it to the Academie Francaise and if they thought it was a good idea they might get a 'pourboire' [tip]."
Durand sold the patent to engineer Bryan Donkin for £1,000 and he disappears from the story, having pocketed a fee and secured an elevated place in history.
Donkin, on the other hand, seemed to have a genuine interest in tin technology, and had already demonstrated a flair for making concepts work commercially.
He patented the first steel pen as an alternative to the quill and invented a device to measure the speed of machines.
Since 1802, at a factory site in Bermondsey, he had worked on turning an untested French design for a papermaking machine into a reality, a challenge that had already proved to be beyond other engineers. Within eight years, he had 18 so-called Fourdrinier machines in operation at mills around the country.
In 1811, his papermaking machine business turned in a profit of £2,212 much of which he invested in his new interest - canning.
He built a new factory on the same site in Bermondsey, where land was cheap but close to the River Thames docks. It was also near his home at the time, in Charlotte Place.
The enhanced functionality requires Javascript to be enable on your browser 1813
Now
1813 Now The poor neighbourhood of Sabaa Qusour, where Marwa lives, has sprawled out since 2003.
It took Donkin two years to refine the method set out by Girard for use on a commercial scale.
The venture was partly funded by Sir John, who played little active part in the business. The other partner John Gamble led the experiments and the running of the factory when the cans rolled off the floor that summer of 1813.
The first high-profile plaudit had come from the Duke of Wellington, then Lord Wellesley, who wrote in April to say how tasty he had found Donkin's canned beef, and recommended it for both the Navy and Army.
Nine days after Wellington decisively beat the French at Vitoria in Spain, Donkin and Gamble presented their beef to the Duke of Kent at Kensington Palace on 30 June.
The duke requested more cans to try out on his family and the following day, Donkin collected the glowing letter from the Counting House in Lombard Street. The duke's secretary Jon Parker wrote:
"I am commanded by the Duke of Kent to acquaint you that his Royal Highness having procured introduction of some of your patent beef on the Duke of York's table, where it was tasted by the Queen, the Prince Regent and several distinguished personages and highly approved. He wishes you to furnish him with some of your printed papers in order that His Majesty and many other individuals may according to their wish expressed have an opportunity of further proving the merits of the things for general adoption."
Anything but fulsome praise from the royals might have spelt the end for Donkin's experiments. He had plenty of other projects on the go, according to his diaries, like a new counting instrument, a mill in Greenwich and a new shoemaking machine devised by Sir Marc Brunel.
His early cans ranged from four to 20lb in weight. The oldest survivor can be found in the Science Museum in London, measuring 14cm (5.5ins) high and 18cm (7ins) wide, and weighing a hefty seven pounds when filled with veal and taken by Sir William Parry to explore the Northwest Passage.
From Arctic ice to Edinburgh doorstop This tin was left in the Arctic when Parry abandoned HMS Fury in 1825, then discovered four years later by Captain Sir John Ross, who brought it back to Edinburgh, where for years it was used as a doorstop at his house. Scientists opened it in 1958, 135 years after it was made, and the roast veal inside found to have a "pronounced bitter taste" due to a large quantity of fatty acids and some dissolved tin and iron. The findings hastened the adoption of lacquered linings in tins.
In 1813, the Admiralty bought 156lb of Donkin's food, feeding it to sick sailors, because it was mistakenly thought that scurvy was due to over-reliance on salted meat.
The praise from seamen for this unexpected addition to their daily menu was warm and glowing, from every corner of the globe.
William Warner, surgeon of the ship Ville de Paris, wrote in 1814 that canned food "forms a most excellent restorative to convalescents, and would often, on long voyages, save the lives of many men who run into consumption [tuberculosis] at sea for want of nourishment after acute diseases; my opinion, therefore, is that its adoption generally at sea would be a most desirable and laudable act".
In Chile, there is a cove named Caleta Donkin, so called because the crew led by Capt Fitzroy were so delighted with their canned food.
Donkin and Gamble even had a system of quality assurance - each can spent one month of incubation at 90-110C heat before going out.
And each was numbered to help track its origins. "This is the sort of thing that food factories today strive for," says Cowell.
Tributes to tinned food Extracts of letters written to Donkin's company: "I gave [visitors] a round of English Beef, which was cooked by Messrs. Donkin and Gamble two years and four months before, which, with a glass of wine, made no bad lunch" - John Dickson, engineer, 1815 "I have the pleasure of saying, the meats and soups I opened during the voyage, were as good as when first put up, and I have no doubt will keep in any climate" - Captain George King of the Mary and Susannah, 1813 "I think it is a most excellent thing for the ship's company, and particularly those in a convalescent state. Two men, who were very ill and weak, have considerably recovered from the use of it these last few days" - Captain A W Schomberg of HMS York, 1814
Perhaps the most gratifying seal of approval came from Sir Joseph Banks, on behalf of the Royal Society, who opened a can of veal two-and-a-half years old and declared it to be in "a perfect state of preservation".
Banks went on to describe Donkin's work as "one of the most important discoveries of the age we live in".
On the back of such praise, business with the Admiralty took off.
In 1814, the order was for 2,939lb and in 1821 it was 9,000lb. Then other players came on to the market, clearly infringing the 14-year patent.
But Donkin's company was making money - prices ranged from 8d/lb for carrots to 30d for roast beef.
He expanded his client base by wooing polar explorers like Parry. For them, canned food was hugely beneficial because the perils of getting stuck in the ice all winter meant they had to haul two or three years of food on voyages.
Parry also brought with him preserved cocoa from Fortnum & Mason, purchased using his own personal account, as a treat for his officers and crew. The upmarket London retailer was quick off the mark to start a canning business on its Piccadilly premises, offering wealthy Britons - the Empire builders - a "taste of home".
Donkin's interest in canning ended in 1821 when he dissolved his partnership with Hall and Gamble. It isn't clear why, but the impression from his diaries is that canning was more of an engineering challenge than a passion.
Some of his personal letters reveal a man finding the commercial climate to be tough, as a debt-ridden nation adjusted to peace after years of fighting.
To his brother in 1817, he says: "What do you think will be the end of these portentous times? From the information I obtained during my recent peregrinations; universal distress seems to pervade the whole community of this country and the manufacturing part in particular."
These anxieties did not blunt his enthusiasm. Donkin continued his papermaking machine business and later assisted Sir Marc Brunel in tunnelling under the River Thames. He became a fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Noting he had been a magistrate in Surrey in his later years, his obituary from the Royal Society said: "His life was one uninterrupted course of usefulness and good purpose."
After his death in 1855, he was buried in a family plot in Nunhead Cemetery, south London. It's an indication of how much history has overlooked his achievements that on a recent visit, cemetery staff were unaware who he was.
His resting place is overshadowed by the imposing sarcophagus next to him for the shipbuilder John Allan. And even on his own grave, his name appears rather as a footnote, below three other relatives named Bryan Donkin and their spouses. There is no mention of his achievements.
Why isn't Donkin more famous? "I think it's because he was modest and he wasn't wealthy and hadn't got noble connections which helped the big boys along," says Maureen Greenland, who is writing a book about Donkin. "People like Brunel and Telford had grand plans that people couldn't help noticing - bridges, railways and canals. But they called on the next rank of engineers to do the work and the experiments. Donkin wasn't in it for the glory but just doing his job. He did work for both Brunel and Telford but they always got the credit. "He really ought to be well known for developing the first papermaking machine. That was his life's work, but when he did that he was only in his very early 30s and wasn't sufficiently wealthy to finance it. The Fourdrinier Brothers [two British inventors] paid the money in, and he was just called the engineer carrying out the work. In fact he completely designed it and brought it into being. But it was always called the Fourdrinier Machine because they were the financial backers. Donkin didn't go down in history, which is a shame, but I don't think it really would have bothered him."
Donkin was a fascinating man and a brilliant engineer who has been recognised in his sphere, says John Nutting, editorial director of The Can Maker magazine. But he's been forgotten by the wider world.
"That period from 1790 to 1880 was a blitz of all sorts of technical achievements and he wasn't in the forefront of what you would see from day to day. He wasn't a guy like Brunel who was involved in ships and trains and all those big infrastructure projects."
Donkin's engineering company remained in Bermondsey until 1902, when it moved to Chesterfield. His successor at the helm of the world's first tin canning business, John Gamble, moved the factory to Cork in Ireland in 1830, where there was a larger supply of cattle and the shipping route to the US offered an endless supply of custom.
When Gamble exhibited an array of canned foods at the Great Exhibition in 1851, to widespread approval, it must have seemed like the tin can's switch from military necessity to household must-have was only a matter of time.
But then came a food scandal that threatened to strike the fledgling industry with a fatal blow.
In January 1852, a group of meat inspectors gathered at the Royal Clarence Victualling Yard in Portsmouth and proceeded to open 306 cans of meat destined for the Navy.
It was not until they opened the 19th can that they found one fit for human consumption.
Instead of perfectly preserved beef, they found putrid meat so rotten that the stone floors needed to be coated with chloride of lime to mask the stench, according to an account in the Illustrated London News.
Sometimes the smell was so overpowering the inspectors had to stop and leave the room for fresh air before resuming their grim task.
They fished out pieces of heart, rotting tongues from a dog or sheep, offal, blood, a whole kidney "perfectly putrid", ligaments and tendons and a mass of pulp. Some organs appeared to be from diseased animals.
They condemned 264 cans that day, throwing them into the sea. The remaining 42 cans were given to the poor.
This scene was repeated across the country, as part of a nationwide inspection ordered by the Admiralty. They found meat at Navy depots to be "garbage and putridity in a horrible state".
A letter to the Times in 1853 revealed that officers of The Plover threw 1,570lb of canned meat overboard in the Bering Straits because "we found it in a pulpy, decayed and putrid state, and totally unfit for men's food".
The supplier in question was Stephan Goldner, who had won the Admiralty contract in 1845 by undercutting all rivals, thanks to cheap labour working at his meat factory in what is now Romania.
That contract grew significantly in 1847 when the Admiralty introduced preserved meat as a general ration one day a week. The following year complaints began to trickle in from victualling yards in the UK and from British seamen around the world that other parts of animals were being found in canned meat.
Stephan Goldner Born in Hungary around 1810
According to immigration records, received a certificate of arrival in 1837 in London, profession'merchant'
By the time of the 1841 Census, he is known as Stephen and living in the City of London
Filed a patent in the same year for the use of brine rather than water as the boiling agent, thereby increasing cooking temperatures - two years after same patent in France
Became father to Susan, same name as wife
Known as a 'preserved provisions man' in 1845 trade directory
Eight-year-old Susan with adopted parents in 1851 Census, she died in 1931
No traces of Goldner after 1855
Despite this, Goldner was awarded another contract in 1850, with a warning that his meat needed to be genuine. In order to meet the demand, he asked if he could increase the size of the cans, but he didn't cook the meat sufficiently.
There are varying reports on how much of Goldner's meat was thrown away - one said more than 600,000lb to the value of £6,691
A government select committee was appointed to investigate and questions were asked in the Commons.
There was a danger that this bad publicity might put people off canned food for good, a threat that still lingered 10 years later.
Writing in Victorian London in 1865, the doctor and writer Andrew Wynter said: "It does seem suicidal folly on the part of the public to conceive a prejudice against a discovery which is of great public importance in a hygienic point of view, and which has been attested and proved."
Goldner was banned from ever supplying the Navy again. It was also revealed that he had supplied the meat to Sir John Franklin's ill-fated expedition that perished in the Arctic in mysterious circumstances in 1847.
Lady Franklin launched five ships in search of her husband, leaving Fortnum cans on the ice in the desperate hope that he would find them. In total more than 50 expeditions joined the search.
Bodies eventually recovered were found to have a high lead content and to this day, many people believe the 129 crew members were poisoned by leaking lead in their poorly soldered tin cans.
More recent research suggests the canned food supplied to Franklin was not acidic enough for that to happen and the lead was more likely to have come from the internal pipe system on the ships.
But the whole Goldner episode was a PR disaster for canned food, says author Sue Shephard.
"In Europe, Britain, Australia and America, people remained nervous of canned food and were reluctant to eat it. Now many also believed that it caused food poisoning."
Housewives wanted recognisable cuts of meat, she says, not flavourless, overcooked blocks of meat. Writer Anthony Trollope bought Australian canned meat for his servants and described it as "utterly tasteless".
A campaign got under way to promote the nutritional benefits of canned food, with advertisements appearing in the popular press and positive reviews from the Great Exhibition in London's Hyde Park.
These messages struck a chord at a time when the growing urban populations in Europe and the US were finding a voice through trade unions and co-operative societies, and demanding better food.
And the first canned food to penetrate the family budget came just in time to salvage the tin can's reputation.
"Condensed milk was the first mass produced object that people bought in shops, in the 1850s," says John Nutting, and it immediately changed the face of cities because urban farms gradually disappeared as people turned from fresh to canned milk.
Heinz can, 1895 Baked beans were originally an old American recipe made by Boston families, says Nigel Dickie of Heinz
They crossed the Atlantic in 1901, when first sold at Fortnum & Mason in London
Today, UK is world's biggest baked beans eater but US remains impervious, not even in top 10
By 1880, the UK was importing 16 million lb of canned meat, as industries sprang up around the globe, capitalising on the railways, roads and canals that were making the planet more connected than ever before.
In the US, Thomas Kensett and Ezra Daggett had patented the use of tin plate in 1825 and started selling canned oysters, fruits, meats and vegetables in New York. But it was the Civil War decades later that really kickstarted the industry, increasing output six-fold.
Mechanisation of can-making arrived in the 1860s and another major breakthrough came in 1896 with the arrival of "double seaming" which, according to Gordon Robertson, a food packaging consultant in Queensland, "made it possible to develop high-speed equipment for the making, filling and closing of these cans".
Brands like Bovril and Heinz capitalised on these and other technological developments that all led to a faster and more efficient means of canning.
Image caption The earliest Heinz baked beans can was 1895, then they came to London in 1901
Tinned food - including so-called bully beef - was introduced as an emergency Army ration in the Boer War, with Bovril the main supplier.
It became a mainstay of the British Army right up until the Falklands War in 1982, when the field rations consisted almost exclusively of tinned products, plus some sachets.
But three years later pouches, which were lighter and easier to pack, open and prepare, replaced cans.
Image caption The new emergency ration of canned beef alleviated the boredom of hardtack biscuits
Simon Naylor, a historical geographer at the University of Exeter, says the can enabled the British to tighten its grip on the Empire and it came to embody imperial strength.
The slogan "Empire Buying Begins At Home" became the hallmark of cans under a new national mark scheme introduced in 1930, he notes.
Canned food did help to maintain the empire, to an extent, says Philip Dodd of the National Army Museum, because it helped morale to have "British" food in the far-flung outposts.
But while the can was making strides, the can opener wasn't. And the Fortnum and Mason 1849 catalogue included instructions on how to cut tins with a knife.
The first tin opener was designed in the 1860s, but it didn't become a staple of household drawers until a second serrated wheel was added in 1925. By that time, the US was the biggest producer of canned food.
"Europe and Britain imported vast quantities of US Pacific canned salmon, and salmon canneries appeared at the mouth of almost every river as far north as Alaska," says Shephard.
In Iowa, there were vegetable canneries, in Chicago meat, while shrimp was canned in New Orleans, peas in Wisconsin and pineapples in Hawaii. Orange and grapefruit juice led a citrus boom in Florida.
The importance of canned food as a central part of the US food economy was further underlined when in 12 months in 1933-34, one of President Franklin D Roosevelt's New Deal Programs delivered 692 million pounds of food to needy people in 30 states, much of it canned beef.
American success was mirrored elsewhere on a smaller scale. South America and Australia had a ready supply of meat but before canning, there was no means to transport it overseas to market.
By the end of the 19th Century, some of the world's largest canneries could be found on the coasts of South America.
This boom among producers in the US and elsewhere meant that European households were experiencing some entirely new foods.
The first taste of corned beef was due to US imports to the UK, says food historian Liz Calvert Smith, where peaches and tropical fruits were also widely eaten for the first time. And tins gave many people who lived inland the first chance to taste sardines which, along with pilchards, were affordable.
Image caption A can-making machine in action at the Machinery Exhibition, in west London in 1902 Image caption The predominantly female workforce peeling ripe tomatoes at a US canning factory in 1930 Image caption In 1934, the Faversham Factory in Kent was one of the most up-to-date canning plants in the UK Image caption The Women's Land Army canning fruit in Monmouthshire, soon after the start of WWII Image caption Canning peanut oil at Central Hershey, in pre-revolutionary Cuba, 1955 Image caption Canning meat for export in the Co-op factory near Belgrade, Yugoslavia, 1964 previous slide next slide
The tin can was an important part of the shift from agricultural to industrial revolution, says food blogger Sue Davies, allowing food to be harvested in season and eaten out of season. And agriculture had to respond to this.
After World War I, US food production increased dramatically through intensified planting and the introduction of fossil-fuelled traction power, chemical fertilisers and synthetic pesticides.
This was partly an attempt to meet the widespread civilian adoption of canned food, says Selcuk Balamir, a PhD fellow at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, but it put power in the hands of giant agricultural-industrial companies.
"Previously a military tool of European colonialism, the tin can would this time become the symbol of capitalism, serving the interests of the American Empire."
The grip on the imagination of consumers was perpetuated by advertising campaigns after World War II that presented canned food as aspirational and convenient.
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In a 45-minute documentary entitled The Miracle of the Can, made by the American Canning Company in 1956, the narrator takes the audience through the technological advances of canning, punctuated by pictures of happy children being fed canned food by beaming housewives in sparkling 1950s kitchens.
"So the miracle of the can continues, bringing to countless supporting industries added expansion and prosperity, to millions of people more jobs, better security and a better way of life," says the narrator.
It was precisely because the tin can was everywhere, an unnoticed part of everyday modern life, that Warhol made prints of 32 soup cans in 1962.
The image became an emblem of the pop art movement.
Since this postwar heyday, the threats to the supremacy of the tin can have come in many forms.
Pet food is available in pouches, soups and drinks in cartons, while big brands like Heinz sell snackpots and fridgepacks.
New kitchen appliances - refrigerators and freezers in the 1960s, microwaves in the 80s - widened food choice and led to a proliferation of foodstuffs on supermarket shelves.
"The market is being constantly peppered so the number of cans sold has reduced, because the choices have become so much greater," says Nick Mullen of the Metal Packaging Manufacturers Association. But given this increased competition, sales of cans have held up well.
Number crunching About 680 food cans pass through every UK household per year
5.5bn food cans are sold in UK, down slightly from 6bn in the 1980s
Despite the dip in food can sales in the UK, the overall market is growing because of drinks cans
9.5bn drink cans sold a year in the UK, the most in Europe
European households consume about 20bn cans of food a year, same as the US Sources: Metal Packaging Manufacturers' Association, UK, and Can Manufacturers Institute, US
Mullen is optimistic about the can's future. "It's difficult to replace tins of fruit, tins of beans, tins of fish or soup. You can get soup out of a carton but it's very expensive and the difference in taste is marginal."
And the two big issues in packaging - food waste and recycling - work to its advantage, he believes.
There has been a shift in thinking from "packaging is bad" to "packaging prolongs life and reduces waste", he says, while at the same time the can is regarded as something that is easily recycled.
Tins have a unique quality, says packaging expert Gordon Robertson, so their ruggedness and impermeability will ensure that they remain an important part of food packaging for a long time.
The image problem bestowed on cans by the modern love affair with fresh food has not dealt it a fatal blow, although stores like Fortnums, once trailblazing in this grand experiment, now only stock tinned foie gras.
Canned and frozen food sales rose 11% in the US in 2009, according to Neilsen, which analysts explained by the habit of consumers to "cocoon" during times of recession, storing up on supplies.
Some countries remain impervious to canned food. In Vietnam, for example, food is mostly bought cheaply at market so nearly all the cans sold are for drinks.
But in Japan, the risk of earthquakes has people stockpiling cans of food, such as long-life biscuits. And the high price of fresh fruit adds to the appeal of canned fruit.
This global industry is powered by state-of-the-art technology. Factories like the Crown Bevcan plant in Leicester, UK, produce nine million cans a day, each one photographed to check there are no imperfections. The noise generated by the multi-tentacled robots that swing overhead at high speed is deafening.
Canning has come a long way since Donkin's fledgling factory opened for business in the summer of 1813, with a handful of people each making six cans an hour.
The Harris Academy school pupils who every day walk across the ground upon which this industry was born will soon be reminded of its significance. Head Dawn Rumley is planning a special assembly to mark the anniversary.
"It is exciting to think as we learn each day that this piece of world history existed right beneath our feet," she says. "And to see the tin can feature so prominently in our everyday lives 200 years later."
Whether the canned food industry is in such health come its 300th birthday in the year 2113 remains to be seen.
But the tins you have today in your cupboard will be.
Videos by John Galliver, audioslideshow by Paul Kerley
You can follow the Magazine on Twitter and on FacebookAbstract The question whether dietary habits and lifestyle have influence on the course of multiple sclerosis (MS) is still a matter of debate, and at present, MS therapy is not associated with any information on diet and lifestyle. Here we show that dietary factors and lifestyle may exacerbate or ameliorate MS symptoms by modulating the inflammatory status of the disease both in relapsing-remitting MS and in primary-progressive MS. This is achieved by controlling both the metabolic and inflammatory pathways in the human cell and the composition of commensal gut microbiota. What increases inflammation are hypercaloric Western-style diets, characterized by high salt, animal fat, red meat, sugar-sweetened drinks, fried food, low fiber, and lack of physical exercise. The persistence of this type of diet upregulates the metabolism of human cells toward biosynthetic pathways including those of proinflammatory molecules and also leads to a dysbiotic gut microbiota, alteration of intestinal immunity, and low-grade systemic inflammation. Conversely, exercise and low-calorie diets based on the assumption of vegetables, fruit, legumes, fish, prebiotics, and probiotics act on nuclear receptors and enzymes that upregulate oxidative metabolism, downregulate the synthesis of proinflammatory molecules, and restore or maintain a healthy symbiotic gut microbiota. Now that we know the molecular mechanisms by which dietary factors and exercise affect the inflammatory status in MS, we can expect that a nutritional intervention with anti-inflammatory food and dietary supplements can alleviate possible side effects of immune-modulatory drugs and the symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome and thus favor patient wellness. Keywords: complementary alternative medicine, gut microbiota, inflammation, lifestyle, multiple sclerosis, nutrition
How Food Affects the Course of Inflammatory Diseases: A Basic Approach The observations reported above suggest that the nutritional status may influence the course of MS. However, the question arises of how dietary molecules could exacerbate or ameliorate MS symptoms, and in general how they could favor or downregulate inflammation at molecular level. In particular, it is important to clarify what are the targets of dietary molecules and the molecular mechanisms involved, if any. Fundamentally, we can say that the food we consume has a broad impact on our development, behavior, health condition, and lifespan by acting on two main targets: (A) the cells of our body and (B) the commensal gut microbiota ( ). On one hand, different kind and amount of dietary factors can interact with enzymes, transcription factors, and nuclear receptors of human cells. This may induce specific modifications of cellular metabolism toward either catabolism or anabolism and modulate the inflammatory and autoimmune responses in our body ( Desvergne et al., 2006 ). On the other hand, we have to consider the impact of diet and lifestyle on our intestinal microflora. We are indeed metaorganisms living with trillions (1014) of microbial cells (roughly 10 times the cells of our body) and thousands of different microorganisms known as the gut microbiota. This complex ecosystem is an essential part of our organism and influences both our immune system and our metabolism. Therefore, it has a strong impact on our health. Open in a separate window In health, there is a close mutualistic and symbiotic relationship between gut microbiota and humans, and gut microbiota provides a number of useful metabolic functions, protects against enteropathogens, and contributes to normal immune functions. This is the normal state of the human intestinal microbiota, called eubiosis. Distortion from eubiosis, linked with a decrease of intestinal biodiversity and increase of pathogenic bacteria, is called dysbiosis. The most common consequence of a dysbiotic gut microbiota is the alteration of the mucosal immune system and the rise of inflammatory, immune, metabolic, or degenerative diseases (Chassaing and Gewirtz, 2014). Different kinds and amounts of dietary factors elicit the selection of specific gut microbial populations changing type and number of microbial species toward eubiosis or dysbiosis, simply acting through the preferential feeding of one or the other microbial population. If our diet favors the change to a dysbiotic gut microbiota, this may lead to gut inflammation, alteration of intestinal immunity, and then to systemic inflammation and chronic inflammatory diseases.
Proinflammatory Dietary Factors The components of the diet whose intake must be controlled to avoid the rise of inflammatory processes in MS, as well as in other chronic inflammatory diseases, are as follows: Saturated fatty acids of animal origin; Unsaturated fatty acids in the trans configuration (hydrogenated fatty acids); Red meat; Sweetened drinks, and in general hypercaloric diets rich in refined (low-fiber) carbohydrates, in addition to animal fat; Increased dietary salt intake; Cow’s milk proteins of the milk fat globule membrane (MFGM proteins).
Fat of Animal Origin Saturated fatty acids of animal origin, which are found in foods such as whole milk, butter, cheese, meat, and sausages, are the components of the diet taken into account more frequently for their deleterious influence on the course of MS. In 1950, Swank suggested that the consumption of saturated animal fat is directly correlated with frequency of MS, but a link between restricted intake of animal fat and remission of MS was reported only in 2003 (Swank and Goodwin, 2003). According to Swank and Goodwin, high-fat diets lead to the synthesis of storage lipids and cholesterol and cause a decrease of membrane fluidity and possible obstruction of capillaries, and the onset or increase of inflammation. Other more recent studies indicate that the action of saturated fat is controlled at the transcriptional level and influence both gene expression, cell metabolism, development, and differentiation of cells. More in general, the assumption of animal fat is often linked to a high-calorie intake, which is on its own a detrimental factor for many chronic inflammatory diseases. Finally, as described later in this article, an excess of saturated animal fat leads to a dysbiotic intestinal microbiota, dysfunction of intestinal immunity, and low-grade systemic inflammation and represents a possible cause of some human chronic disorders. Trans Fatty Acids Trans fatty acids (TFAs) are unsaturated fatty acids that contain at least one nonconjugated double bond in the trans configuration (Bhardwaj et al., 2011). As products of partial hydrogenation of vegetable oils, they were introduced in the 1960s to replace animal fat, but only much later it was found that they have the same deleterious effect on the metabolism and, as the saturated fatty acids, increase the levels of cholesterol and promote the formation of abdominal fat and weight gain. TFAs intake was found to be positively associated with gut inflammation and the upregulation of proinflammatory citokines in Th17 cell polarization (Okada et al., 2013). Moreover, TFAs interfere with the metabolism of natural unsaturated fatty acids, which have the cis configuration. TFAs are found in margarine and other treated (hydrogenated) vegetal fat, in meat and dietary products from ruminants and in snacks. They may be present also in French fries and other fried food, as they are also formed in the frying. Red Meat Red meat contains more iron heme than white meat. The iron is easily nitrosylated and this facilitates the formation of endogenous nitroso-compounds (NOCs; Joosen et al., 2010). Red meat intake shows indeed a dose–response relation with NOCs formation, whereas there is no such relation for white meat. NOCs are mutagenic: induce nitrosylation and DNA damage. Processed (nitrite-preserved) red meat increases the risk. Heterocyclic amines are formed during cooking of meat at high temperatures, but this is not specific for red meat (Joosen et al., 2010). Abnormal iron deposits have been found at the sites of inflammation in MS (Williams et al., 2012) and consumption of red meat is associated with higher levels of γ-GT and hs-CRP (Montonen et al., 2013). Not |
called the ‘Bad Boys of Brexit.’
A leading Hollywood studio is in talks with Arron Banks, the millionaire behind Nigel Farage's Brexit campaign, to make a film out of his referendum diary.
"We have had some very serious Hollywood people in touch with us who are going to buy the rights to the book," Andy Wigmore, spokesman for Banks, told the Telegraph. "They want to buy the option on it.”
Warner Brothers — the studio behind the Harry Potter franchise — is understood to "have done a bit of research," concluding that "effectively [the diary] is like a screenplay so half the work has been done for them," said Wigmore.
He confirmed the producers want to meet Farage and Banks when they are in the U.S. next month for President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration to discuss the idea further.
Banks' diary — called the Bad Boys of Brexit — details how he ran the Leave.EU campaign with Wigmore and the American pollster Gerry Gunster. Scenes would likely include the Battle of the Thames when a pro-Leave flotilla of fishing boats collided with one carrying singer Bob Geldof.
All profits would go to charity, said Wigmore, who explained that the film would be "a comedy."Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal held talks on Thursday in a bid to reach an agreement on national unity. They confirmed a May election but have yet to resolve other key issues.
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REUTERS - Leaders of Fatah and Hamas met for the first time in six months and hailed progress toward ending a rift that has led to separate governments in the West Bank and Gaza, but there was no sign of a breakthrough.
The last meeting between President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Cairo in May yielded an agreement aimed at reuniting the Palestinian territories under a single government that would oversee new elections set for May 2012. There has been no progress towards implementation since then.
Hamas defeated Fatah in a 2006 parliamentary election and has run the Gaza Strip since 2007, when it seized control of the territory from the Abbas administration.
Since then, the Iran- and Syria-backed group has built its own government and security forces, complicating any attempt to reunite Gaza with the Western-backed Palestinian Authority.
Abbas, in comments carried by the Palestinian news agency WAFA, said after the Thursday talks there were “no differences between us now”. Meshaal, who lives in exile in Damascus, said: “We have opened in a new page of partnership.”
Azzam al-Ahmed, a senior Fatah official, said the leaders would hold another meeting to continue discussions.
Abbas wants the head of his Ramallah administration, the independent former World Bank economist Salam Fayyad, to stay on as prime minister. That choice is rejected by Hamas and there has been recent speculation Abbas is now willing to give way.
Elections
Fatah and Hamas representatives said there was agreement that elections should happen in May as agreed in the deal. But analysts doubt whether the vote will happen if the sides have not formed a government by then.
In a sign of some tangible progress, the sides announced that an all-encompassing Palestinian leadership body tasked with reforming the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) would hold its first meeting on December 22. The body was first envisioned by a 2005 agreement among Palestinian factions.
The PLO, led by Abbas, was founded in 1964 and is recognised internationally as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.
Hamas is not currently part of the PLO, which is dominated by the Fatah movement. Hamas, which is shunned by the West for its hostility to Israel, believes that joining the PLO would bolster its international standing.
“It’s been a long wait but God willing it will finally happen,” said Izzat al-Rishq, a Hamas official, referring to the Dec. 22 meeting.
“This is the start of the participation of Hamas in the PLO,” said Hany al-Masri, a Palestinian political commentator based in Ramallah who has been involved in efforts to foster reconciliation. “It’s not the end of the road, but it’s a step.”
A spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Palestinian unity moves were reducing the prospects for peace.
“The closer Abu Mazen gets to Hamas, the further he moves away from peace,” Netanyahu spokesman Mark Regev said.
Israel briefly withheld tax revenues collected on behalf of Abbas’s Palestinian Authority earlier this year in response to the unity agreement.
It took a similar step this month following the Palestinians’ successful bid to join the U.N. cultural agency UNESCO. Fayyad said on Thursday that the Palestinian Authority was “fast approaching the point of being completely incapacitated" by Israel's freeze on tax revenues.When Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside sat on stage at D11 a few weeks back, he confirmed that his company would “broadly” distribute their next wave of smartphones. With today’s FCC filing of the Motorola XT1055 headed to U.S. Cellular (LTE band 12), an XFON variant, we now have at least four variants of this phone confirmed for U.S. carriers.
The listing helps us add another model number to an ongoing list that represents the XFON, which could very well be a part of the new Moto X line of phones. We know that the XT1060 is Verizon’s variant, XT1056 is headed to Sprint, and the XT1058 is on its way to AT&T. The only major U.S. carrier we have yet to see a filing for is T-Mobile.
As for specs, the device is expected to run on a Snapdragon S4 Pro dual-core processor clocked at 1.7GHz, carry 2GB RAM, 16GB of storage, 10MP rear camera, 2MP front camera, 720p display, and run Android 4.2.2. Since that sounds mid-range, we are expecting Motorola to introduce new sensors or software that can predict your every desire as it happens. Well, it’ll at least do things like turn your camera on when you pull your phone out of a pocket, but only at the precise moment you need it to happen.
We have no confirmation on a release or price, though we are expecting it to happen soon.
Via: FCC | Blog of MobilePhoto
Fragments of ancient pottery found in southern China turn out to date back 20,000 years, making them the world’s oldest known pottery — 2,000 to 3,000 years older than examples found in East Asia and elsewhere.
The ceramics probably consisted of simple concave vessels that were likely used for cooking food, said Ofer Bar-Yosef, an archaeologist at Harvard and an author of the study, which appears in the journal Science.
“What it seems is that in China, the making of pottery started 20,000 years ago and never stopped,” he said. “The Chinese kitchen was always based on cooking and steaming; they never made, as in other parts of Asia, breads.”
The crockery, found in Xianrendong Cave in Jiangxi Province, belonged to a group of mobile foragers, Dr. Bar-Yosef said. They were a hunting and gathering community; plant cultivation and agriculture probably did not arrive until about 10,000 years later.
On the other hand, plant cultivation in the Middle East arrived about 1,000 years before it did in China. Still, pottery was not used in the Middle East until much later, Dr. Bar-Yosef said.
“The kitchen of the Middle East was probably based on barbecues and pita breads,” he said. “For pita breads, you don’t have to have pottery — you can grind the seeds and mix it with water, and make it over the fire.”Three undocumented immigrants who were previously deported have been indicted on illegal re-entry charges, said the U.S. attorney.
Jose Cruz-Ramirez, 32, of Mexico, who was previously deported from to Mexico four times in 2010 and 2011, is accused of illegal re-entry and was found in Cumberland County, said U.S. Attorney Bruce Brandler. He was indicted Wednesday.
Maynor Galiego-Mendoza, 45, of Guatemala, was previously deported twice in 2009 and 2010, and illegally re-entered the U.S. after September 2010, Brandler said. He was found in Dauphin County.
Edwin Mauricio-Flores, 35, of Honduras, was previously deported twice to Honduras in 2009 and 2010, and was found in York County after illegally re-entering the U.S. after October 2011.
Each faces a maximum penalty of two years in prison, a fine and supervised release.
Missing woman left home 'in a panic,' police sayGunther Krichbaum
FOTO: bundestag.de
„Nu am solicitat o întrevedere premierul României, Victor Ponta. Suntem de părere că domnia sa trebuie să stea de vorbă cu alte instituții. Știți că premierul este urmărit penal și trimis în judecată”, a declarat la București parlamentarul german Gunther Krichbaum, potrivit Euractiv.ro.
Gunther Krichbaum, membru al CDU, partidul cancelarului Angela Merkel, conduce o delegație transpartinică a Comisiei de Afaceri Europene din Bundestag, care efectuează o vizită la București.
„Vă amintesc că președintele Christian Wulff și-a dat demisia încă din stadiul în care existau doar unele suspiciuni. E o chestiune de cultură politică și democratică. Vrem să evităm distrugerea reputației unei funcții”, a precizat Krichbaum, președintele Comisiei din Bundestag.
„Știu că este un subiect sensibil. Pentru mine personal, premierul Ponta este nevinovat până la decizia unui tribunal. Dar e nevoie ca justiția să poată ancheta cum trebuie și fără rezerve. Criticăm blocarea ridicării imunutății în Parlamentul României”.
„Imunitatea nu este privilegiul unui parlamentar, ci doar o protecție a libertății parlamentului ca instituție. Poate unii sau alții ar trebui să se gândească mai bine”, a mai spus Gunther Krichbaum.
Delegația germană a avut întâlniri, la București, cu președintele Iohannis, cu reprezentanți ai Curții Constituționale, DNA, BNR, Ministerului de Externe și ai societății civile.Hello friend guy lady or other,
Some of you are aware that, last Saturday, I launched a new series on my site called “Horace and Pete”. I’m writing now to tell you some stuff about it….
Horace and Pete is a new show that I am producing, directing, writing, distributing and financing on my own. I have an amazing cast: Steve Buscemi, Edie Falco, Alan Alda, Jessica Lange, Aidy Bryant, Steven Wright, Kurt Metzger and other guest stars. Also Paul Simon wrote and performed the theme song which is beautiful.
The response to episode one has been great so far and there are more coming. We are making them now and having a lot of fun doing it.
Part of the idea behind launching it on the site was to create a show in a new way and to provide it to you directly and immediately, without the usual promotion, banner ads, billboards and clips that tell you what the show feels and looks like before you get to see it for yourself. As a writer, there’s always a weird feeing that as you unfold the story and reveal the characters and the tone, you always know that the audience will never get the benefit of seeing it the way you wrote it because they always know so much before they watch it. And as a TV watcher I’m always delighted when I can see a thing without knowing anything about it because of the promotion. So making this show and just posting it out of the blue gave me the rare opportunity to give you that experience of discovery.
Also because we are shooting this show in a multi-camera format with an emphasis on a live feeling, we are able to post it very soon after each episode is shot. So I’m making this show as you’re watching it.
Okay so let’s talk for a minute about the five dollars of it all. If you’re on this email list then you’re probably aware that I always make an effort to make the work I do on my own as cheap as possible and as painless as possible to get. That’s why my specials are five dollars and that’s why I sold tickets to my last big tour here on the site, with our own ticketing service at a flat price with no ticket charges and we have worked hard to keep my tickets out of the hands of scalpers.
So why the dirty fuckballs did I charge you five dollars for Horace and Pete, where most TV shows you buy online are 3 dollars or less? Well, the dirty unmovable fact is that this show is fucking expensive.
The standup specials are much more containable. It’s one guy on a stage in a theater and in most cases, the cost of the tickets that the live audience paid, was enough to finance the filming.
But Horace and Pete is a full on TV production with four broadcast cameras, two beautiful sets and a state of the art control room and a very talented and skilled crew and a hall-of-fame cast. Every second the cameras are rolling, money is shooting out of my asshole like your mother’s worst diarrhea. (Yes there are less upsetting metaphors I could be using but I just think that one is the sharpest and most concise). Basically this is a hand-made, one guy paid for it version of a thing that is usually made by a giant corporation.
Now, I’m not complaining about this at all. I’m just telling you the facts. I charged five dollars because I need to recoup some of the cost in order for us to stay in production.
Also, it’s interesting. The value of any set amount of money is mercurial (I’m showing off because i just learned that word. It means it changes and shifts a lot). Some people say “Five dollars is a cup of coffee”. Some people say “Hey! Five dollars?? What the fuck!” Some people say “What are you guys talking about?” Some people say “Nothing. don’t enter a conversation in the middle”.
Anyway, I’m leaving the first episode at 5 dollars. I'm lowering the next episode to 2 dollars and the rest will be 3 dollars after that. I hope you feel that’s fair. If you don’t, please tell everyone in the world.
Meanwhile, we’re going to keep making Horace and Pete. We’re going to keep telling you the story.
I sincerely hope that you enjoy it. I’ll write you again later and tell you more about it. It’s fun to talk about. But for now I want to shut up and not ruin the experience of you just watching the show.
Enjoy episode 2 of Horace and Pete. We’re shooting it now. You’ll get it on Saturday morning.
This person,
Louis C.K.Steven Paul Holford's relaxed attitude to the proceedings against him for possession of cannabis did not go down well with the magistrates yesterday.
The 27-year-old from Madeley received a dressing down from the legal adviser when he did grace the court with his presence.
He uttered "sorry guys" by way of apology to the justice bench.
Legal adviser Kerry Nickless told him: "When you are called into court you do not open the door and say two minutes, you come straight into court, it is extremely disrespectful."
Prosecutor Miss Sara Beddow told magistrates police had found 1.94 grams of skunk cannabis at Holford's home in High Street.
Officers searching his home also found a set of weighing scales
"He told police he purchased a quarter of the cannabis each week for £50 and used the scales to divide it equally into a gram a day," she said.
Holford, who wore a hoodie and jeans, represented himself and pleaded guilty to possession of a class B drug. When asked if he had anything to say in his defence he replied: "I just had it there to smoke like."
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He was fined £175 and ordered to pay court costs of £85 and a victim surcharge of £25.
"I ain't gonna be able to pay it now, I get paid fortnightly," he told them.
"What about the other stuff that got taken off me?" he asked. "They took £200 off me. I could've paid today if they gave me it back," he suggested helpfully.
Holford was advised to take this request up with West Mercia Police and told he was free to go.
"Thank you guys," he said on his way out.The Opening of Misty Beethoven is an American pornographic comedy film released in 1976. It was produced with a relatively high budget and filmed on elaborate locations in Paris, New York City and Rome with a musical score, and owes much to its director Radley Metzger (directing this film as "Henry Paris").[1][2][4] According to award-winning author Toni Bentley, The Opening of Misty Beethoven is considered the "crown jewel" of the Golden Age of Porn (1969–1984).[1][2]
Plot [ edit ]
In an adult erotic take-off of George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion (and its derivative My Fair Lady), the film is about a sexologist who tries transforming a low-skilled prostitute into a goddess of passion. While he tries to prepare her to seduce a gay male artist (Casey Donovan), it is he for whom she develops feelings. In this film, Henry Higgins (of Pygmalion) is replaced by Dr. Seymour Love, the sexologist, played by Jamie Gillis.[4] Eliza Doolittle (of Pygmalion) becomes Dolores "Misty" Beethoven, who is played by Constance Money,[4] and Colonel Pickering becomes Geraldine Rich, played by Jacqueline Beudant. During the film, Misty achieves "elevation" better than Love and Rich had hoped and then cuts them off, as in George Bernard Shaw's play. However, this film then sees Misty return, take over for Dr. Love, and run the "school". Dr. Love is present but in a very subservient position. It is clearly Misty who is in charge by this time.
Cast [ edit ]
Constance Money as Misty Beethoven
Jamie Gillis as Dr. Seymour Love
Calvin Culver (aka Casey Donovan) as Jacque Beudant, art dealer
Jacqueline Beudant as Geraldine Rich
Gloria Leonard as Barbara Layman
Terri Hall as Tanya
Notes [ edit ]
The film The Opening of Misty Beethoven was released during the Golden Age of Porn (inaugurated by the 1969 release of Andy Warhol's Blue Movie) and the phenomenon of "porno chic"[5][6] in the United States, in which adult erotic films were just beginning to be widely released, publicly discussed by celebrities (like Johnny Carson and Bob Hope)[7] and taken seriously by film critics (like Roger Ebert).[8][9]
In this Golden Age era, most films of the time were expected to have at least minimal plots. Misty's plot was more elaborate than most; it was based directly on George Bernard Shaw's play, Pygmalion, as well as the Broadway and Hollywood success My Fair Lady. Some historians assess The Opening of Misty Beethoven as attaining a mainstream level in storyline and sets.[10] Author Toni Bentley called the film the "crown jewel" of the Golden Age.[1][2] The film is also satirical, with many added comic touches and dialogue designed for laughs. It includes Mark Margolis's first role. The Opening of Misty Beethoven has the distinction of being the first widely released porn movie to feature female-on-male pegging.[11]
The Italian Edition by Noctuno is an extended version of Misty Beethoven with footage not seen in the original film. Some of the extra footage was used in Barbara Broadcast (Misty's bondage sequence) and Maraschino Cherry (Misty with the matador). All other cutting room floor footage can be found in the Distribpix Misty Beethoven DVD extras. The film was initially rejected for UK cinema by the BBFC and released in a heavily pre-edited form with an additional 1 min 55 secs of censor cuts in 1983. The fully uncut hardcore print was passed with an R18 rating by the BBFC in 2005. It is rumored that the full uncut version was released in the U.S on Laser Disc by Lorimar Home Video. It was also said the Laser Disc Print runs at 87 minutes and has 1:33 ratio. The cool (softcore) version adds several scenes to pad the running time. They include: the servants celebrating at the Italian villa in cave-person outfits, Lawrence and Barbara watching Kojak on TV, Misty and Geraldine together in a tub and, last but not least, cigar guy's female partner on the plane talking to a dejected Seymour Love.
During the film, some dialogue between Misty and Seymour is spoken but not clearly heard, drowned out by a flight attendant talking to a passenger. The sequence's beginning and end are heard, but the middle is virtually inaudible. Surprisingly, the film's script has the missing words, the back and forth as follows: heard is: Misty: "It'll be strange to be back in the States." Seymour: "First trip?;" then not heard is: Misty: "No, I tripped with my brother when I was 16. I was at a dance. I learned a lot from that trip;" then heard is: Seymour: "Well... you're gonna learn a lot from this trip."
2012 restoration [ edit ]
In 2012, DistribPix oversaw a complete restoration of the film, with the full cooperation of the director. The result had a limited exhibition in theaters, but the main outcome of the project was the first-ever official DVD and Blu-ray releases. In addition, a fully annotated CD soundtrack was released. A listing of the music on the film soundtrack was released earlier.[12][13]
Awards [ edit ]
Awards from the Adult Film Association of America:
Other awards [ edit ]
Music soundtrack [ edit ]
Remake [ edit ]
In 2004, Misty Beethoven: The Musical!, a musical remake, was released. It featured Sunset Thomas, Randy Spears, Julie Meadows, Asia Carrera, Chloe, Dave Cummings, Mike Horner, Evan Stone and Tyce Bune. It was directed by Veronica Hart. The film won the 2004 XRCO Award for "Best Comedy or Parody"[21] and the 2005 AVN Award for "Best Sex Comedy".[22]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]What makes The Lorax such a powerful fable is partly its shamelessness. It pulls no punches; it wears its teacher heart on its sleeve. This is commonplace and accepted in children’s stories, but considered largely undesirable in literary fiction. In fact snarkiness and even snobbishness can be brought to bear by some critics if they believe they’ve sniffed out a whiff of idea-mongering in fiction. When it comes to philosophy—just say no! Politics? Heaven forfend! If adults wish to put themselves in the path of notions about right and wrong, the theory seems to go, they can darn well seek out a house of worship or a counselor. Maybe even an AA meeting. They shouldn’t go to a book, unless it’s holy scripture or a self-help manual. Fiction should be an ethically safe space, free of fancy ideas. It should be dedicated modestly to relationships or escapism or the needs of luscious voyeurs.
But I happen to believe in the urgency of now. I don’t accept the proposition that ours is a historical moment like any other, that we can handily shrug off our duty to the future by placing ourselves in an endless, linear continuum of progress that makes its share of errors but is finally, comfortingly self-correcting. Rather I follow the strong evidence for the singularity of this human era, its unique power to make or break that future, directly linked to tipping points associated with climate catastrophe and the irreversibility of extinction. I cleave to science and the need to communicate science, or at least the products of science. Beyond and within science, love: not the love we have for ourselves, but that greater love we forget or take for granted in daily life, the love of otherness. The desperate need for otherness. And I suspect there’s no place, in art or journalism or politics, that isn’t ripe for that discussion.
I rarely write a book where I’m not trying to approach some idea or set of ideas that I think is of interest in the cultural moment. Some of my books touch on the loss of animal and plant life and what that means to people; my new novel, Sweet Lamb of Heaven, is partly about the use of religious belief in politics and the intersection of that use with the diminishment of diversity, cultural and linguistic as well as biological. In approaching these ideas in a fictional vein I’ve had to wrestle, on the technical side, with the trickiness of balancing the aesthetics of contemporary writing (grounded in the subjective and averse to the didactic, committed to the personal and hostile to the general) with what might unfashionably be called a moral vision.
There are a few ways to know whether something I’ve written succeeds in achieving this balance, the tension of being properly subjective yet also conveying a more expansive sense of right and wrong. If I find myself repelled by the text, pulling away from something that’s meant to be read philosophically, that’s a good sign that someone else will feel that way, too. In fiction, philosophical, political, or religious ideas tend to be most convincing when they arise organically out of a character. And the only way I know how to make characters is by voice, the texture of personality inside a narrative. If you can establish a voice that can get away with being somewhat abstract, that’s part of the battle. And part of it is simple charisma.Today, the world’s foremost grouch published a review of Kanye West’s new album, Yeezus, on The Talkhouse.
He began by complimenting Kanye as an artist…
“But the guy really, really, really is talented. He’s really trying to raise the bar. No one’s near doing what he’s doing, it’s not even on the same planet.”
In paragraph two, he complimented him again…
“But Kanye stays unmoved while this mountain of sound grows around him. Such an enormous amount of work went into making this album. Each track is like making a movie.”
And again in paragraph four…
“That’s architecture, that’s structure this guy is seriously smart. He keeps unbalancing you. He’ll pile on all this sound and then suddenly pull it away, all the way to complete silence, and then there’s a scream or a beautiful melody, right there in your face. That’s what I call a sucker punch.”
In paragraph five, he compared Kanye to Axl Rose…
“And now, with this album, it’s ‘Now that you like me, I’m going to make you unlike me.’ It’s a dare. It’s braggadoccio. Axl Rose has done that too, lots of people have. ‘I Am a God’ I mean, with a song title like that, he’s just begging people to attack him.”
In paragraph six, Lou used “farting” as a positive descriptor…
“But why he starts the album off with that typical synth buzzsaw sound is beyond me, but what a sound it is, all gussied up and processed. I can’t figure out why he would do that. It’s like farting. It’s another dare I dare you to like this. Very perverse.”
If you haven’t realized it by now, Lou loves the album…
“That melody the strings play at the end of ‘Guilt Trip,’ it’s so beautiful, it makes me so emotional, it brings tears to my eyes.) But it’s real fast cutting boom, you’re in it. Like at the end of ‘I Am a God,’ anybody else would have been out, but then pow, there’s that coda with Justin Vernon, ‘Ain’t no way I’m giving up.’ Un-fucking-believable. It’s fantastic.”
He loves the same lyrics you do…
“But it’s just ridiculous that people are getting upset about ‘Put my fist in her like a civil rights sign’? C’mon, he’s just having fun. That’s no more serious than if he said he’s going to drop a bomb on the Vatican. How can you take that seriously?”
Lou Reed knows who Chief Keef is…
“‘Hold My Liquor’ is just heartbreaking, and particularly coming from where it’s coming from listen to that incredibly poignant hook from a tough guy like Chief Keef, wow. At first, West says ‘I can hold my liquor’ and then he says ‘I can’t hold my liquor.’ This is classic classic manic-depressive, going back and forth.”
Think Kanye is being hypocritical on “New Slaves”? Lou Reed thinks you’re a fucking idiot…
“Some people might say that makes him complicated, but it’s not really that complicated. He kind of wants to retain his street cred even though he got so popular. And I think he thinks people are going to think he’s become one of them so he’s going to very great lengths to claim that he’s not. On ‘New Slaves’, he’s accusing everyone of being materialistic but you know, when guys do something like that, it’s always like, ‘But we’re the exception. It’s all those other people, but we know better.'”
Lou Reed got goosebumps listening to Yeezus…
“But musically, he nails it beyond belief on ‘New Slaves.’ It’s mainly just voice and one or two synths, very sparse, and then it suddenly breaks out into this incredible melodic God knows what. Frank Ocean sings this soaring part, then it segues into a moody sample of some Hungarian rock band from the ’70s. It literally gives me goosebumps. It’s like the visuals at the end of the new Superman movie just overwhelmingly incredible. I played it over and over.”
Final verdict, Lou?
“It’s all the same shit, it’s all music that’s what makes him great. If you like sound, listen to what he’s giving you. Majestic and inspiring.”INDIANAPOLIS -- The Colts released safety LaRon Landry, linebacker Andrew Jackson and offensive lineman Xavier Nixon on Wednesday.
Editor's Picks Colts do right thing releasing LaRon Landry LaRon Landry will be remembered more for his selfie pictures and getting caught using performance-enhancing drugs than his production on the field for the Colts, Mike Wells writes.
The Colts signed Landry to a four-year, $24 million contract in 2013 with the hope that he would be the hard-hitting safety they had been missing since Bob Sanders played for them.
Landry turned out to be a disappointment instead. He was suspended for four games for using performance-enhancing drugs last season. The Colts then placed him on the exempt/commissioner's permission list for a game after he returned from the suspension.
He played special teams and split time at safety with Sergio Brown before getting his starting job back in Week 16 at Dallas.
A four-game suspension for PEDs was one of several problems LaRon Landry endured while in Indy. Pat Lovell/USA TODAY Sports
Landry, who finished with 104 tackles and 2.5 sacks in his two seasons with Indianapolis, was scheduled to make $4.75 million in 2015 and $5.75 million in 2016. The Colts will save about $2.2 million on the salary cap by releasing him.
Jackson, the Colts' sixth-round pick in 2014, couldn't stay out of trouble off the field. He had a DUI in June in Muncie, Indiana, and had another DUI last month in Kentucky.
Nixon's time with the Colts all but ended when he missed the team plane to New England for the AFC Championship Game last month.Meet Richard L. Scott, conservative sugar daddy, ethical pariah, and would-be destroyer of health care reform. He’s the guy the right wing holds at a distance — and for good reason — even as they gladly take his money:
Once lauded for building Columbia/HCA into the largest health care company in the world, Mr. Scott was ousted by his own board of directors in 1997 amid the nation’s biggest health care fraud scandal. The company’s guilty plea and payment of $1.7 billion to settle charges including the overbilling of state and federal health programs was taken as a repudiation of Mr. Scott’s relentless bottom-line approach. “He hopes people don’t Google his name,” said John E. Hartwig, a former deputy inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services, one of various state and federal agencies that investigated Columbia/HCA when Mr. Scott was its chief executive.
The Nation’s Christopher Hayes is somewhat more blunt about what Scott — known as the Gordon Gekko of the health-care world — is and does:
Having Scott lead the charge against healthcare reform is like tapping Bernie Madoff to campaign against tighter securities regulation. You see, the for-profit hospital chain Scott helped found–the one he ran and built his entire reputation on–was discovered to be in the habit of defrauding the government out of hundreds of millions of dollars. […] Indeed, if there’s one thing that’s most galling about Scott’s antigovernment jihad–and most emblematic–it’s that for all his John Galt bluster, he made his fortune (which, yes, he still has) in no small part thanks to steady contract fees from the Great Society’s entitlement programs. Congressman Pete Stark, a veteran of the last bruising round of fighting over healthcare reform, remembers Scott all too well. Stark recently sent his colleagues a letter hoping to refresh their memories. Calling Scott a "swindler," the letter said, "If he is the conservative spokesperson against healthcare reform, there is no debate."
Something to keep in mind when the ads and congresscritters bought with his money start hitting the airwaves.The Los Angeles Regional Human Trafficking Task Force and more than 30 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies and task forces from across California have arrested 474 child predators involved in a massive pedophile ring.
Additionally, 28 commercially and sexually-exploited children and 27 adult victims were rescued during the third annual three-day statewide sting operation to combat human trafficking, aka Operation Reclaim and Rebuild.
Jim McDonnell, Los Angeles County Sheriff, said in a statement:
“Operation Reclaim and Rebuild focused on rescuing victims of sexual slavery and human trafficking, providing victims with much-needed services, identifying and arresting their captors, seeking successful prosecutions, and disrupting the demand for vulnerable victims by targeting their customers.
“Police agencies and other trafficking task forces throughout our state joined in the enforcement operation to send the clear message that California law enforcement shares a unified mandate: Human trafficking must not be tolerated in our state.”
Investigators say as part of the sting, undercover law enforcement officers posed as prostitutes on street corners, while specially-trained cyber detectives posed as vulnerable teenagers and interacted with suspects on social media, traffickers and customers.
See also: First Time Hacker Shut down 20% of Dark Web in Fight Against Child Porn
Joseph Macias, the special agent in charge for HSI Los Angeles, added:
“Our goal in this unprecedented collaborative enforcement effort was two-fold. First, to provide vital services to any sex trafficking victims we encountered, so they can begin to reclaim and rebuild their lives.
“Second, to start the process to reclaim and rebuild the neighborhoods that have been degraded by organized prostitution schemes which not only exploit the vulnerable, but also often draw other criminal enterprises into the area.”
While McDonnell said the arrests represent a “very sad commentary on the condition we’re dealing with,” Mara Elliott, San Diego City attorney, insisted “pretending this issue doesn’t exist only makes us more complicit in it.” They are absolutely right.
Mr president @realDonaldTrump I would like to remind you of what you said in 2012. Please help the children #PizzaGate @POTUS @FBI pic.twitter.com/ivD562Idi9 — Becki (@becki_p20) January 29, 2017
Last month, Uber driver Keith Avila helped rescue a 16-year-old girl out of sex trafficking in Sacramento, California. He may have saved an unlucky girl from the shackles of child prostitution, but what about the others who are less fortunate?A personal information file by Bronwen Humphries (1994) Introduction -- Time Scale -- Human Descent -- Ramapithecines -- Australopithecines -- Homo Habilis -- Homo Erectus -- Neanderthal Man -- Homo Sapiens Sapiens -- Early Agriculture -- Middle Ages -- What Were People Programmed to Eat? -- Biological Comparisons with Higher Primates -- Health and Endurance -- Conclusions -- Further Reading Introduction You sometimes hear the argument that humans are "naturally vegetarian" or that they evolved as vegetarians. This is somewhat dangerous to pursue as the scientific evidence all indicates that we are omnivores, i.e., we can survive on a wide variety of plant and animal foods. It also used to be believed that the great apes were all frugivores (fruit-eaters), but recent reseach shows that chimpanzees at least will attack and kill small animals and will eat carrion if they find it. The chimpanzee is thought to be our closest animal relative. The extreme opposite concept, however, that of Man the Great Hunter, also seems to be untrue. In his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, Jared Diamond describes how he was invited on a hunt by a tribe in New Guinea who had retained Stone Age technology and habits of thought in the 20th century. The day's total bag was two baby birds, a few frogs, and a lot of mushrooms. Although the men of the tribe frequently boasted of the large animals |
an steered the orchestra through an earlier crisis when he became a consultant in 2008 and executive director in 2009.
Before he resigned, Swan and O’Neill said the loss of a major donation put the orchestra on a financial precipice, leaving employees unpaid, concerts cancelled and ticket holders unable to get refunds.
Documents made public Tuesday show exactly what’s being sought from the city by O’Neill, a businessperson and volunteer president of the orchestra’s board.
His letter states it needs:
$215,000 to pay the salaries and benefits of musicians and staff for December
$110,000 to pay Canada Revenue Agency for unspecified “source deductions” that haven’t been paid.
$50,000 to pay for “insolvency practitioners to manage a voluntary bankruptcy of Orchestra London.”
O’Neill’s letter will go to council’s strategic priorities and policy committee Thursday.
It doesn’t specify the deficit from last season that’s pushed the organization to the financial brink. But earlier this week, O’Neill indicated to The Free Press the shortfall was roughly $330,000.
It’s believed that has pushed the orchestra’s accumulated debt to more than $1 million.
It’s unclear how much money in ticket sales to now-cancelled future concerts was collected and already spent. Ticket holders are unlikely at this point to get refunds.
On the matter of the $110,000 owed to the Canada Revenue Agency, O’Neill in his letter appears to distance the orchestra board from its management team, which was led by Swan. O’Neill writes, “The board of directors was unaware that these amounts were unpaid.”
Orchestra London emerged from a financial crunch about five years ago and has since posted relatively small annual surpluses. But a $350,000 donation expected this summer didn’t arrive, Swan and O’Neill have said.
That created a budget shortfall for last season, which has triggered the financial crisis and emergency request to city hall.
Mayor Matt Brown said the $375,000 request is “even more than I’d originally thought” they would seek. “By all accounts it appears this is an organization that’s in serious trouble and there’s a downward trend.”
The orchestra has delivered long-requested financial statements to city hall, though they haven’t been audited.
— — —
THE ORCHESTRA STATEMENT
Today, December 16, 2014, at 5 p.m., the Board of Directors of Orchestra London Canada Inc. accepted the resignation of Executive Director Joe Swan — effective immediately. The Board thanks Mr. Swan for his considerable contributions on behalf of Orchestra London and wish him well in his future endeavours.
— — —
JOE SWAN
1988-2003: London city councillor
2008: Consultant for Orchestra London
2009: Named executive director of Orchestra London
2010: Elected as city councillor in Ward 3
Oct. 27, 2014: Finishes third in mayor’s race
Dec. 16, 2014: Resigns as orchestra’s executive director
— — —
THE ORCHESTRA
BY THE NUMBERS
$375,000: Request for emergency cash infusion, going to politicians Thursday.
$50,000: Portion of that request that would be spent managing its bankruptcy.
$330,000: Estimated budget shortfall from last season, pushing it to the brink.
$1.2 million: Estimated accumulated debt the orchestra is carrying.
$500,000: Annual grant already given by city hall.
$500,000: Line of credit underwritten by city taxpayers; likely to be due in event of bankruptcy.
$0: Amount musicians and other employees have been paid mere weeks before Christmas.
patrick.maloney@sunmedia.ca
— — —
WHAT THEY SAID
“By all accounts it appears this is an organization that’s in serious trouble and there’s a downward trend.”
Mayor Matt Brown
“I’m glad to have the information in advance of (Thursday’s) meeting. I think who’s managing the orchestra is something you’d want to consider.”
Ward 4 Coun. Jesse Helmer
“We’re a new council and we’re looking for new ideas and new approaches. What we need is to look for a new idea.”
Ward 1 Coun. Michael van Holst
Compiled by Free Press reporter Dan Brownby Roland Boer
This is a question I am asked reasonably often in China: do you think China is communist? Many would not hesitate to say ‘no’. Not only do you find this position among the bland liberal commentators around the globe, but some quarters of the Left have bought into this position as well – either China was communist at some point in the past, or it never really was at all.
So my answer: not yet, but it also depends on what you mean by ‘communist’?
At least three points can be made, and usually form the opening of my response. The first two can be dealt with briefly. To begin with, the government is the Communist Party of China, for whom the official ideology is ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. No matter how much some may froth at the mouth and say that it is an empty shell of an ideology,[1] that the government must appear to hold the line for the sake of legitimacy, that nationalism has replaced socialism as the real doctrine, the reality remains: it is the Communist Party of China, with a history of almost 100 years. (For what it is worth, I would challenge each of those assumptions, but I have no need to do so here, since I merely wish to make the minimalist point).
Second and more strongly than this: Marx and Engels argued that the first step to communism is the ‘abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes’.[2] The fact is that there is no private ownership of land in China, for it is commonly ‘owned’. You can obtain usufruct of the land, that is, land use right from the state, either for a specific period of time or for specific purposes. You may obtain for a period of time either granted land use right or allocated land use right, with different laws applying to each, but you cannot acquire the land as private property.[3] This may come as some surprise to those who opine unthinkingly that China is the most capitalist country of all, even beyond the much-vaunted ‘free market’ of the USA. Instead, speculation on land – one of the cornerstones of a capitalist system – is simply impossible in China. You can of course own an apartment, or even the building that stands upon the land, but not the land upon which it is built. Even more, in cities like Beijing and Shanghai it is also forbidden to invest in accommodation – the purchase of additional apartments beyond one’s own dwelling for the sake of making money.
Third and in more detail, we come to the question of communism itself. Here I would like both to take a little more time and change tack. This change of approach tackles some mistaken assumptions, namely, that communism is a rational idea which needs to be realized, that it is an ideal toward which we strive and that it is singular. So let me begin with the position that communism is a rational idea, a blueprint that needs to be actualised. For the purists, this rational idea may be gleaned from Marx, Engels and perhaps Lenin: common ownership of the means of production; abolition of private property; eventual withering away of the state.
The catch is that these statements are general slogans, indeed rather vague and far from any detailed outline of a communist system.[4] Is it because they did not have the time to do so? Or that they felt the task was better left to others? Many have later tried to produce a blueprint, providing the guidelines for what a democratic socialist system might look like and criticising the forms that socialism has taken thus far.[5] Indeed, the temptation is always there, for we need at least some idea of the object of our striving.
However, this move also contains a trap, for it postulates a philosophical revolution that seeks to undermine the false rationality of capitalism, or indeed of the corrupted socialisms that have been, for the sake of the true rationality of communism.[6] In other words, you propose an alternative rational model that challenges and overthrows the rational model of capitalism. Now the trap springs, for this approach remains within the framework of what it seeks to overcome: Marxism remains a form of rationality. It even risks becoming a type of idealism in which the idea of communism is primary rather than its practice.
From this rationalist position the remaining assumptions flow, for now communism becomes an ideal and singular. With the ideal dimension we face a dilemma, since the communist ideal can act as both a negative and a positive force. Negatively, communism becomes a well-nigh romanticist and perfectionist ideal, one that has not yet been realised in any of the socialist revolutions that have taken place – and there are many of those. Compared to this ideal, they have all fallen short, becoming ‘totalitarian’, ‘state capitalist’, ‘rogue’, ‘outlaw’, or ‘failures’.[7] All too often the cipher for this assumption is none other than Stalin. For many Western Marxists, Stalin marks the betrayal and travesty of communism.[8] Pin the label ‘Stalinist’ on any government and it is automatically assumed not to be communism at all, for Stalin was a ‘brutal’ and ‘totalitarian’ dictator, no different from Hitler.[9]
Elsewhere, I have argued that this denigration of actual socialist revolutions in the name of the perfect revolution yet to come gives voice to resentment at the fact that no successful revolution has yet occurred in Western Europe or North America.[10] It enables a position that may be called ‘Before October’, in which one’s whole mindset is determined by preparation for the revolution rather than what one does after gaining power. Thus, Lenin before October, Mao before 1949, or even Ho Chi Minh before 1945 become the focus of attention. Less interest is shown in the much more difficult tasks of constructing socialism after the revolution. This assumption – or rather, unquestioned framework – for engaging with Marxism struck me at a conference on Lenin, held in Wuhan, China, in October 2012. Half of the delegates were Chinese and the other half foreigners.
Nearly all of the foreigners revealed an interest in the Lenin before the October Revolution, positioning themselves in the process of preparing for a revolution to come. By contrast, most of the Chinese delegates were interested in the Lenin after October, in the many difficulties faced after seizing power – international opposition, corruption, the position of women, forms of the state, maintaining the appeal of socialism and the government’s legitimacy, to name but a few. Obviously, their perspective was directly related to the situation and difficulties facing China today. These perspectives may not have been consciously articulated, but they revealed a distinct divide. Implicitly, most of the foreigners indicated by their perspective that China too is a failed socialism, and thereby awaits a true socialist revolution.
So, the negative dimension of the ideal of communism leads one to dismiss all the revolutions that have taken place, in the name of a perfect revolution that lies in the indeterminate future. This approach also leads to the continual neglect in studying in any sustained way the many historical examples of socialist revolutions and constructions of socialism. In other words, discussions that assume an ideal communism seem to float in an ahistorical ether, replacing careful analysis with exegesis of the occasional small and select piece by Marx, Lenin or perhaps Mao that fits in with this perspective.[11]
At the same time, communism as an ideal does have a beneficial dimension. In this case, the ideal functions not so much as a goal to be achieved, but as a reminder that no form of communism can say ‘this is it, we have achieved real communism’. Here we need to shift focus, for the emphasis is not on some perfect and romanticist ideal, but on the need never to be satisfied with what one has achieved so far. I would prefer to follow Lukács and speak of communism as a process of becoming rather than being,[12] or in the concrete language of Marx and Engels: ‘Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’.[13]
However, this position has its own dialectical dimension. If we accept that the idea of becoming – through Hegel, Nietzsche, Whitehead and others – is itself only possible within capitalism, then communism itself both ends and transforms this idea. That is, becoming undergoes an Aufhebung through communism in a way that relies on capitalism as a prerequisite but simultaneously overcomes capitalism for a very different mode of production. By now it should be obvious that the notion of an ideal has itself undergone a transformation, functioning as a signal of communism as becoming rather than being.
The final point concerns singularity and multiplicity. One of the more pernicious forms of dismissals of Chinese socialism, let alone the many others of Eastern Europe or of Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, Cuba or even Venezuela, is the notion that communism is a singular goal. The blueprint of which I spoke earlier has a tendency to be seen as one rather than multiple. Thus it becomes all too easy to define communism in a certain way, claim that it is this and nothing else, and thereby dismiss anything that does not measure up to the standard. Instead, I would like to take up Deng Xiaoping’s phrase ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’.[14] The slogan has implications greater than he may have imagined, although it is consistent in some ways with Mao’s own idea of the ‘sinification’ of Marxism.[15] I do not want to enter the specific debates around this phrase here, but seek to deploy it in the direction of multiplicity.
If there is a socialism with Chinese characteristics, then there is also – to name but a few – socialisms with Russian, Romanian, Yugoslavian, Vietnamese, and even North Korean characteristics. Or, to avoid the culturist associations of such terms, we may also describe them variously as authoritarian communism, new democracy, democratic centralism, socialist democracy and so on. Countries with longer histories of socialist government – such as the USSR and China – find that they pass through more than one of these at different times. But the point is that multiple possibilities for socialism have opened up with the rich history of socialist revolutions.
So my answer to the question with which I began – ‘do you think China is communist?’ – is ‘not yet, but what do you mean by communism?’ Or rather, the initial question should be, ‘do you think China is becoming communist?’ Practice rather than some form of rationalism that must be actualised, becoming rather than being, multiple truths rather than a singular truth – these are the features of communism I prefer to emphasise. In other words, as Yermakov put it in a moment of insight: communism is ‘a search for the correct path to the unknown’.[16]
References
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken, 2004 [1951].
Boer, Roland. “Before October: The Unbearable Romanticism of Western Marxism.”
Monthly Review (2011). Published electronically 8 October: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/boer081011.html
Cockshott, W. Paul, and Allin Cottrell. Towards a New Socialism. Nottingham: Spokesman, 1993.
Deng, Xiaoping. “Opening Speech at the Twelfth National Congress of the Communist Party
of China, September 1, 1982.” People’s Daily Online 3 (1982).
Douzinas, Costas, and Slavoj Žižek, eds. The Idea of Communism. London: Verso, 2010.
Engels, Friedrich. “Principles of Communism.” In Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 6,
341-57. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1847 [1976].
Guo, Sujian, ed. Political Science and Chinese Political Studies: The State of the Field.
Heidelberg: Springer, 2013.
Kluver, Alan R. Legitimating the Chinese Economic Reforms: A Rhetoric of Myth and
Orthodoxy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.
Losurdo, Domenico. Stalin: Storia e critica di una leggenda nera. Translated by Marie-Ange
Patrizio. Rome: Carocci editore, 2008.
———. “Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism.” Historical Materialism 12,
no. 2 (2004): 25-55.
Mao, Zedong. “On New Democracy (January 15).” In Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary
Writings 1912-1949, vol. 7, edited by Stuart R. Schram, 330-69. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1940
[2005].
Marx, Karl. “The Abolition of Landed Property.” Marxist Internet Archive (1869).
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1869/12/03.htm
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “The Manifesto of the Communist Party.” In Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 6, 477-519. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1848 [1976].
Yermakov, A. A. Lunacharsky. Moscow: Novosti, 1975.
End notes:
[1] For a relatively recent instance, see the essay by Alessandro Russo in Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek, eds., The Idea of Communism (London: Verso, 2010).
[2] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 6, 477-519 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1848 [1976]). See also Karl Marx, “The Abolition of Landed Property,” Marxist Internet Archive(1869), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1869/12/03.htm
[3] See the full statement of the 2007 property law in http://www.lehmanlaw.com/resource-centre/laws-and-regulations/general/property-rights-law-of-the-peoples-republic-of-china.html. See also http://www.doingbusiness.org/data/exploreeconomies/china/registering-property. This situation does, of course, cause consternation and confusion among global capitalist advocates like The Economist. See ‘China’s Murky Ownership Rules: Who Owns What?’ The Economist, June 7, 2011. http://www.economist.com/node/18928526.
[4] Even Engels’s more direct effort remains at the level of general prescriptions. See Friedrich Engels, “Principles of Communism,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 6, 341-57 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1847 [1976]).
[5] For instance, W. Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell, Towards a New Socialism (Nottingham: Spokesman, 1993).
[6] Bruno Bosteels is particularly guilty of such an approach in his contribution to Douzinas and Žižek, The Idea of Communism.
[7] For a recent assertion of the ‘failure’ of communism, see the essay by Judith Balso in Douzinas and Žižek, The Idea of Communism.
[8] For instance, see the essay by Alain Badiou in Douzinas and Žižek, The Idea of Communism, 10.
[9] The most influential example of such propaganda regarding Stalin and Hitler is still Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken, 2004 [1951]). Her work enabled the Western European and US Left to find significant common ground with liberal and conservative criticism of communism. See the compelling destruction of this argument in Domenico Losurdo, “Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism,” Historical Materialism 12, no. 2 (2004); Domenico Losurdo, Stalin: Storia e critica di una leggenda nera, trans. Marie-Ange Patrizio (Rome: Carocci editore, 2008).
[10] Roland Boer, “Before October: The Unbearable Romanticism of Western Marxism,” Monthly Review (2011), http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/boer081011.html
[11] This mystifying effect is particularly noticeable in most of the items in Douzinas and Žižek, The Idea of Communism.
[12] Lukács 1970 [1924], pp. 72-73.
[13] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 49.
[14] “In carrying out our modernization programme we must proceed from Chinese realities. Both in revolution and in construction we should also learn from foreign countries and draw on their experience, but mechanical application of foreign experience and copying of foreign models will get us nowhere. We have had many lessons in this respect. We must integrate the universal truth of Marxism with the concrete realities of China, blaze a path of our own and build a socialism with Chinese characteristics – that is the basic conclusion we have reached after reviewing our long history.” Xiaoping Deng, “Opening Speech at the Twelfth National Congress of the Communist Party of China, September 1, 1982,” People’s Daily Online 3 (1982).
[15] “China must assimilate on a large scale the progressive culture of foreign countries, as an ingredient for enriching its own culture. Not enough of this was done in the past. We should assimilate whatever is useful to us today not only from the present-day socialist and new-democratic cultures but also from the older cultures of foreign countries, for example, from the culture of the various capitalist countries in the Age of Enlightenment. However, we absolutely cannot gulp down any of this foreign material uncritically, but must treat it as we do our food — first chewing it in the mouth, then subjecting it to the working of the stomach and intestines with their juices and secretions, and separating it into essences to be absorbed and waste matter to be discarded — before it can nourish us. So-called wholesale Westernization is wrong. China has suffered a great deal in the past from the formalist absorption of foreign things. Similarly, in applying Marxism to China, Chinese Communists must fully and properly integrate the universal truth of Marxism with the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution, or, in other words, the universal truth of Marxism must have a national form if it is to be useful, and in no circumstances can it be applied subjectively as a mere formula.” Zedong Mao, “On New Democracy (January 15),” in Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912-1949, ed. Stuart R. Schram, vol. 7, 330-69 (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1940 [2005]), 367-68. The debate over scientification/Westernisation versus sinification/indigenisation continues in political science today; see Sujian Guo, ed. Political Science and Chinese Political Studies: The State of the Field (Heidelberg: Springer, 2013). See also Alan R. Kluver, Legitimating the Chinese Economic Reforms: A Rhetoric of Myth and Orthodoxy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 63.
[16] A. Yermakov, A. A. Lunacharsky (Moscow: Novosti, 1975), 107.
[Thank you for your contributions Roland.]
The writer is a left-winger from Australia, based in the industrial city of Newcastle. His main interest concerns the intersections of Marxism and religion, having written a five-volume series called The Criticism of Heaven and Earth (Haymarket, 2009-13). He has recently completed a long study on Lenin and religion. He frequently visits Asia and teaches at Renmin University of China (Beijing).
If publishing or re-posting this article kindly use the entire piece, credit the writer and this website: Philosophers for Change, philosophersforchange.org. Thanks for your support.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
AdvertisementsMueller’s team is being accused of lawlessness by President Trump’s lawyers. The Mueller witch hunters have unlawfully taken tens of thousands of email from the Trump transition team and used them to conduct witness interviews [and to undoubtedly threaten people].
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team has “many tens of thousands” of emails from the Trump transition team, obtained through the General Services Administration – the government agency responsible for hosting the transition email system which used a “ptt.gov” address, and which according to a Trump lawyer were improperly obtained through “unlawful conduct.”
The trove of documents, which includes sensitive emails to and from Trump son-in-law and top advisor Jared Kushner, comprise 12 email accounts – one of which reportedly contains around 7,000 emails. Mueller’s team has reportedly been using the emails as the basis for witness interviews, sources tell Axios.
The transition emails are said to include sensitive exchanges on matters that include potential appointments, gossip about the views of particular senators involved in the confirmation process, speculation about vulnerabilities of Trump nominees, strategizing about press statements, and policy planning on everything from war to taxes. –Axios
“Mueller is using the emails to confirm things, and get new leads,” a transition source adds.
This is clearly a fishing expedition. It’s unAmerican. We don’t do this to people in this country.
Transition officials had reportedly pre-sorted emails in anticipation of Mueller’s investigation, separating “privileged” communications from the rest of the cache, and sources say they were surprised to learn of Mueller’s use of the emails – as they have been fully cooperative with the special counsel investigation. “They ask us to waive NDAs [nondisclosure agreements] and things like that,” a second source said. “We have never said ‘no’ to anything.”
Tranistion team lawyer Kory Langhofer says the Special Counsel obtained the documents through “unlawful conduct” by the General Services Administration, reports Fox News.
There is no question this Democrat-packed Mueller team is out to get Trump at all costs. There is no reason to doubt it.
Democrat partisan Adam Schiff is on TV daily claiming there is proof of Trump-Russia collusion but he never gives any evidence. It is also clear that either Schiff or one of the other Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, leaked Donald Trump Jr.’s testimony as he was testifying, only it went out in bits and pieces, with half-truths and unfavorable tidbits leaking to the press. Trump Jr. wants this investigated.
Schiff was the one who left the room at about the times of the leaks.
The entire Trump collusion story seems to be the result of Clinton opposition research and the unfairness of it is beginning to reach pollsters, even Democratic pollsters.
The hearings this week and last week with first FBI Director Christopher Wray and then Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein were insulting. People want answers and these two didn’t give any. All they do is leak and they are arrogant about it.
As far as giving information to Congress, they defiantly refused. Congress has oversight over them and they have no right to refuse. Tucker had it correct when he tweeted it is a constitutional crisis. When you have a corrupt former FBI Director manipulating crimes to exonerate his gal Hillary and no one wants to do a thing about it, you have a crisis. This is lawlessness.
Former US Attorney: #Comey threw the case against @HillaryClinton along with Senior Justice officials in the Obama administration. It is a constitutional crisis #Tucker @FoxNews — Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) December 16, 2017RelayRides is serious about entering the airport car rental market and enabling its users to make their vehicles available to travelers when not in use. It took a big step in that direction over the summer, when it launched its peer-to-peer rentals at San Francisco International Airport.
Now RelayRides is solidifying its spot at SFO by striking a deal with the airport to clear up any questions about the legality of its service there. As part of the deal, the company has agreed to pay a fee for customers that are traveling through the airport, and it’s also partnered with a nearby lot and shuttle service to reduce congestion at arrivals and departures drop-off points.
For RelayRides, making peer-to-peer rentals available at airports is a natural fit, particularly as the company is focusing more heavily on long-term rentals. The company ended its hourly rental feature in October, due to lackluster demand in that area, and is betting the future of the business on multiday rentals.
Travelers figure to be a part of that as well, as it gave users the ability to begin listing their cars at nearby airports in June. But its implementation at SFO is probably the best example of what RelayRides would like to do on a large scale: The company has partnered with a nearby parking lot to house rentals for travelers leaving the Bay Area and making their cars available to renters while they’re gone.
RelayRides isn’t the only startup seeking to make peer-to-peer car rentals available at airports. FlightCar, which launched earlier this year at SFO and has raised $6.1 million from General Catalyst and Softbank Capital (among others) is also working to connect passengers with cheaper car rental prices at the airport. But while FlightCar has resisted working with SFO to date, RelayRides wanted to get ahead of any controversy by striking a deal with the airport.
There were two main concerns from the airport when it set up shop, according to RelayRides CEO Andre Haddad. The first was that it would contribute back fees to the airport for passengers that used its service, in the same way cabs, black cars, and shuttle buses do. The other concern was around congestion, and how it would reduce bottlenecks at the terminal.
On the first point, RelayRides is paying a portion of its revenues for travelers who come from SFO back to the airport. And it’s reducing congestion by offering parking at a local lot and sharing shuttles to the airport.
For RelayRides, the deal will help avoid any run-ins with SFO, which has been trying to crack down on various startups that operate outside the traditional framework that its existing transportation partners follow. For instance, the airport issued cease-and-desist letters to ride-sharing companies like Lyft and SideCar earlier this year because those services fail to pay the typical fees that cabs do when picking up or dropping off passengers.
More broadly, though, RelayRides is trying to work with local regulators and governments whenever possible, even going so far as to suspend service in New York after being hit with a cease-and-desist order there. The company, which has raised $30 million from investors that include GM, Shasta Ventures, August Capital, and Google Ventures, hopes that by doing so it can help ensure that peer-to-peer car rentals remain here to stay.
Photo Credit: Håkan Dahlström via Compfight ccSAN DIEGO -- Doc Rivers said he never wanted the Los Angeles Clippers to trade DeAndre Jordan to the Boston Celtics for Kevin Garnett last June when the two teams were working on a deal for the head coach.
One of the proposed trades attached to the eventual deal that got Rivers out of the final three years of his contract in Boston and allowed him to sign a new three-year deal with Los Angeles had the Clippers sending Jordan and a draft pick to the Celtics for Garnett.
It was a side deal that the NBA nixed because such side deals go against league rules. Rivers said he's happy the deal fell apart. He had hoped there would be a way for the Clippers to land Garnett, but not at the expense of Jordan.
"I couldn't get involved in that whole thing," Rivers said. "That was the strangest thing in the world. I was seeing the trade talks and I was saying, 'Wait a minute! We don't want to give away that guy!' We wanted that other guy too. That was the home run to get both.
"[Jordan] is just too young and too gifted to let walk out your door, bottom line. He's a game changer defensively. He can single-handedly change a game with his defense. There's five guys, and that number maybe too high, that can do that single-handedly with their size and athleticism and he's one of them. When you have one of those guys, you want to keep them."
Rivers has praised the Clippers' 25-year-old center during the team's training camp in San Diego. He has called Jordan the team's defensive captain and a candidate for the NBA's Defensive Player of the Year this season.
Rivers also insisted that Jordan be included in a photo with himself, Chris Paul and Blake Griffin for the team's media guide, calling Jordan part of the Clippers' "Big Three."
"No one's been better than that guy," Rivers said of Jordan's performance during training camp. "He's been on another level."
The Celtics eventually traded the 37-year old Garnett along with Paul Pierce and Jason Terry to the Brooklyn Nets after Rivers left Boston.
Jordan said he has embraced Rivers' challenge of being the team's defensive captain this season.
"It's about maturity," Jordan said. "I have to set an example for my teammates, so do Chris and Blake. But my thing is mainly defense. That's my only focus this year. I'm not really focused on anything. Defense is my first, second and third priority."CCF funding is a subsection of the main SourceWatch article Center for Consumer Freedom.
Center for Consumer Freedom funding
The Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) is registered as tax-exempt nonprofit organization and is required to disclose some financial information to the Internal Revenue Service which is publicly available by inspecting their IRS Form 990s. Like Berman's other front groups, it does not disclose the identity of its funders, but some information about it has become publicly available thanks to the 1998 attorney generals' settlement with the tobacco industry, which required tobacco companies to release millions of pages of previously secret company documents.
CCF claims to represent "more than 30,000 U.S. restaurants and tavern operators." However, the IRS Form 990 which it filed for the the six-month period from July to December 1999 (under the name of "Guest Choice Network") shows that almost all of its financial support came from a handful of anonymous sources. Its total income for that period was $111,642, of which $105,000 came from six unnamed donors. It received no income from membership dues. Some of its funding apparently came from one of Berman's other organizations, the American Beverage Institute, which "contributes monthly amounts to the Guest Choice Network to assist with media expenses." The Guest Choice Network did not report paying salaries to any of its employees, who were presumably paid by Berman & Co. CCF's Form 990 for the year 2000 showed total income of $514,321, almost all of which ($492,500) came from seven unnamed donors. Once again, it received no income from membership dues and did not report paying salaries to any employees. However, it did list $256,077 in compensation paid to Berman and Co., Inc., for "management services."
In 2004, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a complaint with the IRS alleging that CCF violated its nonprofit, tax-exempt status. IRS law prohibits private individuals from benefiting from nonprofit organizations, but CREW alleges that Rick Berman and his for-profit lobbying and public relations firm have received nearly $2 million from CCF and its predecessor organization since 1999.[1] Tax-exempt organizations must have a charitable purpose, but CREW notes that CCF lobbies exclusively on behalf of food producers and the restaurant and tobacco industries.
Funding from Right-Wing Bradley Foundation in Wisconsin
The right-wing Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which is based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and "doled out nearly as much money as the seven Koch and Scaife foundations combined" from 2001 to 2009, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,[2] has given at least $375,000 (from 2009 to 2012) to CCF. The Bradley Foundation gave CCF $200,000 in 2009,[3] $50,000 in 2010,[4] and $125,000 in 2012,[5] according to the foundation's IRS tax filings for those years. See Contributions of the Bradley Foundation for more.
Funding from GMO Company J.R. Simplot
The J.R. Simplot Company Foundation, Inc., a 501(c)(3) run by the J.R. Simplot Company -- a privately-owned agricultural genetic engineering company describing itself as "one of the largest privately held food and agribusiness companies in the nation"[6] -- gave $20,000 to CCF in 2010.[7]
2011 Finances
In 2011, The Center for Consumer Freedom reported $1,402,807 in total revenue in 2011 on its 990 tax return, and $2,121,780 in expenses.[8]
CCF reported spending $1,294,488 on its own president's consulting company, Richard Berman And Company, Inc.. It also spent $128,859 advertising on Fox News.
CFC received a total of $15,500,073 in gifts, grants and contributions from 2007-2011. It gave fellow Berman front group The Center for Union Facts a $22,000 cash grant in 2011.[9]
2005 Finances
CCF's Form 990 for the year 2005 listed total revenue of $3.67 million. [10] Of its expenditure of $3.82 million in 2005, $2.19 million was for a series of major advertisements, $856,699 was for running a series of websites and distributring a daily emnail newsletter to "approximately 30,000 subscribers" and a further $214,000 on maintaining a "database of foundations grants and funding sources of organizations dealing with food and beverage issues."[11]
Of the group's $3.82 million of expenditure in 2005, $1.62 million was paid as compensation to Berman & Co., representating approximately 42% of the group's total expenditure.[12]
CCF contributions table
The Center for Media and Democracy obtained the following information on corporate contributions to the Guest Choice Network/CCF through documents obtained from a whistleblower:by
The
A recent research said “When |
go into court and having a judge decide if a law was unconstitutional.”
Both the House and the Senate overwhelmingly passed House Bill 59 and sent it to the governor for his signature. Instead, Gov. Nathan Deal vetoed it, saying the Legislature went too far.
“This sweeping waiver of sovereign immunity would allow unprecedented judicial intrusion into daily management decisions entrusted to the executive branch of government,” Deal said when explaining his veto.
Lawmakers are expected to take up the issue again this session.
‘To me, it’s not even a close call’
While serving as state attorney general, Mike Bowers helped draft the 1991 constitutional amendment that has been relied upon by his successors to thwart lawsuits against government agencies.
In an interview last week, Bowers said he didn’t anticipate the amendment could ultimately bar suits challenging the constitutionality of state laws.
“There is virtually no way for citizens to force their government to obey the law in Georgia today, given the Sustainable Coast decision by the Georgia Supreme Court and because there’s no legislation to overcome sovereign immunity,” Bowers said.
“Is it more important to save money defending lawsuits or is it more important to be able to hold our government accountable so it obeys the law? To me, it’s not even a close call.”In a progressive society, it is often white families that stand in the way of equality and justice. Systemic white supremacy depends, first and foremost, on the white family unit. When white conquerors forcefully penetrated the indigenous, egalitarian homeland of the Native peoples of America, they were quick to replicate their white societies, initiating their parasitism by establishing white plantations, headed by white fathers, submissive white mothers, and, most critically, white children, with full dominion over the enslaved and oppressed people of color that were forced to uphold these micro-fiefdoms.
It is no surprise, then, that America’s fascination with the white family unit has gone hand-in-hand with the historical proliferation of white supremacy. After Bacon’s Rebellion, white micro-fieftans thought it necessary to expand the definition of white family to encompass the entirety of white society, so as to coerce the working class to fight amongst itself based on racial lines. Whites are embedded from birth with the sense of common white identity, and this identity conditions them to replicate the white family unit, thus furthering the cycle of white supremacy in America. That is why the white family unit must be destroyed.
In 1973, the Supreme Court, consisting entirely of men, eight of whom were white, ruled that the termination of pregnancy was constitutional up until the third trimester. For decades, progressives have championed this decision as a victory for the cause of women’s rights. However, it is time we challenge this problematic notion.M
ozilla has updated its web browser to Firefox 50. The latest update comes with many security fixes along with rendering fixes for round-cornered dashed and dotted borders. For operating systems like Linux, Windows 8 and older–lacking native emojis–Firefox 50 brings a built-in emoji set. According to tests, Firefox 50 also brings massive startup time improvements.
Firefox 50 also marks an end to the existence of libavcodec versions lower than 54.35.1. libavcodec is a popular open source codec library used to encode and decode audio and video data. It finds its use in various multimedia players, video editors, applications, frameworks, etc.
What’s new in Firefox 50?
Download protection
Firefox 50 adds download protection for more number of executable file types on Windows, Mac, and Linux. This will enhance the safety of machine while downloading software.
New keyboard shortcuts
You can now enable CTRL+TAB shortcut to go through open tabs in recently used order. Reader Mode can now be accessed directly using Ctrl+Alt+R (For Mac: Command+Alt+R).
New locale support
Support for Guarani language has been added in Firefox 50. Guarani–a division of the Tupi-Guarani language family–is mainly spoken by the American Indian people living in Paraguay and nearby places.
Improved Find feature
You can now search for ‘whole words’ using Find in page feature in Firefox 50.
Enhanced video playback
Video playback is now possible for websites which don’t have plugins with WebM EME Support for Widevine. Widevine, a Google company, provides DRM solutions to enable content protection for videos delivered through the internet.
WebGL
Firefox 50 also increases the availability of WebGL for 98% of Windows 7 and above users. WebGL is used to render 3D computer graphics.
Performance
It also adds improved performance for SDK extensions or the extensions which use the SDK module loader.
Firefox for Android
Firefox 50 for Android comes with HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) video support via the player overlay. It also offers simplified UI by clubbing the Recent Tabs and History panels.
The latest Firefox 50 update is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. You can find the release notes and download links on this page.
If you have something to add, tell us in the comments below.
Also Read: This USB Stick Can Perform HIV Test With 95% Accuracy In 20 MinutesColleges across the country are failing to keep up with a troubling spike in demand for mental health care — leaving students stuck on waiting lists for weeks, unable to get help.
STAT surveyed dozens of universities about their mental health services. From major public institutions to small elite colleges, a striking pattern emerged: Students often have to wait weeks just for an initial intake exam to review their symptoms. The wait to see a psychiatrist who can prescribe or adjust medication — often a part-time employee — may be longer still.
Students on many campuses are so frustrated that they launched a petition last month demanding expanded services. They plan to send it to 20 top universities, including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, and Columbia, where seven students have died this school year from suicide and suspected drug overdose.
“Students are turned away every day from receiving the treatment they need, and multiple suicide attempts and deaths go virtually ignored each semester,” the petition reads. More than 700 people have signed; many have left comments about their personal experiences trying to get counseling at college. “I’m signing because if a kid in crisis needs help they should not have to wait,” one wrote.
STAT requested information from 98 campuses across the country and received answers from 50 of those schools. Among the findings:
At Northwestern University, it can take up to three weeks to get a counseling appointment. At Washington University in St. Louis, the wait time runs nearly 13 days, on average, in the fall semester.
At the University of Washington in Seattle, delays in getting care are so routine, the wait time is posted online; it’s consistently hovered between two and three weeks in recent months. In Florida, where educators are pressing the state legislature for millions in new funding to hire counselors, the wait times at University of Florida campuses can stretch two weeks.
Smaller schools aren’t exempt, either: At Carleton College, a liberal arts campus in Northfield, Minn., the wait list can stretch up to 10 days.
A few weeks’ wait may not seem like much. After all, it often takes that long, or longer, for adults to land a medical appointment with a specialist. But such wait times can be brutal for college students — who may be away from home for the first time, without a support network, and up against more academic and peer pressure than ever before. Every class, every meal, every party can become a hurdle for students struggling with eating disorders, depression, and other issues.
Many counseling centers say that they are often overwhelmed during the most stressful times for students, such as midterms and finals. Creighton University in Omaha, Neb., for example, reports a wait time of up to a month during busy periods.
In most instances, STAT’s examination found, students who say that they are suicidal are seen at once, and suicide hotlines are available for after-hours emergencies. But some students are uncomfortable acknowledging an impulse to harm themselves, and thus get pushed to the end of the line, along with undergrads struggling with concerns ranging from acute anxiety to gender identity issues.
Campus counselors are acutely aware that they’re leaving students stranded but say they don’t have the resources to do better.
“You’re making sure people are safe in the moment,” said Ben Locke, who runs a national college counseling network and directs counseling services at Pennsylvania State University. “But you’re not treating the depression or the panic attacks or the eating disorders.”
‘I needed to see someone’
Constance Rodenbarger, now in her third year at Indiana University, first sought help at the counseling center in her second semester, as she struggled to deal with an abusive relationship on top of long-term depression. The next appointment was at least two weeks away.
“I was just looking at that date on the calendar and thinking, ‘If I can just make it one more day,’ but then it became just one more hour, and then one more minute,” she said.
“I just couldn’t hang on.”
The day before her appointment, on Nov. 17, 2014, she tried to kill herself.
Her roommate found her, and Rodenbarger was rushed to the hospital. She called the counseling center from the hospital to say she wouldn’t be able to make it in the next day.
“When I called that day and said, ‘I need to see someone,’ I needed to see someone,” she said.
Indiana University now says it connects with all students who seek counseling within two days. But that connection can involve simply setting up an appointment — for up to three weeks away.
“We, like centers across the country, are working on expanding our staff,” said Nancy Stockton, the director of Indiana University’s counseling center. “We certainly need more clinicians.”
Indiana University and several other large schools said they employ one counselor for roughly every 1,500 undergraduates. That’s at the high end of the range recommended by national experts. The numbers reported in an annual national survey are even more stark: In 2015, large campuses reported an average of one licensed mental health provider per 3,500 students.
When students do get in to campus counseling centers, most see therapists, social workers, or perhaps psychologists.
Just 6 in 10 college counseling centers have a psychiatrist available, even part-time, to prescribe or adjust medications, according to the annual survey, conducted by the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors. That’s a serious mismatch, given that about one-quarter of college students who seek mental health services take psychotropic medications.
There are other hurdles, too. While many schools tout free counseling, they often cap that benefit. Students at Brown University, for instance, get seven free sessions a year. At Indiana University, students get just two free sessions and then pay $30 per visit.
And it can be hard for students to develop a consistent relationship with a therapist when so many college mental health providers work limited hours. Wellesley College, for example, has a counseling staff which includes six therapists — but three of them are only on campus part-time.
While dozens of colleges provided STAT with detailed information about their mental health resources, the public relations staff at others, including Georgetown University, Dartmouth College, and Grinnell College, refused to provide information after repeated requests.
Others, such as Harvard and Yale, declined to provide specific staffing information. In some cases, such as with the US Merchant Marine Academy, media relations staff expressed discomfort about being compared to other colleges.
Columbia University told STAT it employs the equivalent of 41 full-time counselors for just over 6,000 students, which would be an enviable staffing level, far better than most other schools its size. Columbia said its wait time varies, but did not provide a specific range. All enrollment numbers come from U.S. News and World Report.
A spike in crisis cases
Demand for counseling on college campuses has been rising steadily for several years.
And the latest data, released in January, show a recent spike in cases of students in acute crisis.
One in three students who sought counseling last year said they’d seriously considered suicide at some point in their lives, according to a report out last month from the Center for Collegiate Mental Health. That’s up from fewer than 1 in 4 students in 2010.
And those are just the students who admit they’re in crisis. Untold others don’t know how to respond when an employee at the counseling center asks if it’s an emergency. They may downplay their situation, telling themselves others are in more dire condition or it must not be a true crisis if they have the presence of mind to ask for help.
That’s what happened to Adrienne Baer during the fall of 2015, in her junior year at the University of Maryland. Both her grandparents had recently died. So had a high school friend.
“It was a lot to wrap my head around,” she said. With a push from friends, she decided to call the counseling center. “I didn’t exactly have an education on what their resources were, but I got one,” Baer said.
Baer said she was asked on the phone whether she was experiencing an emergency. She didn’t know how to answer that: No one gave her a definition. So she said no and was shunted to the end of the waiting list. It would be two weeks before she could see a counselor.
She dashed off an angry email to the counseling center the minute she hung up the phone:
“I am currently struggling with the issues I wanted to discuss with a therapist or counselor, but even I don’t know how I’ll be in 24 hours, let alone 2 weeks.…
I don’t know if all that constitutes an emergency or if I need to have a mental breakdown to be seen prior to a two week wait but I am seriously disappointed in the lack of availability in mental health resources.”
That got their attention. She was given a quick appointment for an initial assessment. But for continuing care, Baer was put back on the waiting list. It would be five weeks before she could see a psychiatrist who could prescribe medication.
“I had to wait. There was nothing I could do,” said Baer, now a senior. “It was just a roller coaster that I couldn’t control.”
Sharon Kirkland-Gordon, director of the University of Maryland’s counseling center, said she knows her staff can’t keep up with demand, though she said they’re “working overtime to meet the needs of students.”
Requests for appointments shot up 16 percent last year alone, she said.
Nationally, about six in 10 undergrads seeking counseling are women, and 5 percent are international students. There are roughly an equal number of freshman, sophomores, juniors, and seniors.
Kirkland-Gordon has started to bring on part-time seasonal staff to help handle the workload. Many campuses also use therapists who are still in training work one-on-one with students, as long as they report to licensed counselors.
“If we had a magic wand, I think you’d probably hear the same thing from all of us counseling directors,” said Kirkland-Gordon. Their wish list is simple: more resources.
No one is entirely sure why student demand for mental health services is rising; factors may include increased pressure from parents or peers on social media, or a difficult job market. Another possible reason: increased awareness about the risk of mental health conditions.
In the past decade, the federal government has given out tens of millions in grants to suicide prevention programs that raised awareness of risk factors. A generation of students trained by such programs is now in college — and seeking help when they feel warning signs. But not every college got a bump in funding to meet the surge in demand.
“If you want a perfect recipe to generate reduced availability of treatment, that would be it,” said Locke, of Penn State, who also serves as director of the Center for Collegiate Mental Health, a national network.
Locke notes that college health centers would never require a student with strep throat to wait two weeks for an appointment. Yet that’s what’s happening to many students with anxiety, depression, and other serious mental health concerns. “It puts the student’s academic career, and potentially their life, at risk,” he said.
As for Baer, she said she made it through that stressful semester by leaning on friends at school and family back in Pennsylvania. She wonders what would’ve happened to an international student or to a freshman without a reliable support network.
“I do feel like I fell through the cracks,” she said, “but I feel like I fell onto a safety net that other people might not have.”
A college president sounds the alarm
In an era when colleges are ranked by the number of their professors and the quality of their food — or whether their gyms house rock-climbing walls — it can be tough for the counseling centers to make a case for more resources.
Some turn to quick fixes, touting “stress-busting” programs like bringing in puppies for students to pet during midterms or handing out free cookies in the library during finals.
Others are making a concerted effort to respond to the surging demand.
The wait times at Ohio State University were so alarming to Dr. Michael Drake — a physician who stepped into the president’s office in 2014 — that he hired more than a dozen new counselors. That pushed the school’s ratio down to one provider for roughly every 1,100 undergraduates.
“We were doing it to really smooth the pathway of success for students,” Drake said. National data suggest the additional providers will help; 7 in 10 students who seek counseling say the mental health care improved their academic performance.
The University of California system moved to update counseling services in 2014, as wait lists grew and students with acute needs sought care. It took another year to get a dedicated funding stream to hire more counselors, in the form of increased student fees.
“Things start to back up like a traffic jam,” said Gary Dunn, director of counseling and psychological services for the University of California, Santa Cruz. “A lot can happen in four or five weeks during a quarter in college. It really wasn’t OK to have that delay in place.”
Students who have lived through mental health crises welcome more staff. But they also urge better training so that everyone on campus knows to treat mental health concerns as seriously, and with as much empathy, as a physical injury.
Nick, who asked that his last name not be used, was diagnosed with depression before college and had a difficult transition to his freshman year at Ithaca College in upstate New York. “I had no idea how to cope with all of it and I floundered a bit,” he said in an interview.
He sought help early on — during orientation — because he knew he’d likely need it. But he said he was bounced between two counselors and had difficulty getting appointments that fit into his schedule. In the end, he had to pay for a private mental health specialist off campus.
Ithaca did not respond to requests for information on its mental health services, saying its counseling center staff was busy. At the time he sought care, Nick said there were just two counselors for the school’s 7,000 students.
“I was so badly handled. Not by any fault of their own, they were just woefully underprepared,” he said.
This year, by contrast, he had to take time off for a surgery. Getting help with a physical injury was a breeze, he said.
“The administration and professors have been much more understanding and willing to help when it’s something tangible and physical,” he said, “when the doctors can say, ‘Here’s what’s wrong with you and here’s how you can fix it.’”
Drawing lessons from trauma
Rodenbarger, the Indiana University student, is still feeling the echoes of her struggles to get mental health help on campus. Her suicide attempt cost her both her job and her off-campus apartment. The medication she was put on cost her a pilot’s license.
But she is recovering — with the help of a mental health provider off campus. She’s easing off the medication. She’s on track to graduate in the summer of 2018 with two degrees, a fine arts degree in printmaking and another in astronautics.
She’s also excited to have seen the school expand its walk-in services for students in need of urgent mental health care. It’s a step forward — and she wants to see more like it.
“Had I gotten help when I reached out for it,” she said, “it would never have gotten to the level that it did.”
Republished with permission from STAT. This article originally appeared on February 6, 2017One of two proposed initiatives that would get Washington state out of the liquor business will qualify for the November ballot.
The secretary of state’s office said late Friday that the signature check for Initiative 1100 was completed. Following certification by Secretary of State Sam Reed, it will become the first of six measures vying for space on the fall ballot to be formally blessed.
Last month proponents turned in almost 400,000 signatures for I-1100. It takes just over 241,000 signatures of registered voters for a measure to to qualify.
Big box retailer Costco has contributed more than $700,000 to I-1100.
A competing privatization measure, Initiative 1105, is backed by about $1.4 million from two big beverage distributors and is also expected to be certified soon.
I-1100 would eliminate Washington’s “three-tiered” liquor control system, which segregates the manufacturing, distributing and retailing of spirits. Bans against volume discounts would be repealed and retailers like Costco would be allowed to buy directly from manufacturers. The other measure, I-1105, would privatize the liquor retail system but keep in place state laws that protect the liquor distributors who are behind 1105.
Both privatization campaigns say getting the state out of the liquor business will be good for consumers and could bring the state even more tax revenue.
A union-backed “no” campaign is ramping up to oppose both efforts, saying the initiatives will increase liquor sales and put much-needed revenue at risk just as the state budget is reeling from deep service cuts.
The broader opposition campaign, Keep our Kids Safe, is supported by the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which represents state liquor store workers. The State Council of Firefighters and the Church Council of Greater Seattle also are involved in the “no” campaign.
In 2009, the state Liquor Control Board said taxes, markup and fees provided more than $332.7 million for programs and services throughout the state. Of that, $199 million went to the state’s general fund, almost $63 million went to cities and counties and $49 million went to help pay for the state’s health insurance for the poor.Iowa City, Iowa Samantha submitted almost 4 years ago
During-Show Bonnaroo Volunteers! I am looking for a buddy to tag along (as I am going solo this year) or to help someone in need of a ride. I will be leaving from Iowa City the night of June 8th (or possibly early the morning of the 9th) in order to be there between 10am and 1pm June 9th for volunteer check-in. I have 2-3 open seats (it will depend on cargo) in my car if anyone is looking for a ride or needs picked up somwhere along the way. I plan to return to Iowa City Monday, June 15th if anyone is needing a return ride. I'm planning to leave Manchester by noon that day at the latest. I am flexible though. - SamanthaAfter a loan at QPR, Mauro Zarate is back in favour at West Ham, but new suitors are on the horizon.
West Ham face a challenge to their commitment to Mauro Zarate, with Italian newspaper Corriere dello Sport claiming Bologna are interested in the forward.
Zarate signed with the Hammers last summer and made a good early impression before falling out of favour under Sam Allardyce, and being sent out on loan to relegated QPR.
As far as 2015/16 goes, Zarate is already off to a positive start, being picked in the starting line-up for Slaven Bilic's first game as manager, going on to provide an assist in a 3-0 Europa League win over Lusitanos.
The Hammers appear keen on giving him a second chance, with co-chairman David Gold saying on Twitter in late May the striker would be welcome back at the club.
Corriere dello Sport report Serie A side Bologna have identified Zarate as an affordable transfer target after being priced out of the market for Liverpool's Fabio Borini.
The paper even claims Zarate is keen to leave West Ham, but this information could very well be outdated considering his recent return to the first team fold, so should be taken as conjecture rather than fact.
What West Ham decide to do if there is a bid could be interesting, and will depend very much on whether Zarate keeps impressing during the early Europa League matches and in pre-season.
After the way he trailed off last season there could be temptation to cash in while there is interest, but this will depend on how much of this was attributed to the player, and how much to then manager Sam Allardyce for failing to get a talented player performing at his best.This is a story for everyone in need of a lot of humor, witty comments and descriptions, and a delightful and suspenseful story!
Nadia Wolf is like any young lady who knows what she’s good at and takes a gamble to make a living. Nadia lives above a marriage chapel in the revered gambling city of Las Vegas. She is a poker player by day and helps a dear friend and soon to be manager, Frankie, at his chapel. I can’t forget to mention Gus, the on-a-diet-cat, which may be a tad grouchy but loving all the same.
Nadia, a beautiful and clumsy woman all in one, takes her poker seriously. She has a couple eligible bachelors interested, both rich, both handsome, and both want her for more than a turn of the cards.
Her problem is she’s attracted to both, yet doesn’t want to mix poker with relationships. Instead a deadly game with another player (poker player I mean) wants to put her underground. She needs help from more than one bachelor and a touch of flirting doesn’t hurt.
The Nadia Wolf series is right up there with the Stephanie Plum series full of quirks, giggles, and a few serious mishaps. I have hope for Nadia’s well-being and her eventual capture of that special man. I haven’t finished the series yet, but I certainly hope she’s happy at the end and encourage you to find out, too!Looking for news you can trust?
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The latest Arctic report from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) is out and it’s a sobering read. Records were broken in the month of June on two fronts:
The largest ice loss in the satellite record for the month of June: of 1.10 million square miles (2.86 million square kilometers) The lowest June snow cover on the ground in the Northern Hemisphere: falling 386,000 square miles (1 million square kilometers) below the previous record low set in 2010
On the sea ice front, the June loss was especially rapid (I wrote more about that here).
It was facilitated in part by remarkably high atmospheric temperatures—up to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius) above the 1981-2000 average over northern Eurasia and southern Baffin Bay. These temperatures were measured ~3,000 (914 meters) feet above the ocean’s surface.
That made the June 2012 ice extent the second lowest in the satellite record; 2010 is still the record holder.
This year’s rapid ice loss contributed to a linear rate of decline for June Arctic ice at 3.7 percent per decade since the satellite record began (graph above).
Snow cover over the landmasses of the Northern Hemisphere also retreated rapidly to the lowest levels ever recorded for the date by the end of June.
By then the shores of the entire Arctic Ocean coastline were basically snow free (map above). From the NSIDC report:
This rapid and early retreat of snow cover exposes large, darker underlying surfaces to the sun early in the season, fostering higher air temperatures and warmer soils.
That positive feedback loop between warming/melting landmasses and warming/melting sea ice will contribute to the trend in the graph above (shown in degrees C).
You can see how the global mean combined temperature over land and ocean has risen a whopping ~1 degree Fahrenheit in a century. And that only includes up to the year 2000. The biggest records continue to be serially broken after 2000.HexaPDF continues to grow and mature, with this release bringing advanced text layout as first step into providing full document layout features.
Support HexaPDF — Become a Patron!
Advanced text layout means that HexaPDF is now able to:
Apply kerning and ligatures to text, with the possibility to easily add other positioning or substitution steps (e.g. for correctly positioning diacritical marks)
Apply different styles to different parts of the text of a paragraph (example)
Wrap lines while supporting special characters like non-breaking spaces, soft-hyphens and zero-width spaces (example)
Use arbitrarily shaped boxes for text layout (example)
Align text horizontally and vertically, e.g. left, center, right and justify; and top, center, bottom (example)
Mix text and inline boxes, e.g. for showing images or arbitrary drawings together with text (example)
Calculate the height of a text box without drawing it, or limiting the height and retrieving the overflowing items
In essence HexaPDF::Layout::TextBox together with the other classes in HexaPDF::Layout is similar to Prawn’s formatted text box implementation. However, HexaPDF still lacks some text box features like text colors, links or underlining. This will be fixed with a future release.
To see how HexaPDF’s implementation compares to Prawn’s in terms of performance I adapted the text rendering benchmark to use the text box implementations. The results (see the text box benchmark for details and caveats) are rather promising, with HexaPDF being about 10 times faster than Prawn!
HexaPDF’s text box implementation can already be used to compose whole documents but it is still only another stepping stone on the way to full document layout features. There are major parts missing for this, like automatic page breaking, tables, column layout and a composition class to make using all these parts easier.
As always, have a look at the changelog for an overview of all changes. And if you have a request, drop me an e-mail or open an issue!Orman is putting his business record front and center in his campaign. Orman's wealth gives GOP fodder
OLATHE, Kan. — Greg Orman wanted to turn the capital of shrimp cocktails into a shrimp-producing powerhouse.
A few years ago, the businessman-turned-independent Kansas Senate candidate had become a director of Ganix Biotechnologies. With the help of $2.5 million in federal loan guarantees and $128,000 in state tax breaks, he and fellow investors pledged to build a $5 million-$6 million organic shrimp farm smack dab in the Nevada desert.
Story Continued Below
“We consume more shrimp per capita in Las Vegas than anywhere else in the world — 22 million pounds of it annually,” Orman told Las Vegas’ KLAS-TV in 2011.
The venture collapsed within a year. Ganix defaulted on a $725,000 bank loan, and a Kansas bank foreclosed on the shrimp farm property, according to public documents. The project had been pegged to create 30 jobs and eventually pump millions into the coffers of financially struggling North Las Vegas, according to news reports at the time.
(Also on POLITICO: The man behind the GOP’s Senate drive)
The sudden frontrunner against GOP Sen. Pat Roberts in the most competitive Senate race no one saw coming, Orman is putting his business record front and center in his campaign. The 45-year-old Princeton graduate tells voters he knows what it takes to create jobs and that he’d bring much-needed business savvy to Washington.
And there’s no question about this: Orman has become spectacularly wealthy over the course of a two-decade-plus career that includes investments in ventures as far flung as energy-efficient lighting, spinal surgery screws and an obscure Jeff Goldblum film. Any successful investor is bound to have some failures, but Orman appears to have more wins than losses, creating several successful companies along the way.
But triumph in the business world, as Mitt Romney learned, doesn’t necessarily translate into success on the campaign trail. And Republicans are seizing on the less-flattering aspects of his business past to bring Orman’s campaign back to earth. In addition to his well-publicized business and personal relationship with a person convicted of securities fraud, Orman has ties to companies that took advantage of offshore or low-tax havens and was once sued by a woman who alleged that Orman threatened to wipe out her children’s college fund if he wasn’t included in a deal, records show.
( Also on POLITICO: Court rebuffs Kansas GOP on Senate race)
The outcome of the race may well turn on which portrayal of Orman’s background prevails: the non-ideological entrepreneur or the shady investor who won’t level with voters about where he stands on issues.
Going after a candidate’s business record is an unusual turn for Republicans, considering they’re typically the ones fending off rich-guy attacks. But it’s the hand they’ve been dealt and they are playing it.
“Greg Orman’s offshore tax havens, business partnerships with a convicted Wall Street banker and ties to liberal Democrats raise serious questions,” said Corry Bliss, campaign manager for Roberts.
Said Orman campaign manager Jim Jonas: “We’re happy to compare Greg’s successful record as a businessman creating jobs with Sen. Roberts’ failed record as a Washington politician any day.”
Orman’s emergence also puts Democrats in the peculiar position of at least tacitly backing the candidate of the 1 percent. Not that there’s another alternative.
Asked if Orman’s past business dealings might turn off Democrats, the party’s state chairwoman, Joan Wagnon, said: “Where would they go?”
(Also on POLITICO: Poll: Republicans trail in Kansas)
She predicted the GOP attacks “won’t work on Republicans because Republicans are not offended by rich people.”
Orman, who has avoided saying which party he’d caucus with in an evenly split Senate, declined to be interviewed for this story. At a coffee shop in Topeka, Kansas last week, he was asked if he thought his wealth would be an asset or liability for his campaign.
“You know, I haven’t thought of it,” he told reporters.
Orman has amassed a personal fortune of at least $21.5 million, according to his financial disclosure documents — and likely much more because assets and liabilities are reported in broad ranges. He would be the fifth-wealthiest senator, based on a 2012 ranking by the Center for Responsive Politics.
Fresh out of Princeton in 1991, Orman joined the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. and wasted little time methodically building a diverse array of business interests. He created Environmental Lighting Concepts in 1992, growing the firm to $10 million in annual revenue then selling it to Kansas City Power & Light in 1996. He created a successful Minnesota commercial real estate firm, FRM Associates, in which he now holds between $5 million and $25 million in assets.
Since 2004, Orman has worked at his private equity firm, Denali Partners, investing in small and mid-sized firms. In 2012, Orman purchased a Kansas boxing equipment company, Combat Brands, saying he helped “save the brand” and protect 50 jobs. (He owns between $1 million to $5 million in the company.) Orman is now named as a defendant in a $30 million lawsuit with a rival company, Everlast, which the campaign dismisses as frivolous.
All told, Orman reports holding assets and positions in 43 companies. At least 17 are incorporated in Nevada, two are in Delaware and one in the Cayman Islands; all three locales give corporations preferable tax treatments. (Other companies are incorporated in Kansas, Missouri and Minnesota.) Orman also has ties to Hollywood: he’s listed as executive producer of Goldblum’s 2006 film “Pittsburgh,” and one of his companies made a loan of $250,000-$500,000 to ROAR, the Hollywood talent management firm run by veteran showbiz executive Bernie Cahill.
Orman’s rise has been marked by multiple court battles, including a particularly nasty showdown last year stemming from a 2009 business deal.
One of Orman’s companies, Design X Studios, had been brought in to help restructure a graphics company’s outstanding loan. But the arrangement went south, and a Kansas businesswoman, Jennifer Hopkins, accused Orman of trying to bleed dry her children’s college funds by seeking to withhold money into her bank accounts, according to court documents. Hopkins alleged that Orman had been “harassing” her colleague and violated an attorney-client privilege.
“Since July 2012, if not earlier, Greg Orman has attempted to strong-arm Jennifer Hopkins,” Hopkins’ attorney, Robert Flynn, alleged in a March 2013 court document. “If Ms. Hopkins didn’t agree to cut Orman into the deal, Orman threatened that he could delay the distribution of litigation proceeds, thereby causing Ms. Hopkins to incur financial damages.”Why Litecoin could be good investment
Moises Cassab Blocked Unblock Follow Following Feb 20, 2017
Ill start off by declaring I never imagined myself endorsing what is basically a bitcoin copy cat, with a few superficial differentiators to bitcoin. Until I encountered the last last turn in the bitcoin scaling saga.
Segregated witness by most expert accounts is an amazing piece of software. Allowing the creation of side-chains and a proper lightening network by fixing a bug affecting transaction ID’s. As a nice little extra, it also bumps the on-chain transaction capacity to what is essentially a 2mb block.
Fortunately and unfortunately, miners seem extremely averse to perform any major changes to the protocol. With Segwit stuck at around 25% of the required 95% hashing power and 14 activation periods left (Each period is 2,016 blocks) its beginning to look like we wont get segwit any time soon.
Thus the crises might allow crypto silver to shine. Charlie Lee the creator of litecoin has been pushing hard to get segwit to activate in the much less valuable litecoin network(188M), that will function as a great test before activating on the bitcoin network. Although the hashing stands at 20% over the required 75%. Charlie Lee is adamant that it will activate even if a POW change is required.
The following events lead me to believe there a three outcomes possible.
Nothing happens, segwit does not activate. Litecoin follows its usual path. In the past two years it has gone from 1.85- 3.76 and YTD 3.12–3.76
2. Segwit activates there is an unknown bug the whole system collapses and litecoin forks back to pre segwit but the price probably craters. Crisis averted in bitcoin land
3. Segwit activates. It immediately goes to the top of R/BTC and huge amounts |
But she said her No. 1 choice would have been Daniels.
“Oh, yeah. I would have loved it,” Knochel said. “But I never figured it would happen. His heart’s elsewhere now.” I think he enjoys Purdue too much. And he’s doing a great job.”
Mike Berghoff, chairman of the Purdue Board of Trustees, said he spent time with Daniels this week for long-standing business “while all the chatter was going on.” Berghoff said he trusted that Daniels understood that trustees believed he was doing good work at the university.
“At the same time, I tried not to influence any decision he might be contemplating, because I knew if he was contemplating it, it was for all the right reasons,” Berghoff said. “I think he put it into the proper order. Though, I think he was sensitive to the growing volume about what he wanted to do as the decision lagged about Gov. Pence.”
That said, Berghoff admitted he was relieved the trustees didn't have to think about a presidential search.
"We already have an (athletic director) search going on," Berghoff said.
Daniels said he was committed to Purdue, which a year ago offered him a contract extension that runs into 2020. Daniels stands to make a combined $1 million in retention bonuses if he stays at Purdue through then, according to that contract.
“My reasons for this decision are entirely positive,” Daniels wrote. “I love Purdue, its students, staff and alumni. I believe that good things are occurring at our university and am enthusiastic about pursuing them further.”
Dave Bangert writes for the Journal and Courier. Contact him at dbangert@jconline.com.
CLOSE These Greater Lafayette residents weren't thrilled about the idea of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as vice president, Thursday, July 14, 2016. Meghan Holden/Journal & Courier
Read or Share this story: http://on.jconline.com/29EVD6fIt is official, Black Diamond Equipment will unveil their new ice tool they are dubbing the Fuel at Outdoor Retailer next week. We’ll be there and get the full scoop and more information. It doesn’t look like the shaft will be carbon. Instead it will be a hyrdoformed single piece of aluminum. No idea when they will be released but I assume they’ll be available for Fall 2014. In a brief press release, BD had this to say:
“Black Diamond introduces the Fuel ice tool, featuring a lightweight shaft hydroformed from a single piece of aluminum for a lighter feel, superior swing and better handling. ‘No one else in the industry is doing anything like the Fuel’s one-piece hydroformed shaft,’ says Kolin Powick, Black Diamond’s new Category Director for Climbing Equipment. “It’s a quiver of one for the modern winter climber.’ “Image copyright Northumbria Police Image caption Clockwise from top left, Badrul Hussain, Habibur Rahim, Abdul Sabe and Mohibur Rahman were all investigated as part of Operation Sanctuary
Four more men have been jailed for their part in a drugs and grooming ring that forced young women to have sex.
They were convicted as part of the Operation Sanctuary investigation into a grooming gang that sexually abused vulnerable girls in Newcastle.
Habibur Rahim, 34, was jailed for 29 years for rape, inciting prostitution and drugs offences.
Abdul Sabe, 40, was handed a 12-year term for sexual exploitation, inciting prostitution and drugs offences.
Night terrors
Newcastle Crown Court judge Penny Moreland also jailed Mohibur Rahman, 44, of Northcote Street, for four and a half years for inciting prostitution, drugs offences, sexual assault and sexual exploitation.
Badrul Hussain, 37, Drybeck Court, was sentenced to four years in prison for drugs offences.
The court had heard that Sabe, of Dean House, was already on the sex offenders register when he carried out the abuse.
The men were dealt with on the second day of sentencing of gang members.
Last month 17 men and one woman were found guilty after two years of trials, with eight men convicted of conspiracy to incite prostitution.
The court heard from a young female victim who still suffers from regular night terrors and now sleeps with a knife by her bedside.
Image copyright Northumbria Police Image caption The grooming network is being sentenced this week
She was raped by Rahim, of Kenilworth Road, who used a wardrobe to barricade her in the room with him.
The father-of-two, also known as Sham, had already plied her with alcohol and drugs.
'Losing my hair'
In a statement, read to the court, the victim, who was 17 at the time, said: "I have suffered severe depression and a split personality.
"I feel paranoid all the time and don't feel safe in my own flat, I have started losing my hair.
"I wake up in the night fearing Sham is in the flat. I keep wanting to take my own life to get away from it all. I now sleep with a knife by my bed."
Rahim was convicted of two counts of conspiracy to incite prostitution, relating to eight different victims, a number of trafficking for sexual exploitation offences and one count of rape.
Judge Moreland said he had been a high profile and active member of the group and had engaged in "sustained and systematic abuse".
She said he had caused extreme harm to his victims by cultivating their dependence on alcohol and drugs.
She also repeated her statement from a previous sentencing that there was no evidence for the offences being racially aggravated and the gang had picked out their victims because they were young and vulnerable.
Six of the gang have already been jailed and the sentencing of those remaining is expected to last until Friday.
During the investigation Northumbria Police paid a child rapist more than £10,000 to act as an informant.Iran’s double-digit inflation rate worsened for the sixth consecutive month in March, the government said on Monday, in what appeared to be an implicit acknowledgment that international sanctions linked to the disputed Iranian nuclear program are causing some economic harm.
The government’s statistics office said the rate increased in March to an annualized 31.5 percent, compared with 30.2 percent in February and 26.4 percent a year earlier, the semiofficial Mehr News Agency reported. The Mehr report did not offer an explanation for the increase except to specify that much of it was in the categories of food, beverages and tobacco.
Many economists say the real rate could be at least double the official rate, partly because it does not fully take into account the prices of many imported goods, which have become prohibitively expensive. The main reason is the severe depreciation of the rial, Iran’s national currency, as the sanctions that have limited Central Bank activities and oil exports have taken hold.
Some experts believe the Iranian inflation calculation deliberately understates the actual rate in order to present a public face of resistance to the coercive pressures inflicted by the sanctions, which have been imposed largely by the United States and European Union.Shooting
Free Throws
Rebounding
Turnovers
Nearly everything that is important to the game of basketball can be attributed to one of those four factors. But is each factor created equally? Or is one "more equal" than the others? Oliver himself tackled this question, using his futuristically-titled RoboScout program. Here is how Oliver assessed the relative importance the the four factors:
Shooting: 40% Turnovers: 25% Rebounding: 20% Free Throws: 15% To be honest, I'm not sure what kind of Skynet-style algorithm RoboScout employed to arrive at these relative weights, but let's take them at face value for now.
That shooting is the most important of the four factors is fairly non-controversial. However, there is lukewarm disagreement within the basketball statistics community as to whether Oliver's weights are correct.
Basketball analyst and blogger EvanZ took a stab at this question in a two part post in 2010. By modeling point differential as a function of the four factors, he could assess which factor was most responsible for variation in scoring margins. You can refer to Evan's excellent writeup for the details, but here is the end result, laid alongside Oliver's original estimates:
factor DeanO EvanZ Shooting 40% 54% Turnovers 25% 22% Rebounding 20% 15% Free Throws 15% 10%
While Dean and Evan agree on the order of importance, Evan's analysis ranks shooting significantly more important than Oliver's analysis would indicate, with field goals being more than twice as important as the next most important factor, turnovers.
So what can a win probability model add to this debate? For one, it allows for a more direct measure of what leads to wins in the NBA. Every play that takes place in an NBA game can be assessed according to its impact on win probability. And, nearly every one of those plays can be attributed to one of the four factors. An offensive rebound will increase a team's win probability in most situations, and that increase can be attributed to the "rebounding" factor. A game winning buzzer beater will surely impact win probability, and that impact would, of course, be attributed to the "shooting" factor.
As I have modeled it, every team starts a game with an equal share of win probability: 50%. Winning a game amounts to accumulating an additional net 50% in win probability, bringing the total to 100% (and dropping your opponent's total to 0%). Assessing the relative importance of the four factors can then be boiled down to measuring how much of that needed 50% in win probability gain comes from each of the four factors.
Using all games from the 2011-2014 NBA seasons, here is the average win probability gain for winning teams, broken down by the four factors:
Shooting: +34.6% (69% of total)
Turnovers: +5.8% (12% of total)
Rebounds: +4.5% (9% of total)
Free Throws: +3.9% (8% of total)
Other: +1.3% (3% of total) What does "Other" represent? It's any play not easily attributable to one of the four factors, but that still has impact on win probability. Examples include technical fouls, jump balls, and failing to get a shot off at the end of a quarter. It may be coincidental, but EvanZ found that only 4% of point differential was unexplained by the four factors, which is very close to my 3% attributable to "Other" above.
How does this result stack up against Oliver and EvanZ's estimates? See below (note: to keep things consistent, I am renormalizing the totals to sum to 100%, excluding "Other"):
factor DeanO EvanZ winProb Shooting 40% 54% 71% Turnovers 25% 22% 12% Rebounding 20% 15% 9% Free Throws 15% 10% 8%
In order of importance, I am in agreement with Oliver and EvanZ, but that's where the similarities largely end. In terms of win probability impact, shooting is nearly six times more important than the next most important factor, turnovers. This is significantly at odds with the other two estimates. Before I propose some theories as to what is driving this difference, I'm going to drill down on these results a bit more.
The nice thing about the win probability approach is that it is merely an aggregation of very granular data, rather than a top-down regression model. So, I can attribute win probability added at a variety of detailed levels. The table below breaks down average win probability added (for the victorious team) by quarter:
Win Probability Added Percent of Total quarter total FG FT RB TO FG FT RB TO Q1 5.6% 4.1% 0.5% 0.5% 0.6% 72% 8% 9% 11% Q2 7.6% 5.8% 0.6% 0.4% 0.8% 77% 8% 6% 10% Q3 9.9% 7.1% 0.7% 1.0% 1.0% 72% 7% 10% 10% Q4 21.7% 15.3% 1.8% 2.3% 2.3% 71% 8% 11% 11% OT 3.1% 2.2% 0.3% 0.3% 0.3% 71% 9% 9% 10%
The first thing to notice is that win probability added is not evenly distributed among the four quarters of regulation play. Each quarter is more important than the one that precedes it, with the fourth quarter more than twice as important as the third.
Within each quarter, the win probability contribution of each of the four factors is relatively consistent (see the "Percent of Total" columns). Prior to pulling the data, I would have expected Shooting (FG) to have a larger impact in the fourth quarter, particularly the final minute. Here is how the fourth quarter breaks down:
Win Probability Added (4th Qtr) Percent of Total minute total FG FT RB TO FG FT RB TO first 10 12.2% 9.0% 0.7% 1.4% 1.1% 74% 6% 11% 9% penultimate 2.6% 1.7% 0.2% 0.4% 0.3% 66% 7% 16% 11% final 6.9% 4.6% 0.9% 0.5% 0.9% 67% 13% 7% 13%
Of the 21.7% in win probability added in the fourth quarter, a third of that comes in the final minute of play. And in that final minute, free throws become more important in determining the outcome of the game, making up 13% of the total, compared to an average of 8% over the entire game.
So why are my numbers so different from previous estimates of the four factors' importance? EvanZ's analysis focused on point differential, and perhaps it is possible that what drives differences in scoring margin may not always align with what wins games. For example, let's say a game has entered its "garbage time" phase. With victory (or defeat) assured, teams are more likely to pull their starters and play backups. Perhaps starters are more likely to make contributions via field goal shooting, to the exclusion of the other three factors.
So, when the bench players are in during garbage time, their contributions may be more evenly spread among the four factors, which does affect scoring margin. It can turn a 25 point blowout into a 10 point victory, the impact of which would show up in EvanZ's analysis. But win probability added largely ignores these garbage time contributions.
Or maybe the difference is due to matters more mundane and technical. Assessing "relative importance" is not exactly a well defined measure. I find no fault in EvanZ's approach to the problem, but it is difficult to say whether his approach leads to numbers that are directly comparable to mine. Also, it is hard to make sense of what these numbers actually mean. That shooting is important is hardly a penetrating insight, and all three analyses agree on that point.
But what does it mean to say that shooting has a relative importance of 71%, instead of 54%? What could an NBA GM do with that information? And how it would it change things if instead that value was 75%? At this point, I can't really say, but I think it is worthwhile to explore further. Alternate theories welcome in the comments below or on TwitterDavid Glasner is unhappy with Allan Meltzer, who wrote an absurd op-ed in the WSJ in which Meltzer, among other things, just makes stuff up — claiming that markets are signaling fear of inflation when they are in fact doing no such thing. In fact, the most sophisticated gauge we have of market inflation expectations, from the Cleveland Fed, looks like this:
But it’s actually much worse than Glasner acknowledges. Meltzer has been banging the same drum for more than three years; I debunked a very similar scare op-ed on his part way back in May 2009.
You might think that the complete failure of the predicted inflation takeoff to materialize would at least give him pause. But no: his dogmatism is completely unshaken.
And the thing is, he’s typical. I wrote about this a few weeks ago:
Actually, has even one prominent economist or economic prognosticator who got everything wrong admitted it, or shown even a hint of humility? Has anyone perhaps hinted that the policy recommendations he was making might not be right, given the total failure of events to go the way he predicted? I can’t think of one.
Glasner suggests that Meltzer has been corrupted by Murdoch’s influence. I disagree; I hold no affection for Murdoch, but one of the many unpleasant things we’ve learned in this crisis is that there was plenty of intellectual corruption in the economics profession from the get-go.Buy Photo U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (from left), House Speaker Paul Ryan and Gov. Scott Walker acknowledge the crowd after they spoke during the 1st Congressional District Fall Fest at the Walworth County Fairgrounds in Elkhorn. (Photo: Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)Buy Photo
Elkhorn — The Republican Party's crisis reverberated across the country Saturday, as Donald Trump vowed to remain in the race, several top leaders told him to get out, and House Speaker Paul Ryan sought to focus attention on the stakes of the election.
All the turmoil facing the party in the wake of the emergence of a 2005 video — where Trump is heard making crude comments about groping and sexually harassing women — could be felt at the Walworth County Fairgrounds.
Trump's invitation to come here for a unity event was withdrawn by Ryan, who rebuked the nominee in a withering statement Friday.
Vice presidential nominee Mike Pence, penciled in to appear, also stayed away, and in his own statement Saturday scolded his running mate, saying he was "offended by the words and actions" from the Trump video.
"I do not condone his remarks and I cannot defend them," Pence said. "I am grateful that he has expressed remorse and apologized to the American people."
It was left to Ryan, the final speaker at the 1st Congressional District Fall Fest, to put it all in perspective.
"There is a bit of an elephant in this room," Ryan said, standing on a stage backed by two American flags, decorated with pumpkins, and flanked with hay bales and tractors.
"It's a troubling situation. I'm serious, it is," Ryan said. "I meant what I said and it is still how I feel, but that is not what we're here to talk about today."
There were 10 speakers, including emcee Jay Weber of WISN-AM (1300), and Trump's name was only mentioned three times.
Ryan and others, including Gov. Scott Walker and Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, sought to focus on GOP policy and election prospects up and down the ballot. But the message was overshadowed by the party's standard bearer finding himself under siege. Trump's brief apology, issued late Friday, appeared to only add to his woes.
In interviews and a tweet, Trump said he was staying in the race. "I have tremendous support," he told the Washington Post.
Melania Trump said the words her husband used in the 2005 video were "unacceptable and offensive to me," but said she hoped people would accept his apology, as she had.
Trump's support within the party's hierarchy appeared to be collapsing, with several senators, governors and House members calling on him to quit the race. U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the party's 2008 nominee, withdrew his support from Trump.
The top Wisconsin Republicans who have backed Trump — Ryan, Walker and Johnson — have not withdrawn their support but have condemned his comments. The three politicians were not available to take questions here.
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The scene at the event was pure American, a beautiful autumn day with voters eating pulled pork and later gathering by the stage for speeches. Several people in the crowd were upset by the lack of acknowledgement of Trump. At one point, U.S. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner exchanged words with a heckler.
CLOSE Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner tells a protester to "clean up your act!" during the 1st Congressional District Fall Fest at the Walworth County Fairgrounds in Elkhorn on Saturday. Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
In an interview, Attorney General Brad Schimel called Trump's comments "indefensible."
"He's going to have to apologize and get to work and focus on real issues here," he said. "I don't know if he can leave that behind."
Asked if Trump should leave the ticket, Schimel said: "I don't know. That's way beyond my pay grade."
Brad Courtney, chairman of the state Republican Party, said he remained intent on recruiting volunteers and putting together a ground operation for the election.
"I am focused on winning Wisconsin," he said, ticking off a series of races.
Trump supporters said they were sticking with their candidate, despite the controversy.
Elkhorn resident Shelly Nettesheim, who donned a T-shirt reading "Deplorable Lives Matter," chalked up Trump's absence as a missed opportunity in a swing state.
"That's sort of disappointing in a crowd of this size with the election just weeks away," said Nettesheim, a branch manager at a staffing firm. "I don't think (Ryan) had any choice, but it would have been a big deal for our little community to have Donald Trump here."
Nik Rettinger, a member of the Republican Party of Waukesha County, praised the event's organizers for moving forward and pushing a conservative message, even if it meant skipping over virtually any mention of the top of the ticket.
"I think that with the suddenness of what came out, there needs to be some time to digest all of it," said Rettinger.
Jennifer Holter, a retired city government supervisor, said Trump's comments mattered to her, but they won't be enough for her to switch to Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton. Holter said she's concerned that Clinton will have the opportunity to appoint multiple U.S. Supreme Court justices and select liberal-leaning jurists.
"I will say it impacted (my view of Trump), but I don't think it will change it, because I look at what the alternative is: another Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the court," said Holter.
Trump supporter and Brodhead resident Lavonne Drake said she believed Trump's chances to win were "pretty good until yesterday." She argued that too much has been made of Trump's "potty-mouth," adding "we know that he's kind of that way."
"He's not perfect, he has a lot of character flaws, but I don't think they even compare to Hillary Clinton's," Drake said. "I hope sincerely that the women of this country take a look at the true character of the people and see there are flaws in both."
Read or Share this story: http://on.jsonl.in/2dUAk3lI’ve been using Python for a while. Recently I have noted some nuances, wonders and counter-intuitive things I ran into. The list grew surprisingly fast.
Disclaimer: Most of the problems that I list here can be understood and explained. It’s just my opinion that something is odd, so forgive me if I raise something that, in your opinion, is not an issue at all.
It’s less apparent, but still reasonable to point out that the select module is inconsistent. It specifies methods, some of which take seconds, others take milliseconds as a parameter.
I’m often in doubt about the behaviour of get-like methods, due to inconsistent behaviour. Currently some of them raise exception, others just return None. Why None?
Unfortunately pprint is not special and has to be used with brackets. Hopefully this issue was addressed by Python 3 – print will also always require brackets.
I’d love to use pprint.pprint in the same way print is used.
This often appears in conjunction with print:
Constructing tuples is misleading for beginners. For example foo(1,2) is way different than foo((1,2)). On the other hand foo(1) is the same as foo((1)).
All my friends who learn Python have a problem with sort. Apparently <list>.sort() returns None, which causes a lot confusion. What they need is the builtin sorted.
Internals
Circular imports It’s not a surprise that Python doesn’t handle circular imports. But what does that actually mean? Let’s create two files: a.py and b.py. Let’s import b from a and a from b: $ cat a.py var_1 = 1 import b var_2 = 2 print “Hello world from module a” print “Imported b, b.var_1=%r b.var_2=%r” % ( getattr (b, “var_1″, None ), getattr (b, “var_2″, None )) $ cat b.py var_1 = 1 import a var_2 = 2 print “Hello world from module b” print “Imported a, a.var_1=%r a.var_2=%r” % ( getattr (a, “var_1″, None ), getattr (a, “var_2″, None )) Think for a while about what result you would expect. $ python -c "import a" Hello world from module 'b'. Imported a, a.var_1=1 a.var_2=None Hello world from module 'a'. Imported b, b.var_1=1 b.var_2=2 What actually happened? We requested module a. Module a runs.
a requests module b. Flow goes to b.
b requests a. Python understands that it’s actually in the middle of creating module a, and gives back the reference to half-loaded namespace from module a.
Module b prints out a.var_1, which has the correct value, but a.var_2 is not set yet, so it defaults to None.
After that everything continues normally.
Module naming and side effects It’s often forgotten that direct imports from inside the module, like import a imports something way different than global import import blah.a. For example, if you created a file /tmp/a.py: $ cd /tmp; PYTHONPATH=.. python >>> import a >>> import tmp.a The commands are importing different module from Python’s point of view. If a.py has any side effects, they will be executed twice. A common bug is to use local paths from inside the module, while encouraging users to use global module paths from outside. This leads to double imports. So, if you’re importing local files from inside a python module, consider the syntax with dot: # Imagine we’re in a module *tmp*, in a file *b.py*: import a # bad, import is different than *tmp.a* import tmp.a # better, but we can’t rename the module easily from. import a # perfect! imports file a.py from _this_ module.
What do imports import? If I need a.b.c.d(), Python requires me to understand which of the parts describe a module, which describe a file inside module, which describe a class and which a function. In this case I could assume that a.b.c are modules and d() is a global function: >>> from a.b.c import d >>> d() But that can be wrong! a can be a module and b.c.d() can describe a class, sub class and sub sub class. >>> from a import b >>> b.c.d() That’s not all. In normal cases lacking a proper import causes an exception. Sometimes it doesn’t… My favourite example is os.path. I still don’t know if I should import os or os.path. Both versions work: >>> import os >>> os.path.devnull ‘/dev/null’ >>> import os.path >>> os.path.devnull ‘/dev/null’
Module reload Apparently Python does allow you to dynamically reload modules.
That’s a pretty neat feature. But in practice it’s not very useful –
modules are usually imported from global namespaces and local imports
from inside the code are considered slow.
Loading order Python uses several mechanisms for loading modules: System modules are loaded from /usr/lib/python2.5.
. Other are in /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages.
. There’s also /usr/share/python-support.
. And /usr/lib/python-support.
. I haven’t yet mentioned eggs.
. And eggs have *.pth files. Python Eggs are really dirty. Install a few of them and run: >>> import sys >>> sys.path [ '', '/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/multiprocessing-2.6.2.1-py2.5-linux-x86_64.egg', '/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/amqplib-0.6.1-py2.5.egg',...] Yes! Eggs are injected into the loading paths, polluting your system Python installation, and hurting Python startup time. Btw. I tried to force Python to use eggs from my home directory:
it’s painful. Not to mention the problems there are with
platform-specific eggs.
999+1 is not 1000 The well-known “feature” of Python integers is that they don’t play nicely with is operator. Internally, small integers are reused objects and is, which checks object memory location, works fine. Greater integers are created as new objects every time, so is fails. >>> 1 is 1 True >>> 1000 is 1000 True >>> 999 + 1 is 1000 False >>> 2 + 1 is 3 True To make things even worse the behaviour changes over python versions.
For example 100+1 is 101 returns True in Python 2.5 but False
in Python 2.4.
The order of unpacking Have you ever wondered what is the order during tuple unpacking? >>> _, _, _ = 1, 2, 3 >>> _ 3 On the other hand this syntax is not allowed in function declarations. Strange. >>> def a (_, _, _): print _ … File “<stdin>”, line 1 SyntaxError: duplicate argument ‘_’ in function definition Speaking of function declarations, there’s a nice feature that allows you to define named parameters before unnamed ones, although this syntax works only for function definitions, not for usage: >>> def foo (a= 1, b= 2, *args, **kwargs): … print “a=%r b=%r args=%r kwargs=%r” % (a,b,args,kwargs … >>> foo( 4, 5, 6 ) a= 4 b= 5 args=( 6,) kwargs={} >>> foo(a= 4, b= 5, 6 ) # I would expect this to work! File “<stdin>”, line 1 SyntaxError: non-keyword arg after keyword arg
Python has deterministic garbage collection Unlike other dynamic languages, Python uses reference counting as a garbage collection mechanism. During normal execution objects are freed right in the moment where they lose the last reference. This means that while the program runs Python shouldn’t have any unexpected hiccups!
Unlike Java or Erlang, Python can run predictably smoothly. Am I saying that Python is a proper realtime language, and that you could use it in
a medical ventilator? Well, Python does have advanced garbage collection
but it’s only used to free cyclic references. With proper programming discipline you can avoid creating reference loops. Oh, and please
do avoid setting __del__ destructors, as Python can’t free reference loops with objects that define them.Apple has finally allowed pornography into the iTunes App Store. The application, called Hottest Girls, costs $2 and includes "2200+ images of topless, sexy babes and nude models".
UPDATE: TechCrunch is reporting that Apple has pulled the app from its App Store, stating, "it appears someone over at Cupertino [has] ultimately decided to reject the first such app." The removal of the app is only a temporary one, according to the app's developer. Allen Leung, developer of Hottest Girls, posted on his web site that his app is "temporarily sold out" due to overload on his image server.
*UPDATE #2: Apple has reiterated its policy against pornographic apps and is taking credit for pulling the app. Leung has subsequently removed his claim of being "sold out." More details in our followup story: Apple: No Porn Allowed in iPhone's App Store
*
Why has Apple, a company which banned an e-book application from the same store because it could be used to download the Kama Sutra, suddenly started selling smut? Because the 3.0 iPhone software update now allows age restrictions for applications. Also, when I downloaded the application to test it, a new alert popped up asking me if I am over 17. I said yes.
The application itself is terrible. Four photos are shown on screen at once and tapping one will pull a full sized version from the server. From here you can look at it or save it to your photo-roll. There is no slideshow to display a progressive striptease of the same model, so you are limited to one picture at a time before you have to navigate back to the main screen, which shows a lack of understanding as to how a porn app should work. You could of course just use the application for downloading and view the pictures later in the Photos application.
You can, however, pick a category. On offer are Popular, Asian, Blonde, Brunette and Swimsuit. This is a little less specialized than what you will find on most porn sites, and it is also distinctly softcore: while there are nipples to be seen, that's about it. A smartly-worded Google image search would do better if you're looking for titillation.
The most interesting part is the social media aspect, or at least a crowd-sourcing one. When you view a picture full-size you are asked to rate it as either good or bad. Supposedly these ratings will steer future updates, which will be free and pushed directly to buyers.
This is certainly an interesting move from Apple. One of the main reasons for not buying porn on the internet (apart from the vast range of free content) is fear that the purveyors will rip you off if you give them a credit card number. With the Apple Store, your stimulation is just an easy, automatically-billed click away. This first foray is quite awful, but you can be sure that there will be more, and better, very soon.
Product page [iTunes]Inland NW CycloCross Series, to be scheduled for October and November.
Butte 100 mountain bike race, July 29: Billed as the country's toughest MB event; route follows Continental Divide, 25, 50 or 100 miles. Limit 350 riders.
Silver Mountain Race Series, July through September. Two divisions, Downhill and Super-Downhill.
12 hours of Disco, May 20-21: Mountain bike solo or team event on an 11-mile track near Salmon, Idaho.
24-Hours Round the Clock mountain bike race, May 27-28: Go solo or with a team in this endurance and social classic at Riverside State Park in Spokane.
Nakusp Road Bike Invitational, May 13-15: Three stage event includes hill climb and road race based out of Nakusp, British Columbia.
Tour de Bloom, May 5-7: Cycling Omnium by Wenatchee Valley Velo Club includes hill climb, criterium and road race.
Wednesday Night Mountain Bike Series, races Wednesdays in May and June, for all ages and abilities, starting 6:30 p.m. at Riverside State Park's Seven Mile airstrip in Spokane.
Cooper Jones Twilight Series, Tuesday nights, April 11 through July: Alternates from criteriums at Airway Heights to road races around Spokane.
Fat Tire Revolution Series, March 19-Sept. 23: includes 8 mountain-biking and off-paved road gran fondoes and races in central Washington, team and solo.
Cyclists who consider organized bike rides passé can break away in regional competitive races and series:
If you don't see your regional cycling event listed, send information by email to Outdoors editor Rich Landers.
Following is The Spokesman-Review’s 2017 Northwest Bicycling Events Calendar, the expanded list for events generally within a 300-mile range of Spokane.
Some of these tours are club affairs while many are fundraisers that feature great food, with cyclists happily donating to charitable causes in return for the pampering of a well-oiled event.
Plan ahead. Quotas for some popular events are reached months in advance. Other events offer discounts for early registration.
See the ‘you snooze, you lose’ list of several of the most popular spring and summer events that require applicants to be on the ball during winter.
February
Chilly Hilly, Feb. 26: Kicking off the cycling season for more than 40 years, 33-mile route around Bainbridge Island attracts about 6,000 riders. About $30 with ferry fare.
March
Gran Fondo Ephrata, March 19: Ride 80 miles on mixed surface roads out of Ephrata, Wash. First of five events in Vicious Cycle Gran Fondo series. $70.
April
Valley River Ride, April 2: New in 2017, ride 35, 52 or 62 miles from Renton along the Cedar and Green rivers; by Cascade Bicycle Club.
Spokane Bike Swap and Expo, April 8: Buy or sell used bikes at Spokane County Fair and Expo Center; benefits Friends of the Centennial Trail. $5 entry, kids under 13 free.
Gran Fondo Goldendale, April 9: Ride 90 miles on mixed surface roads out of Goldendale, Wash. One of five events in Gran Fondo series. $70.
Daffodil Classic, April 9: Ride 40-, 60- or 100-mile loops in the Orting Valley southeast of Tacoma; treats finishers with strawberry shortcake, 42nd annual event sponsored by Tacoma Wheelmen’s Bicycle Club. $40.
Tulip Pedal, April 15: |
end up being a safety at some point in time.
"He has to use his body and be in really good position to be a cover guy. You've just got to be careful how you use him. The kid's not a bad player."
On the other hand, Franklin's game, based on the off-season and first three weeks of training camp, hasn't fit as well in the NFL.
Franklin, 5 feet 10 inches and 205 pounds, can't get out of neutral. He rushed seven times for 17 yards in the intrasquad scrimmage and nine for 23 in the first two games.
It's just 16 carries, but Franklin's average of 2.5 yards is about on par with the way he has practiced, too.
With Randall Cobb injured and possibly being phased out of the return game, the Packers have been force-feeding Franklin into a role he never played for the Bruins. He has encountered some ball-security issues in practice and hasn't done anything returning in games.
The scouts said he ran hard from scrimmage in college, but that hasn't been evident in the pros. Renowned for his pass protection, he's been only adequate there.
"He looks like his numbers," a personnel man said. "He's not a real impressive guy. He plays small, and he doesn't play fast.
"I kind of liked him in college because he was so productive. But if you didn't know he was a draft pick, you'd think he was a free agent."
Eddie Lacy looked even better on tape than he did live. Center Evan Dietrich-Smith wasn't in good position on two or three of Lacy's runs, but the rookie helped him by making great reads, powering through trash and making sharp, educated cuts.
It's hard to know what to make of Alex Green. He doesn't get in until the second half, and his reads haven't been sharp.
The first snap for James Starks came with 5½ minutes remaining in the third quarter. He's 15-42 (2.8) in the two games compared to 12-31 (2.6) for Green.
Starks didn't help his cause with some shaky pass blocking. Rather than take blitzing safety Cody Davis on down the middle, he hit him with a glancing shoulder. Later, Starks ducked his head and made almost no contact with leaping linebacker Ray-Ray Armstrong.
Mike McCarthy benched Starks after he bounced a poorly blocked inside run to the perimeter and fumbled once he got there.
Last week, DuJuan Harris put on pads for the first time but was limited because of a troublesome knee. If Harris can return to his 2012 form, the Packers probably view Lacy and Harris as their ideal 1-2 punch.
The battle outside: After two games, the third-best outside linebacker has been rookie free agent Andy Mulumba, not holdover Dezman Moses or rookie Nate Palmer, a sixth-round pick from Illinois State.
At 6-3, Mulumba is an inch taller than Moses and Palmer. He runs much faster than Moses and has been more instinctive than both of them.
Mulumba's forte is rushing the passer. He's a top-notch athlete with a feel for setting up blockers.
Against St. Louis, Mulumba did his best work against Chris Williams, the 14th overall pick as a tackle by the Chicago Bears in 2008. Williams, who was cut in October 2012, was playing left tackle with the backups Saturday night even though he is in a close battle to start at left guard.
Mulumba bull-rushed Williams for a sack in 3.2 seconds. On the next snap, he beat him for a knockdown.
Later, Mulumba flattened inside and made a tackle, beat a wham block by the tight end for an assisted tackle and displayed good hustle downfield.
Mulumba isn't as strong as Moses, who played the point impressively in his 490-snap rookie season. He also will need tons of work in zone coverage.
Moses, however, hurt himself twice in coverage against the Rams. After missing running Isaiah Pead in the flat and watching him gain 11 more yards, Moses overran Jared Cook as he dropped in a fire zone and the lithe tight end was gone for 37 yards.
Palmer posted three pressures in the last quarter, his most impressive moments of camp. Still, he's a project.
Decent debut: Mike Neal played outside linebacker from scrimmage for the first time and wasn't bad. Of his 15 snaps, seven came at linebacker but just one was in the base 3-4 defense.
In his lone base snap, Neal used his 275 pounds to play through tight end Corey Harkey and force Pead to go so wide he lost a yard. Harkey, a second-year man from UCLA, had upheld his reputation for outstanding blocking by pancaking Nick Perry 10 yards downfield on Pead's 11-yard run to open the Rams' offensive night.
Harkey got back at Neal by hooking him inside and the ball went outside for a substantial gain.
Coverage figures to remain an adventure for Neal. But if he can be at least adequate setting the edge against the run, defensive coordinator Dom Capers should make good use of him in customized game plans.
Too close to call: Don Barclay had a full week to run ahead of Marshall Newhouse at right tackle. Based on Saturday night, McCarthy will have a difficult decision picking a starter.
Barclay played extremely well in the nine-play first series.
He got off to the linebacker level and stayed with Alec Ogletree on a 7-yard run by Lacy. He stepped outside to pin defensive end Chris Long inside on a 15-yard run. He shoved defensive tackle Kendall Langford into the turf on the back side on another 7-yard run.
In protection, Barclay was keeping Long at bay with crisp sets and good hand placement.
Newhouse replaced Barclay for the next series, and when Barclay returned for the third he wasn't nearly as effective. In fact, in his 33-play stint (all at right tackle), there were four pass plays (two against Long, two against end William Hayes) in which he lost the edge but the ball was out (three times) or Graham Harrell was forced to scramble.
Barclay, however, didn't have a glaring minus in the run game.
Newhouse, in 15 snaps at right tackle and eight at left, could be dinged for three running plays and one pass.
Left tackle David Bakhtiari split his 40 snaps against starter Robert Quinn and backup Gerald Rivers.
Other than Quinn's third-and-5 inside sack, Bakhtiari's only other big miscue in protection was a false-start penalty. Most of his minuses again came in the run game.
Long audition: Jermichael Finley played merely 17 snaps. Matthew Mulligan injured his arm double-teaming defensive tackle Michael Brockers on a run and was done after three snaps. Andrew Quarless and Ryan Taylor sat out.
Thus, D.J. Williams (23 snaps) was the No. 2 tight end, and the snap counts swelled this game for Brandon Bostick (18 to 33) and Jake Stoneburner (11 to 20).
Weighing merely 236 pounds, Williams has made himself into a capable blocker. Twelve of his snaps came from a conventional three-point stance, and from there he made outstanding blocks at the point of attack against both Quinn and Ogletree on three runs totaling 29 yards.
He also gained 10 yards after the catch on his two receptions for 17 yards, and showed awareness by getting out of bounds late in the final minute of the first half.
On the other hand, Williams got sloppy against Quinn twice on the back side, and also was part of the reason why Quinn wasn't blocked on a failed third and 1.
He also dropped a pin-point vertical throw from Harrell in which he was behind middle linebacker Josh Hull 21 yards downfield.
Bostick worked from a three-point stance 20 times. He isn't nearly the blocker that Williams has turned into even though he outweighs him by 10 pounds.
Other than one or two plays, Bostick wasn't a liability in the run game. He just doesn't have the tenacity, training or horsepower yet to match the other tight ends.
As a receiver, Bostick has watched Finley so much that their mannerisms are eerily similar.
He gets in and out of his breaks just like Finley. He swivels on his down hand to peer back at the quarterback during audibles like Finley. He even strides like Finley.
Bostick caught all three balls thrown to him for 29 yards.
Stoneburner came back for the ball and made a smart, sure-handed touchdown catch. Otherwise, he didn't distinguish himself.
Send email to bmcginn@journalsentinel.comWhat is Saito Therapy?
This therapy was developed by me (Mr Saito) as a result of suffering from and then curing my own Anxiety Disorder. Saito Therapy is based on the concept of traditional Japanese Zen meditation and my own experience.
I spent almost 3 decades suffering from severe case of social phobia and general anxiety disorder. During that time I constantly kept reading Morita-therapy books and even hospitalized in one of the most strict Morita-Therapy hospitals twice for 4 months but I saw no improvement.
But in 1993 I read "Arugamama no sekai (Be as you are)" by Dr Usa (a Morita Therapy specialist). I was very impressed by his book. It made me realize that the way I was treating my illness was wrong. After that my anxiety disorder gradually improved until, finally, I overcame my problems entirely.
I decided to help those who suffer from Anxiety Disorder and in 1997 I launched the Japanese version of Saito therapy on internet. Since then I have been giving advice to those who seek help. Considering of the difficulty of anxiety disorder, I gradually cure those who suffer the most in Japan. Now, with the launch of the English version, I am ready to give advice to sufferers the world over.
My theory is unique. If you follow these instructions, you will see great changes overnight. Your mood swings will stabilize and your depression will disappear but it will take patience and time to get rid of your all anxiety flashbacks.
So, Good Luck and please e-mail with news on your progress: good or bad.
Area of effectiveness
Anxiety Disorder, Social Phobia, Panic Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Eating Disorder and syndromes induced by anxiety.
What do you have to do now?
1. Stop looking for a treatment for your Anxiety Disorder
2. Stop listening to your obsessive and intrusive thoughts. Start doing something in front of you.
3. Go to bed early at night when you feel very depressed
4. Go straight to school or to your office without any preparations and precautions.
5. Do not go to the doctor, do not take medication, do not read books that are related to your disorder and do not collect information about your problems.25
I have used this many times and everyone loves it! An easy clean-up tip.. Put about 1" of water in the broiler pan and clean up is a breeze, just por out water and rinse off, no scubbing!
This recipe as written for me was no good. I should have omitted the flour. I followed the directions to a T and what I got was bacon lightly coated in flour with no sweetness whatsoever. I'...
Donna Van Avery 100 38
I have used this many times and everyone loves it! An easy clean-up tip.. Put about 1" of water in the broiler pan and clean up is a breeze, just por out water and rinse off, no scubbing! Read more
CRYSLYN 46 6
We make this bacon, but haven't ever used the flour...just sprinkle on the brown sugar and pepper. I love that you cook this in the oven. It's so much easier that way! (Spread a piece of foil... Read more
Debbie Hupman-Diehl 154 5
oh yeah...bacon that is sublime! turns "ordinary" bacon into extraordinary, special bacon into spectacular!If you are in the Adirondacks, get thyself over to Oscar's Smokehouse, grab some of the... Read more
Rachel 1k 14
Yummy! 2nd time added 2T chili powder, 1 tsp ground cumin, 1 tsp ground coriander, and 1/4 tsp of cayenne pepper, only 1/2 tsp of black. Sweet and Spicy! Read more
MRS_BOOKIES 81 6
This is heavenly. A family favorite. Just make sure to do a couple of pounds. I have a gas oven so it cooked it perfectly on 350 for about 30 minutes or more. I put the bacon on parchment pap... Read more
KATYPI 566 207
Now this was fun; it's so bad for us but it tastes very good. I actually cooked it at a lower temperature to cook along with another dish, 350F for 35 minutes or so. It came out nice and crisp... Read more
Nandabear 3k 470
The bacon turned out nice and crisp. It was just a little bit sweeter than I would have preferred so next time I'll use a little less brown sugar. Loved the baking in the oven idea. Thanks! Read more
tahitian4rmj 115 42
This went by quickly. During the holidays, I also do the same thing with leftover ham. Its delicious. Read morePARIS -- Authorities in southern France have detained a man they say stabbed a woman and her three daughters at an Alps resort, apparently upset at what they were wearing.
Jean-Marc Duprat, a deputy mayor for the town of Laragne-Monteglin in the Hautes-Alpes region, says the mother and her girls, aged 8, 12 and 14, were vacationing at a nearby resort when the man attacked them Tuesday morning. He said the man, who is not related to them, was upset they were wearing shorts and T-shirts.
According to The Telegraph newspaper of Britain, the suspect is a Moroccan man who was arrested after the incident.
The newspaper said the youngest girl was left fighting for her life in a local hospital with a punctured lung.
Local media also reported that the man accused the women of being inappropriately dressed before or during the attack.
A French prosecutor, however, told the AFP news agency "the motive of the attack is very blurred." He did not say whether officials believe it could have been the latest attack by Islamic extremists to hit Europe.
Laragne-Monteglin is 110 miles northwest of Nice, where a Tunisian man killed 84 people last week by driving through a crowd on Bastille Day.Rodman gives Kim the gift of Trump: ‘The Art of the Deal’
Former NBA basketball star Dennis Rodman presents a book titled "Trump The Art of the Deal" to North Korea's Sports Minister Kim Il Guk Thursday, June 15, 2017, in Pyongyang, North Korea. (AP Photo/Kim Kwang Hyon)
PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) — Dennis Rodman has delivered a message from President Donald Trump to North Korea — sort of.
On Thursday, the former NBA player gave the country’s sports minister a copy of Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal,” a present intended for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
It wasn’t signed by Trump, who was Rodman’s boss for two seasons of the “Celebrity Apprentice” reality TV show. Rodman has said his visit has nothing to do with the White House.
Some other highlights of what has so far been a low-key Pyongyang trip for the often flamboyant celebrity, who has visited the North four times before:
___
HANGING WITH NORTH KOREAN ATHLETES
While his previous visits in 2013 and 2014 often drew controversy, Rodman has said this week he’s just here to meet old friends and have a good time.
He and his small entourage have been spending time hanging out with young North Korean basketball players and visiting local sights.
He watched a North Korean men’s basketball team and met Sports Minister Kim Il Guk. Along with the Trump book, other gifts he presented for Kim Jong Un include a copy of “Where’s Waldo? The Totally Essential Travel Collection,” a mermaid puzzle, two sets of soap and two autographed jerseys.
Rodman also met North Korean Olympic athletes, including judo gold medalist An Kum Ae.
“All of you guys should be proud of yourselves, because, you know, a lot of people don’t give you guys credit, because this is such a small country, and not many people from North Korea can compete around the world,” Rodman said.
He continued: “But for you guys to come back here in your country, with a medal, that says a lot about North Korea, because people don’t really take North Korea so seriously about sports or anything like that.”
___
“AN OLD FRIEND”
Rodman, one of the only Westerners to have personally met Kim Jong Un, has been criticized for a prior trip where he sang “Happy Birthday” to Kim and suggested an American missionary was at fault for his own imprisonment in North Korea, remarks for which he later apologized.
But the sports minister made clear Rodman is viewed fondly in Pyongyang.
“In the past, our respected supreme leader met you several times and he used his precious time to watch the basketball match with the players you brought here. In the past he met you, so our people all know you well,” Kim Il Guk told Rodman. “And also we feel that you are an old friend.”
___
NO ROLE IN STUDENT’S RELEASE
Rodman’s arrival on Tuesday came just hours after the North decided to release Otto Warmbier, an American university student who had been imprisoned for 15 years with hard labor for trying to steal a propaganda banner.
Warmbier, who had been confined for 17 months, has apparently fallen into a coma not long after his confinement began and Pyongyang issued a statement Thursday saying it decided to let him go for “humanitarian reasons.”
Officials in Washington and Pyongyang said Rodman played no role in the release. Behind-the-scenes discussions regarding Warmbier had been underway well before his visit.
The 22-year-old Warmbier, a University of Virginia undergraduate, was convicted and sentenced in a one-hour trial in North Korea’s Supreme Court in March 2016. He got 15 years in prison with hard labor for subversion after he tearfully confessed that he had tried to steal the propaganda banner.
His father, Fred Warmbier, told Fox News that his son was “terrorized and brutalized” and has been in a coma for more than a year.
The report of Warmbier’s release on the North’s official Korean Central News Agency made no mention of Warmbier’s health.
Although U.S. citizens are not banned from visiting North Korea, the U.S. State Department strongly advises against it.
With Warmbier’s release, three other Americans remain imprisoned in North Korea.“Well,” deadpans Ian McKellen’s Magneto, sizing up the X-Men’s position from the rubble of a robo-wrecked future, “it’s complicated.” You can say that again, but the beauty of Bryan Singer’s mutant-verse comeback is the light work he makes of potentially heavy lifting. Faced with huge fan hopes (beloved comic source, Singer’s return), a crowded superhero market, two X-teams, temporal shenanigans and geographical jumps, Singer has refreshed the series with blasts of his original entries’ X-factors: vim, levity, clarity and a sincere, soulful grip on the emotional stakes involved.
You know you’re in sure hands as soon as Patrick Stewart intones The Themes – faith, destiny, hope - over shots of a stormy (honestly, the weather’s foul) 2023 apocalypse, where mutant-killing robo-whatsit Sentinels have set Prof X a poser: “Is the future truly set?” The test for that question is a madly ambitious tale of choice and redemption, ushered briskly across space and time as 2023 Wolverine’s consciousness is zapped into his 1973 body. His task: to fix the First Class team’s fractures and fix the future.
Problem is, James McAvoy’s Xavier has lost hope and started moping around like Bruce Wayne in a mega-sulk. Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) will take some dissuading from her mission to kill Sentinel creator Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), an assassination that will inadvertently escalate Trask’s Sentinel programme. Dovetailing between Xavier/Raven’s arcs, Singer draws heart from their past ties and heft from those chunky questions of causality and ethics that time-travel tales crack open.
Repetitive exposition sometimes nulls the pacing, but, just as Wolverine’s violent way with kitchen-ware silences Xavier’s gas-bagging during one dicey situation, so the plot restarts fast. From Quicksilver’s (Evan Peters) delicious prison-bust show-stopper to a wicked mutant tag-team use of the X-Jet, Singer revels in the cool shit. Yet what impresses most is how close he sticks to Mystique and Xavier, even as football stadiums are raised for a multi-level but cannily (and literally…) contained climax.
Lawrence honours increased screen-time with emotional conviction, wounded eyes speaking volumes. Indeed, old and new cast-members shine through the screen-crowd. More McKellen would have been nice but Stewart monologues magnificently, Michael Fassbender relishes ’70s Magneto’s cruel cool, Dinklage makes Trask more than a ’tache-twirling tyrant and Hugh Jackman’s sardonic Logan never gets old (and he has a 20-year-old’s bum).
The climax revels in temporal paradoxes, but it also offers simple, smart pleasures, locking some plot threads into place and opening others teasingly. As for post-credits pleasures, future X-cursions look triply exciting after this assured reclamation of distinct comic-book turf. If The Amazing Spider-Man 2 showed how superhero cinema could become stuck in a rut, Singer’s brisk, bracing old/new mash shows us the antidote. As Beast puts it, “Power’s back on.”
Verdict: With style, heart and thrills, Singer has nailed the most ambitious X-flick yet. Popcorn pizzazz combines with X2 ’s emotional sweep and something extra: a platform for the X-Men’s screen survival.Tyrone Brown (born 1973) is an African-American man from Texas who, in 1990, was sentenced to a life term in a Texas maximum security prison and was kept incarcerated for 17 years after testing positive once for smoking marijuana while on probation for robbing a man of two dollars at the age of 17.[1] No one was hurt in the robbery, and Brown had voluntarily returned the wallet to the victim.[1] Brown's case attracted some attention in the press in 2006, and he was later granted a conditional pardon by Texas Governor Rick Perry.[2] He was released on March 16, 2007.
Press attention [ edit ]
Brown's case was contrasted in the press with the case of an influential white defendant; both defendants were sentenced by the same judge, Keith Dean.[1][2] The other man had committed murder by shooting an unarmed prostitute in the back (and then taking money from his victim after shooting him), and had then violated his parole by repeatedly testing positive for cocaine use over a period of several years, breaking through the glass door of a woman's home to confront her in a dispute, living with at least two men who had multiple criminal convictions, and being arrested for crack cocaine possession while driving a congressman's car.[1] Probation records indicated that the man had failed five drug tests over a three-year period.[1] In contrast with the way Brown was treated, the other defendant was never sent to jail and received an early lifting of all of the usual conditions of probation.[1][2]
After Brown's case and the contrasting treatment of the other man became well known, in part due to a feature report on the ABC News television program 20/20, the judge involved in the two cases, Keith Dean, failed to win re-election to his position.[1]
Original crime [ edit ]
When he was 17 years old, Brown and another 17-year-old committed a robbery.[1] Brown and his partner confronted a man with a pistol and demanded that he give them his wallet. The victim handed his wallet to Brown, and after removing the two dollars that it contained, Brown returned the wallet to him. Brown was a high-school dropout and had been a victim of child abuse by his father, who had reportedly beat him. Judge Keith Dean in Dallas, Texas originally sentenced Brown to 10 years of probation for the crime, before changing his sentence to life in prison after he tested positive once for marijuana use.FX is staying the course with The Americans.
The low-rated but critically acclaimed 1980s Russian spy drama has been renewed for a fourth season, the cable network announced Tuesday.
Starring Keri Russell, Matthew Rhys and Noah Emmerich, the fourth season will return in 2016 with another round of 13 hourlong episodes.
Read more 'The Americans' Star on Lack of Awards: "We Haven’t Been Sleeping With the Right People"
"Remarkably, this season of The Americans has achieved even greater acclaim than that of its first two seasons," FX original programming president Nick Grad said. "The series has cemented it status with critics as television’s best current drama and arguably the best show on TV, and we couldn’t agree more."
Read more 'The Americans' Star Keri Russell on Season 3: Is it Sexist to Not Recruit Paige?
Season three of the series, produced by Fox 21 Television Studios, FX Productions and showrunners Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields, has been on par year-over-year, drawing 4.2 million total viewers (down 4 percent) and 1.8 million among adults 18-49 (off 6 percent) when factoring in seven days of DVR viewing, VOD and streaming. Season three has seen the series grow 147 percent from its overnight performance when adding seven days of viewing (up from 124 percent in season two and 93 percent in its freshman run).
The Americans joins a drama roster at FX that also includes Tyrant, The Strain, Taboo and the farewell season of Justified as well as anthologies American Horror Story, American Crime Story and Fargo.
Email: Lesley.Goldberg@THR.com
Twitter: @SnooditWASHINGTON (Reuters) - They look vaguely like miniature hockey pucks skittering along on three pin-like metal legs, but a swarm of small robots called Kilobots at a laboratory at Harvard University is making a little bit of history for automatons everywhere.
The Kilobots, a swarm of 1,000 simple but collaborative robots are pictured in this undated handout photo obtained by Reuters August 14, 2014. REUTERS/Mike Rubenstein and Science/AAAS/Handout via Reuters
Researchers who created a battalion of 1,024 of these robots said on Thursday the mini-machines are able to communicate with one another and organize themselves into two-dimensional shapes like letters of the alphabet.
Much smaller groups of robots have been able to carry out similar tasks, but never a group this size.
The Kilobots are told by the researchers via an infrared transmitter to do a certain job. The robots then do it collectively without further input from a human being.
In a study published in the journal Science, they formed themselves on a large tabletop into the shapes of the letter “K,” a star, a solid square and a wrench.
It may be a step forward for collective artificial intelligence, although the researchers acknowledge the Kilobots are not exactly thinking deep thoughts.
“This is a ‘collective’ of robots - a group of robots that work together to complete a common goal,” said Harvard computer scientist Michael Rubenstein, who led the study. “If you call collective artificial intelligence the ability of a ‘collective’ to start to behave as a single entity, you could call this collective artificial intelligence.”
The Kilobots are simple and inexpensive robots built to talk to fellow Kilobots and sense the location of those others using infrared light. They use vibration motors to slide across a surface on their three legs.
But the surface must be very smooth. The one used in this study was essentially an eight foot (2.4 meter) by eight foot “dry erase” board tabletop. Even minor surface friction like that of paper halts them.
The robots measure about 1.2 inches in diameter and two inches tall. The material to build each of them cost just $14.
Rubenstein said the research anticipates a day when people may send many robots acting as a single entity to perform a task - perhaps to a destination like Mars - instead of humans or a single robot.
A “collective” may better handle an unknown environment - for example, forming into a snake shape to navigate sand dunes or like a ball to roll down a hill. He said a “collective” also is “fault tolerant” - if a single robot among 1,000 breaks down, plenty are left to do the job.
The Kilobot name is a play on the word kilobit, meaning 1,024 bits of digital information. But to some it might sound menacing - as in “killer robot” - as if it belongs in a movie like “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.”
“I tell people that these robots are not very dangerous. The only way that they could hurt you is if you try to eat one. They can’t even go over a piece of paper. So they’re kind of stuck where they are,” Rubenstein said.ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- The leader of an anti-government militia in Alaska who proclaimed that "God's law" trumps "man's law" was sentenced on Tuesday to nearly 26 years in prison for a plot to kill government employees he portrayed as his enemies.
Schaeffer Cox, the 28-year-old leader of the Alaska Peacekeepers Militia and a onetime candidate for the Alaska House of Representatives, apologized through tears for his actions.
"Well, I put myself here, with my own words, and I feel horrible about that, and I hurt my family, and that's who's really paying, and I feel horrible about that," he said at a hearing in federal court in Anchorage.
"I put a lot of people in fear by the things I said and the crazy stuff that was coming out of my mouth," he said.
Cox was convicted last summer of conspiring to murder federal and state government officials, including judges and law enforcement agents, soliciting others to commit murder and related weapons charges.
Evidence included a cache of illegal weapons, detailed lists of potential targets, testimony of government informants and tape recordings of speeches and meetings, some made secretly.
During the trial, Cox spent two days on the witness stand, at times confidently telling the jury his philosophy and likening himself to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi.
He testified that he sincerely believed government agents were planning to kill him and that he was justified in taking steps to defend his family against the police.
'Master manipulator'
But at Tuesday's sentencing, Cox disavowed many of those stances. He and his attorney cited a post-trial psychological evaluation that concluded Cox was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, delusions and a paranoid personality disorder.
U.S. District Court Judge Robert Bryan, who imposed the sentence, said he agreed Cox probably was mentally ill but said that did not excuse his actions.
"I want to note that he has never been so ill as to not be able to have followers and convince people to follow him," Bryan said. The 310-month sentence falls well short of the life term Cox could have received.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Skrocki, who described Cox as a "master manipulator," said he was "comfortable" with the sentence, even though prosecutors had been seeking 35 years.
Election, economy spark growth of militias
"Our view of what Mr. Cox said to the court is thoroughly contradicted by his actions," Skrocki told reporters after the sentencing hearing, noting those actions included putting longtime family friends "on a hit list."
Cox's sentence was the same as that imposed on Monday on one of his followers, Fairbanks-area resident Lonnie Vernon, who was convicted of murder conspiracy and weapons charges. Vernon's 66-year-old wife Karen, got 12 years for her role in the plot.
A fourth defendant, Coleman Barney, 38, was sentenced in September to five years in prison for weapons charges.SINGAPORE - Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH) has dismissed the Filipino nurse whose Facebook comments targeting Singaporeans surfaced last week, angering many online.
Mr Ello Ed Mundsel Bello wrote that Singaporeans are "loosers" (losers), and that he was "praying that disators (disasters) will strike Singapore". In a statement to the media on Friday night, TTSH said Mr Bello had joined the hospital in October and was under probation when he made the "offensive online comments".
During its investigations, the hospital was alerted to and received earlier online posts by Mr Bello, including "an offensive Facebook comment on Singapore", and "two offensive comments on religion on his Google Plus page".
Mr Bello confirmed that he had made these three posts, despite having earlier told his employers that he had reported to the police that his Facebook account had been hacked. He was then dismissed.
"These comments were highly irresponsible and offensive to Singapore and religion," said a TTSH spokesman. "They have distressed members of the public and our hospital staff. His conduct goes against our staff values of respect, professionalism and social responsibility. As a public healthcare institution, we take a very serious view and have zero tolerance on conduct that is offensive and detrimental to multi-cultural harmony in Singapore.
"Our decision for dismissal is independent of the ongoing police investigation of the more recent alleged posts made in January 2015. We are still in full cooperation with the police on the alleged comments."This weekend’s inaugural American Le Mans Series race at Circuit of the Americas marks the long-awaited debut of the DeltaWing coupe, built with an eye towards the future.
The new prototype contender is an evolution of the initial Ben Bowlby-designed car, which Don Panoz has campaigned since the start of the ALMS season. Featuring the obvious addition of a roof, there’s also been a number of other significant developments to the narrow-track car.
With a brand-new, specially designed Elan-built tub, narrowed rear frame around the engine, and most importantly improved cooling to better accommodate the 2.0-liter Mazda-based turbo engine, it hasn’t necessarily been a trouble-free transition, according to team manager Dave Price.
Following a breakout race for its outgoing roadster at Road America, which saw both Andy Meyrick and Katherine Legge lead overall at stages, the new coupe only turned its first laps less than two weeks ago at Roebling Road. On Tuesday, it completed 27 laps in an open test at COTA, which brought a few teething issues to light.
“I’m always realistic with my expectations but I think it would be fair to say that coming off Road America, we hoped to have hit the ground running,” Price said. “We had two small problems [on Tuesday] but they did consume a lot of time. We had a wastegate problem and a gear selection problem. They were tiny, software issues. It took a bit of time to fix it. We’ve made more [modifications] to it now.
“I guess we’ll spend a good part of this week fixing it and hope to have a nice, trouble-free run through the race. I’d be surprised if we were as competitive as we were at Road America because looking at where we were [on Tuesday], we’ve got a bit of ground to make up.”
Price, though, is confident the car will eventually exceed the performance levels of its predecessor. He said it was already 7 mph faster in a straight line than the roadster at the initial test in Georgia, while plans are in place to debut a 9 kg lighter engine for the next round at VIR.
As for 2014, when the DeltaWing coupe will be performance balanced with Daytona Prototypes and P2 cars to race in top Prototype category, Price is not expecting any wholesale changes, particularly in the engine department. However, there is an initiative to shed up to 25 kgs from the current specification, to bring the base weight down to 500 kg.
Price said a tire test with new class-wide supplier Continental is scheduled for shortly after Petit Le Mans next month, which should also help provide a better gauge into the car’s 2014 performance levels.
“I spoke to Scot [Elkins] last week,” Price said. “He was asking me about our engine program, in terms of balance of performance. The engine development program has been arrested in terms of power. We produce anything from 350 to 370 hp. If you look at it longevity, it really doesn’t need much more power or torque.
“We’re now [focused] on weight and fuel consumption. That’s where we’ll concentrate all of our winter development on.”
While Panoz is aiming to sell DeltaWings to customers, with the capacity to build and support up to three cars for next year, Price doesn’t anticipate any changes to the factory team’s program, as plans are on track for a full-season effort USCC effort in 2014.
“I can’t see any reason why we wouldn’t run a factory car,” he said. “There is development to carry over as well as giving technical support to customers. [The car] is different, so it needs a different approach to running a car, setting up a car and racing a car. Customers need to benefit from our experience.”Matt Kent, age 33, turned back just 24 hours into his first attempt to sail across the Atlantic aboard the "stern-faced" tub Undaunted. Ryan Langley takes a close-up look at this tiny little ocean-crossing capsule.
Just 24 hours into his first attempt to sail solo across the Atlantic in Undaunted, his 42-inch yacht, Matt Kent had to turn back.
He set off from La Gomera in the Canary Islands on 6 April, but returned after concerns about his boat’s seaworthiness.
He explains: “I wasn’t really in too much danger, [but] there was a weak point in the boat that was concerning me. The emergency floatation system component that was on the rudder assembly was getting hammered so hard in these really close together waves. The float was getting jammed upwards so fast and so often the boat’s movement couldn’t keep up.
“It was the worst, most unpredictable and erratic conditions I have ever sailed in with that boat. When it started gusting 45 knots |
70–1.10) 0.79 (0.59–1.06) 1.03 (0.69–1.52) 0.299 Institutional delivery for prolonged labour 8.69 (2.25–33.61) 10.50 (2.54–43.29) 6.02 (1.14–31.78) 0.4930 1.02 (0.53–1.97) 1.51 (0.60–3.79) 0.61 (0.23–1.62) 0.176 Home care: antenatal practices Iron intake 0.46 (0.23–0.91) 0.43 (0.21–0.91) 0.55 (0.22–1.33) 0.6150 1.47 (1.23–1.76) 1.24 (0.94–1.64) 1.63 (1.29–2.06) 0.141 Home care: delivery practices Birth attendant washed hands 6.95 (3.16–15.29) 6.71 (3.02–14.95) 7.22 (3.14–16.57) 0.7790 4.19 (3.38–5.21) 4.73 (3.43–6.53) 3.85 (2.86–5.18) 0.358 Clean delivery kit used 5.90 (3.72–9.36) 5.01 (3.10–8.10) 7.74 (3.58–16.73) 0.2750 3.81 (2.89–5.02) 5.53 (3.68–8.31) 2.18 (1.44–3.30) 0.002 Plastic sheet used – 3.40 (2.38–4.85) 5.65 (3.37–9.45) 1.92 (1.12–3.28) 0.004 Cord cut with new or boiled blade 3.06 (1.78–5.26) 3.36 (1.93–5.85) 2.55 (1.38–4.72) 0.2740 2.15 (1.72–2.69) 2.59 (1.74–3.85) 1.96 (1.48–2.58) 0.258 Cord tied with boiled thread – 7.90 (5.92–10.53) 9.46 (6.29–14.23) 5.84 (3.80–8.97) 0.110 Home care: postnatal practices Appropriate cord care (nothing applied on stump) 1.28 (0.53–3.08) 1.07 (0.44–2.64) 1.53 (0.61–3.86) 0.1290 1.86 (1.41–2.47) 1.34 (0.88–2.02) 2.42 (1.66–3.53) 0.037 Baby wrapped or put on the skin within 10 min 7.58 (5.20–11.05) 4.10 (2.37–7.11) 11.74 (7.03–19.60) 0.006 Baby placed on mother's skin within 30 min 0.47 (0.17–1.32) 0.44 (0.16–1.23) 0.37 (0.11–1.20) 0.6880 0.96 (0.71–1.30) 0.63 (0.39–1.02) 1.26 (0.85–1.87) 0.030 Baby not bathed in first 6 h after birth 3.95 (2.42–6.46) 3.93 (2.38–6.51) 3.78 (2.01–7.09) 0.8910 2.28 (1.89–2.75) 1.92 (1.44–2.57) 2.52 (1.97–3.22) 0.162 Breastfeeding initiated within 1 h 1.76 (0.79–3.93) 1.80 (0.79–4.10) 1.71 (0.73–3.96) 0.7870 3.29 (2.60–4.18) 2.02 (1.41–2.91) 5.15 (3.74–7.10) 0.000 Only breastmilk given in first day 1.52 (1.22–1.91) 1.89 (1.35–2.65) 1.31 (0.97–1.78) 0.112 Exclusive breastfeeding in first 6 weeks after birth 0.80 (0.44–1.45) 0.70 (0.38–1.32) 1.32 (0.51–3.41) 0.1820 1.39 (1.13–1.72) 1.73 (1.25–2.37) 1.22 (0.92–1.62) 0.110 Bangladesh Malawi Total High SEP Low SEP Difference Total High SEP Low SEP Difference OR* 95% CI OR* 95% CI OR* 95% CI P-value* OR (95% CI) OR (95% CI) OR (95% CI) P-value* Health care use 3 + antenatal care visits to medical provider 1.55 (1.37–1.75) 1.60 (1.39–1.83) 1.39 (0.98–1.98) 0.476 0.94 (0.56–1.55) 0.92 (0.53–1.61) 0.87 (0.43–1.74) 0.843 Medical treatment sought for illness during pregnancy 1.18 (1.04–1.34) 1.22 (1.06–1.40) 0.98 (0.71–1.36) 0.235 – Institutional delivery 1.12 (0.97–1.28) 1.13 (0.97–1.31) 0.97 (0.62–1.53) 0.545 1.23 (0.69–2.19) 1.28 (0.67–2.42) 1.17 (0.55–2.52) 0.771 Institutional delivery for prolonged labour – – Home care: antenatal practices Iron intake 2.63 (2.32–2.98) 2.39 (2.08–2.75) 3.97 (2.96–5.32) 0.002 1.38 (0.47–4.08) 0.97 (0.32–2.98) 4.06 (0.94–17.54) 0.012 Home care: delivery practices Birth attendant washed hands 3.05 (2.39–3.87) 3.58 (2.68–4.79) 2.15 (1.38–3.37) 0.061 0.19 (0.06–0.53) 0.18 (0.07–0.47) 0.25 (0.08–0.73) 0.434 Clean delivery kit used 5.46 (4.51–6.62) 5.67 (4.59–7.01) 4.98 (3.13–7.90) 0.611 – Plastic sheet used 2.43 (2.09–2.83) 2.72 (2.29–3.23) 1.75 (1.28–2.41) 0.017 – Cord cut with new or boiled blade 2.46 (1.21–5.00) 2.95 (1.31–6.65) 1.40 (0.32–6.18) 0.390 – Cord tied with boiled thread 1.32 (1.13–1.53) 1.25 (1.05–1.49) 1.62 (1.16–2.24) 0.176 – Home care: postnatal practices Appropriate cord care (nothing applied on stump) 1.76 (1.48–2.09) 1.66 (1.37–2.01) 2.27 (1.57–3.28) 0.138 – Baby wrapped or put on the skin within 10 min 1.49 (1.28–1.73) 1.40 (1.18–1.66) 1.88 (1.36–2.62) 0.113 1.61 (0.39–6.71) 2.40 (0.49–11.80) 0.67 (0.11–4.31) 0.180 Baby placed on mother's skin within 30 min 0.93 (0.80–1.08) 0.85 (0.71–1.01) 1.26 (0.90–1.76) 0.038 – Baby not bathed in first 6 h after birth 1.74 (1.43–2.12) 1.76 (1.40–2.20) 1.61 (1.06–2.45) 0.711 1.51 (0.48–4.69) 1.76 (0.53–5.82) 0.72 (0.20–2.63) 0.013 Breastfeeding initiated within 1 h 2.55 (2.08–3.11) 2.59 (2.06–3.26) 2.45 (1.63–3.67) 0.812 1.79 (0.44–7.37) 2.32 (0.54–10.06) 1.49 (0.30–7.49) 0.340 Only breastmilk given in first day 2.28 (1.75–2.97) 2.42 (1.79–3.27) 1.79 (1.00–3.21) 0.370 – Exclusive breastfeeding in first 6 weeks after birth 1.29 (1.09–1.52) 1.30 (1.08–1.57) 1.26 (0.89–1.79) 0.888 – Bangladesh Malawi Total High SEP Low SEP Difference Total High SEP Low SEP Difference OR* 95% CI OR* 95% CI OR* 95% CI P-value* OR (95% CI) OR (95% CI) OR (95% CI) P-value* Health care use 3 + antenatal care visits to medical provider 1.55 (1.37–1.75) 1.60 (1.39–1.83) 1.39 (0.98–1.98) 0.476 0.94 (0.56–1.55) 0.92 (0.53–1.61) 0.87 (0.43–1.74) 0.843 Medical treatment sought for illness during pregnancy 1.18 (1.04–1.34) 1.22 (1.06–1.40) 0.98 (0.71–1.36) 0.235 – Institutional delivery 1.12 (0.97–1.28) 1.13 (0.97–1.31) 0.97 (0.62–1.53) 0.545 1.23 (0.69–2.19) 1.28 (0.67–2.42) 1.17 (0.55–2.52) 0.771 Institutional delivery for prolonged labour – – Home care: antenatal practices Iron intake 2.63 (2.32–2.98) 2.39 (2.08–2.75) 3.97 (2.96–5.32) 0.002 1.38 (0.47–4.08) 0.97 (0.32–2.98) 4.06 (0.94–17.54) 0.012 Home care: delivery practices Birth attendant washed hands 3.05 (2.39–3.87) 3.58 (2.68–4.79) 2.15 (1.38–3.37) 0.061 0.19 (0.06–0.53) 0.18 (0.07–0.47) 0.25 (0.08–0.73) 0.434 Clean delivery kit used 5.46 (4.51–6.62) 5.67 (4.59–7.01) 4.98 (3.13–7.90) 0.611 – Plastic sheet used 2.43 (2.09–2.83) 2.72 (2.29–3.23) 1.75 (1.28–2.41) 0.017 – Cord cut with new or boiled blade 2.46 (1.21–5.00) 2.95 (1.31–6.65) 1.40 (0.32–6.18) 0.390 – Cord tied with boiled thread 1.32 (1.13–1.53) 1.25 (1.05–1.49) 1.62 (1.16–2.24) 0.176 – Home care: postnatal practices Appropriate cord care (nothing applied on stump) 1.76 (1.48–2.09) 1.66 (1.37–2.01) 2.27 (1.57–3.28) 0.138 – Baby wrapped or put on the skin within 10 min 1.49 (1.28–1.73) 1.40 (1.18–1.66) 1.88 (1.36–2.62) 0.113 1.61 (0.39–6.71) 2.40 (0.49–11.80) 0.67 (0.11–4.31) 0.180 Baby placed on mother's skin within 30 min 0.93 (0.80–1.08) 0.85 (0.71–1.01) 1.26 (0.90–1.76) 0.038 – Baby not bathed in first 6 h after birth 1.74 (1.43–2.12) 1.76 (1.40–2.20) 1.61 (1.06–2.45) 0.711 1.51 (0.48–4.69) 1.76 (0.53–5.82) 0.72 (0.20–2.63) 0.013 Breastfeeding initiated within 1 h 2.55 (2.08–3.11) 2.59 (2.06–3.26) 2.45 (1.63–3.67) 0.812 1.79 (0.44–7.37) 2.32 (0.54–10.06) 1.49 (0.30–7.49) 0.340 Only breastmilk given in first day 2.28 (1.75–2.97) 2.42 (1.79–3.27) 1.79 (1.00–3.21) 0.370 – Exclusive breastfeeding in first 6 weeks after birth 1.29 (1.09–1.52) 1.30 (1.08–1.57) 1.26 (0.89–1.79) 0.888 –
Table 5. Nepal India Total High SEP Low SEP Difference Total High SEP Low SEP Difference OR* 95% CI OR* 95% CI OR* 95% CI P-value* OR* 95% CI OR* 95% CI OR* 95% CI P-value* Health care use 3 + antenatal care visits to medical provider 4.10 (2.07–8.14) 4.18 (2.09–8.36) 3.19 (1.50–6.79) 0.2510 1.12 (0.92–1.35) 1.02 (0.78–1.32) 1.10 (0.81–1.48) 0.715 Medical treatment sought for illness during pregnancy 4.79 (2.85–8.05) 6.90 (3.55–13.38) 2.35 (1.13–4.90) 0.0160 0.79 (0.64–0.98) 0.76 (0.57–1.02) 0.73 (0.53–1.02) 0.893 Institutional delivery 5.88 (2.57–13.46) 6.24 (2.60–14.99) 4.94 (1.43–17.06) 0.7300 0.87 (0.70–1.10) 0.79 (0.59–1.06) 1.03 (0.69–1.52) 0.299 Institutional delivery for prolonged labour 8.69 (2.25–33.61) 10.50 (2.54–43.29) 6.02 (1.14–31.78) 0.4930 1.02 (0.53–1.97) 1.51 (0.60–3.79) 0.61 (0.23–1.62) 0.176 Home care: antenatal practices Iron intake 0.46 (0.23–0.91) 0.43 (0.21–0.91) 0.55 (0.22–1.33) 0.6150 1.47 (1.23–1.76) 1.24 (0.94–1.64) 1.63 (1.29–2.06) 0.141 Home care: delivery practices Birth attendant washed hands 6.95 (3.16–15.29) 6.71 (3.02–14.95) 7.22 (3.14–16.57) 0.7790 4.19 (3.38–5.21) 4.73 (3.43–6.53) 3.85 (2.86–5.18) 0.358 Clean delivery kit used 5.90 (3.72–9.36) 5.01 (3.10–8.10) 7.74 (3.58–16.73) 0.2750 3.81 (2.89–5.02) 5.53 (3.68–8.31) 2.18 (1.44–3.30) 0.002 Plastic sheet used – 3.40 (2.38–4.85) 5.65 (3.37–9.45) 1.92 (1.12–3.28) 0.004 Cord cut with new or boiled blade 3.06 (1.78–5.26) 3.36 (1.93–5.85) 2.55 (1.38–4.72) 0.2740 2.15 (1.72–2.69) 2.59 (1.74–3.85) 1.96 (1.48–2.58) 0.258 Cord tied with boiled thread – 7.90 (5.92–10.53) 9.46 (6.29–14.23) 5.84 (3.80–8.97) 0.110 Home care: postnatal practices Appropriate cord care (nothing applied on stump) 1.28 (0.53–3.08) 1.07 (0.44–2.64) 1.53 (0.61–3.86) 0.1290 1.86 (1.41–2.47) 1.34 (0.88–2.02) 2.42 (1.66–3.53) 0.037 Baby wrapped or put on the skin within 10 min 7.58 (5.20–11.05) 4.10 (2.37–7.11) 11.74 (7.03–19.60) 0.006 Baby placed on mother's skin within 30 min 0.47 (0.17–1.32) 0.44 (0.16–1.23) 0.37 (0.11–1.20) 0.6880 0.96 (0.71–1.30) 0.63 (0.39–1.02) 1.26 (0.85–1.87) 0.030 Baby not bathed in first 6 h after birth 3.95 (2.42–6.46) 3.93 (2.38–6.51) 3.78 (2.01–7.09) 0.8910 2.28 (1.89–2.75) 1.92 (1.44–2.57) 2.52 (1.97–3.22) 0.162 Breastfeeding initiated within 1 h 1.76 (0.79–3.93) 1.80 (0.79–4.10) 1.71 (0.73–3.96) 0.7870 3.29 (2.60–4.18) 2.02 (1.41–2.91) 5.15 (3.74–7.10) 0.000 Only breastmilk given in first day 1.52 (1.22–1.91) 1.89 (1.35–2.65) 1.31 (0.97–1.78) 0.112 Exclusive breastfeeding in first 6 weeks after birth 0.80 (0.44–1.45) 0.70 (0.38–1.32) 1.32 (0.51–3.41) 0.1820 1.39 (1.13–1.72) 1.73 (1.25–2.37) 1.22 (0.92–1.62) 0.110 Nepal India Total High SEP Low SEP Difference Total High SEP Low SEP Difference OR* 95% CI OR* 95% CI OR* 95% CI P-value* OR* 95% CI OR* 95% CI OR* 95% CI P-value* Health care use 3 + antenatal care visits to medical provider 4.10 (2.07–8.14) 4.18 (2.09–8.36) 3.19 (1.50–6.79) 0.2510 1.12 (0.92–1.35) 1.02 (0.78–1.32) 1.10 (0.81–1.48) 0.715 Medical treatment sought for illness during pregnancy 4.79 (2.85–8.05) 6.90 (3.55–13.38) 2.35 (1.13–4.90) 0.0160 0.79 (0.64–0.98) 0.76 (0.57–1.02) 0.73 (0.53–1.02) 0.893 Institutional delivery 5.88 (2.57–13.46) 6.24 (2.60–14.99) 4.94 (1.43–17.06) 0.7300 0.87 (0.70–1.10) 0.79 (0.59–1.06) 1.03 (0.69–1.52) 0.299 Institutional delivery for prolonged labour 8.69 (2.25–33.61) 10.50 (2.54–43.29) 6.02 (1.14–31.78) 0.4930 1.02 (0.53–1.97) 1.51 (0.60–3.79) 0.61 (0.23–1.62) 0.176 Home care: antenatal practices Iron intake 0.46 (0.23–0.91) 0.43 (0.21–0.91) 0.55 (0.22–1.33) 0.6150 1.47 (1.23–1.76) 1.24 (0.94–1.64) 1.63 (1.29–2.06) 0.141 Home care: delivery practices Birth attendant washed hands 6.95 (3.16–15.29) 6.71 (3.02–14.95) 7.22 (3.14–16.57) 0.7790 4.19 (3.38–5.21) 4.73 (3.43–6.53) 3.85 (2.86–5.18) 0.358 Clean delivery kit used 5.90 (3.72–9.36) 5.01 (3.10–8.10) 7.74 (3.58–16.73) 0.2750 3.81 (2.89–5.02) 5.53 (3.68–8.31) 2.18 (1.44–3.30) 0.002 Plastic sheet used – 3.40 (2.38–4.85) 5.65 (3.37–9.45) 1.92 (1.12–3.28) 0.004 Cord cut with new or boiled blade 3.06 (1.78–5.26) 3.36 (1.93–5.85) 2.55 (1.38–4.72) 0.2740 2.15 (1.72–2.69) 2.59 (1.74–3.85) 1.96 (1.48–2.58) 0.258 Cord tied with boiled thread – 7.90 (5.92–10.53) 9.46 (6.29–14.23) 5.84 (3.80–8.97) 0.110 Home care: postnatal practices Appropriate cord care (nothing applied on stump) 1.28 (0.53–3.08) 1.07 (0.44–2.64) 1.53 (0.61–3.86) 0.1290 1.86 (1.41–2.47) 1.34 (0.88–2.02) 2.42 (1.66–3.53) 0.037 Baby wrapped or put on the skin within 10 min 7.58 (5.20–11.05) 4.10 (2.37–7.11) 11.74 (7.03–19.60) 0.006 Baby placed on mother's skin within 30 min 0.47 (0.17–1.32) 0.44 (0.16–1.23) 0.37 (0.11–1.20) 0.6880 0.96 (0.71–1.30) 0.63 (0.39–1.02) 1.26 (0.85–1.87) 0.030 Baby not bathed in first 6 h after birth 3.95 (2.42–6.46) 3.93 (2.38–6.51) 3.78 (2.01–7.09) 0.8910 2.28 (1.89–2.75) 1.92 (1.44–2.57) 2.52 (1.97–3.22) 0.162 Breastfeeding initiated within 1 h 1.76 (0.79–3.93) 1.80 (0.79–4.10) 1.71 (0.73–3.96) 0.7870 3.29 (2.60–4.18) 2.02 (1.41–2.91) 5.15 (3.74–7.10) 0.000 Only breastmilk given in first day 1.52 (1.22–1.91) 1.89 (1.35–2.65) 1.31 (0.97–1.78) 0.112 Exclusive breastfeeding in first 6 weeks after birth 0.80 (0.44–1.45) 0.70 (0.38–1.32) 1.32 (0.51–3.41) 0.1820 1.39 (1.13–1.72) 1.73 (1.25–2.37) 1.22 (0.92–1.62) 0.110 Bangladesh Malawi Total High SEP Low SEP Difference Total High SEP Low SEP Difference OR* 95% CI OR* 95% CI OR* 95% CI P-value* OR (95% CI) OR (95% CI) OR (95% CI) P-value* Health care use 3 + antenatal care visits to medical provider 1.55 (1.37–1.75) 1.60 (1.39–1.83) 1.39 (0.98–1.98) 0.476 0.94 (0.56–1.55) 0.92 (0.53–1.61) 0.87 (0.43–1.74) 0.843 Medical treatment sought for illness during pregnancy 1.18 (1.04–1.34) 1.22 (1.06–1.40) 0.98 (0.71–1.36) 0.235 – Institutional delivery 1.12 (0.97–1.28) 1.13 (0.97–1.31) 0.97 (0.62–1.53) 0.545 1.23 (0.69–2.19) 1.28 (0.67–2.42) 1.17 (0.55–2.52) 0.771 Institutional delivery for prolonged labour – – Home care: antenatal practices Iron intake 2.63 (2.32–2.98) 2.39 (2.08–2.75) 3.97 (2.96–5.32) 0.002 1.38 (0.47–4.08) 0.97 (0.32–2.98) 4.06 (0.94–17.54) 0.012 Home care: delivery practices Birth attendant washed hands 3.05 (2.39–3.87) 3.58 (2.68–4.79) 2.15 (1.38–3.37) 0.061 0.19 (0.06–0.53) 0.18 (0.07–0.47) 0.25 (0.08–0.73) 0.434 Clean delivery kit used 5.46 (4.51–6.62) 5.67 (4.59–7.01) 4.98 (3.13–7.90) 0.611 – Plastic sheet used 2.43 (2.09–2.83) 2.72 (2.29–3.23) 1.75 (1.28–2.41) 0.017 – Cord cut with new or boiled blade 2.46 (1.21–5.00) 2.95 (1.31–6.65) 1.40 (0.32–6.18) 0.390 – Cord tied with boiled thread 1.32 (1.13–1.53) 1.25 (1.05–1.49) 1.62 (1.16–2.24) 0.176 – Home care: postnatal practices Appropriate cord care (nothing applied on stump) 1.76 (1.48–2.09) 1.66 (1.37–2.01) 2.27 (1.57–3.28) 0.138 – Baby wrapped or put on the skin within 10 min 1.49 (1.28–1.73) 1.40 (1.18–1.66) 1.88 (1.36–2.62) 0.113 1.61 (0.39–6.71) 2.40 (0.49–11.80) 0.67 (0.11–4.31) 0.180 Baby placed on mother's skin within 30 min 0.93 (0.80–1.08) 0.85 (0.71–1.01) 1.26 (0.90–1.76) 0.038 – Baby not bathed in first 6 h after birth 1.74 (1.43–2.12) 1.76 (1.40–2.20) 1.61 (1.06–2.45) 0.711 1.51 (0.48–4.69) 1.76 (0.53–5.82) 0.72 (0.20–2.63) 0.013 Breastfeeding initiated within 1 h 2.55 (2.08–3.11) 2.59 (2.06–3.26) 2.45 (1.63–3.67) 0.812 1.79 (0.44–7.37) 2.32 (0.54–10.06) 1.49 (0.30–7.49) 0.340 Only breastmilk given in first day 2.28 (1.75–2.97) 2.42 (1.79–3.27) 1.79 (1.00–3.21) 0.370 – Exclusive breastfeeding in first 6 weeks after birth 1.29 (1.09–1.52) 1.30 (1.08–1.57) 1.26 (0.89–1.79) 0.888 – Bangladesh Malawi Total High SEP Low SEP Difference Total High SEP Low SEP Difference OR* 95% CI OR* 95% CI OR* 95% CI P-value* OR (95% CI) OR (95% CI) OR (95% CI) P-value* Health care use 3 + antenatal care visits to medical provider 1.55 (1.37–1.75) 1.60 (1.39–1.83) 1.39 (0.98–1.98) 0.476 0.94 (0.56–1.55) 0.92 (0.53–1.61) 0.87 (0.43–1.74) 0.843 Medical treatment sought for illness during pregnancy 1.18 (1.04–1.34) 1.22 (1.06–1.40) 0.98 (0.71–1.36) 0.235 – Institutional delivery 1.12 (0.97–1.28) 1.13 (0.97–1.31) 0.97 (0.62–1.53) 0.545 1.23 (0.69–2.19) 1.28 (0.67–2.42) 1.17 (0.55–2.52) 0.771 Institutional delivery for prolonged labour – – Home care: antenatal practices Iron intake 2.63 (2.32–2.98) 2.39 (2.08–2.75) 3.97 (2.96–5.32) 0.002 1.38 (0.47–4.08) 0.97 (0.32–2.98) 4.06 (0.94–17.54) 0.012 Home care: delivery practices Birth attendant washed hands 3.05 (2.39 |
8/15/2011 4:34:09 PM] Kalu Nguyen: NO
[8/15/2011 4:34:09 PM] Kalu Nguyen: "NO
[8/15/2011 4:34:09 PM] Kalu Nguyen: no
[8/15/2011 4:34:10 PM] Kalu Nguyen: im not
[8/15/2011 4:34:22 PM] Kalu Nguyen: im a bad person
[8/15/2011 4:34:23 PM] Kalu Nguyen:?
[8/15/2011 4:34:27 PM] Kalu Nguyen: how
[8/15/2011 4:34:38 PM] Kalu Nguyen:...
[8/15/2011 4:34:40 PM] Kalu Nguyen: im not
[8/15/2011 4:34:41 PM] Kalu Nguyen: forcing
[8/15/2011 4:34:41 PM] Kalu Nguyen: anyone
[8/15/2011 4:34:45 PM] Kalu Nguyen: u idiot
[8/15/2011 4:34:48 PM] Kalu Nguyen: lol
[8/15/2011 4:34:50 PM] Kalu Nguyen: i forced u
[8/15/2011 4:34:51 PM] Kalu Nguyen: yea w/e
[8/15/2011 4:34:55 PM] Kalu Nguyen: im not forcing anyone
[8/15/2011 4:34:59 PM] Kalu Nguyen: lol...
[8/15/2011 4:35:07 PM] Kalu Nguyen: i wanted u to get me gm
[8/15/2011 4:35:09 PM] Kalu Nguyen: just saying have
[8/15/2011 4:35:11 PM] Kalu Nguyen: doesnt mean
[8/15/2011 4:35:11 PM] Kalu Nguyen: im
[8/15/2011 4:35:12 PM] Kalu Nguyen: forcing u
[8/15/2011 4:35:14 PM] Kalu Nguyen:.
[8/15/2011 4:35:16 PM] Kalu Nguyen: well
[8/15/2011 4:35:18 PM] Kalu Nguyen: im not
[8/15/2011 4:35:19 PM] Kalu Nguyen: forcing
[8/15/2011 4:35:20 PM] Kalu Nguyen: my friends
[8/15/2011 4:35:25 PM] Kalu Nguyen: they just asked
[8/15/2011 4:35:27 PM] Kalu Nguyen: if they can
[8/15/2011 4:35:28 PM] Kalu Nguyen: ladder
[8/15/2011 4:35:30 PM] Kalu Nguyen: yep
[8/15/2011 4:35:34 PM] Kalu Nguyen: my friends
[8/15/2011 4:35:36 PM] Kalu Nguyen: asked me
[8/15/2011 4:35:38 PM] Kalu Nguyen:..
[8/15/2011 4:35:40 PM] Kalu Nguyen: i didnt let them
[8/15/2011 4:35:41 PM] Kalu Nguyen: cus
[8/15/2011 4:35:45 PM] Kalu Nguyen: u were laddering
[8/15/2011 4:35:51 PM] Kalu Nguyen: stfgu
[8/15/2011 4:35:52 PM] Kalu Nguyen: stuf
[8/15/2011 4:35:54 PM] Kalu Nguyen: i dont
[8/15/2011 4:35:54 PM] Kalu Nguyen: make
[8/15/2011 4:35:55 PM] Kalu Nguyen: anyone
[8/15/2011 4:35:56 PM] Kalu Nguyen: ladder
[8/15/2011 4:36:01 PM] Kalu Nguyen: its just a game
[8/15/2011 4:36:06 PM] Kalu Nguyen: chill ur fagget self
[8/15/2011 4:36:11 PM] Kalu Nguyen: cus
[8/15/2011 4:36:11 PM] Kalu Nguyen: ur
[8/15/2011 4:36:14 PM] Kalu Nguyen: rawr
[8/15/2011 4:36:18 PM] Kalu Nguyen: roar
[8/15/2011 4:36:21 PM] Kalu Nguyen: meow
[8/15/2011 4:36:23 PM] Kalu Nguyen: fu
[8/15/2011 4:36:27 PM] Kalu Nguyen: yea
[8/15/2011 4:36:35 PM] Kalu Nguyen: no1
[8/15/2011 4:36:37 PM] Kalu Nguyen: wait
[8/15/2011 4:36:42 PM] Kalu Nguyen: right now
[8/15/2011 4:36:44 PM] Kalu Nguyen: ur the wrong 1
[8/15/2011 4:36:50 PM] Kalu Nguyen: cus u accusing me
[8/15/2011 4:36:52 PM] Kalu Nguyen: of using u
[8/15/2011 4:36:58 PM] Kalu Nguyen: not
[8/15/2011 4:36:58 PM] Kalu Nguyen: at
[8/15/2011 4:36:59 PM] Kalu Nguyen: all
[8/15/2011 4:37:00 PM] Kalu Nguyen:..................
[8/15/2011 4:37:05 PM] Kalu Nguyen: yea
[8/15/2011 4:37:05 PM] Kalu Nguyen: but
[8/15/2011 4:37:06 PM] Kalu Nguyen: that isnt
[8/15/2011 4:37:07 PM] Kalu Nguyen: using
[8/15/2011 4:37:09 PM] Kalu Nguyen: nope
[8/15/2011 4:37:10 PM] Kalu Nguyen: cus
[8/15/2011 4:37:12 PM] Kalu Nguyen: it's laddering
[8/15/2011 4:37:12 PM] Kalu Nguyen: no
[8/15/2011 4:37:13 PM] Kalu Nguyen: think
[8/15/2011 4:37:13 PM] Kalu Nguyen: of
[8/15/2011 4:37:14 PM] Kalu Nguyen: it
[8/15/2011 4:37:14 PM] Kalu Nguyen: this
[8/15/2011 4:37:15 PM] Kalu Nguyen: way
[8/15/2011 4:37:15 PM] Kalu Nguyen: stfu
[8/15/2011 4:37:16 PM] Kalu Nguyen: STFU
[8/15/2011 4:37:18 PM] Kalu Nguyen: UU BITCH
[8/15/2011 4:37:20 PM] Kalu Nguyen: ok
[8/15/2011 4:37:21 PM] Kalu Nguyen: listen
[8/15/2011 4:37:23 PM] Kalu Nguyen: this what
[8/15/2011 4:37:25 PM] Kalu Nguyen: ok
[8/15/2011 4:37:26 PM] Kalu Nguyen: so
[8/15/2011 4:37:33 PM] Kalu Nguyen: if u gave me
[8/15/2011 4:37:33 PM] Kalu Nguyen: sex
[8/15/2011 4:37:34 PM] Kalu Nguyen: everyday
[8/15/2011 4:37:35 PM] Kalu Nguyen: and
[8/15/2011 4:37:36 PM] Kalu Nguyen: stop
[8/15/2011 4:37:36 PM] Kalu Nguyen: and
[8/15/2011 4:37:37 PM] Kalu Nguyen: i go
[8/15/2011 4:37:38 PM] Kalu Nguyen: ask
[8/15/2011 4:37:39 PM] Kalu Nguyen: a friend
[8/15/2011 4:37:40 PM] Kalu Nguyen: for
[8/15/2011 4:37:40 PM] Kalu Nguyen: sex
[8/15/2011 4:37:41 PM] Kalu Nguyen: cus
[8/15/2011 4:37:42 PM] Kalu Nguyen: u stopped
[8/15/2011 4:37:45 PM] Kalu Nguyen: and he did
[8/15/2011 4:37:46 PM] Kalu Nguyen: then
[8/15/2011 4:37:46 PM] Kalu Nguyen: thats
[8/15/2011 4:37:47 PM] Kalu Nguyen: using
[8/15/2011 4:37:48 PM] Kalu Nguyen:......
[8/15/2011 4:37:49 PM] Kalu Nguyen: no..
[8/15/2011 4:37:51 PM] Kalu Nguyen: no it isnt
[8/15/2011 4:37:52 PM] Kalu Nguyen:...........
[8/15/2011 4:37:52 PM] Kalu Nguyen: no
[8/15/2011 4:37:53 PM] Kalu Nguyen: stfu
[8/15/2011 4:37:57 PM] Kalu Nguyen: if u bought my
[8/15/2011 4:37:58 PM] Kalu Nguyen: lunch every
[8/15/2011 4:38:06 PM] Kalu Nguyen: day
[8/15/2011 4:38:07 PM] Kalu Nguyen: and
[8/15/2011 4:38:09 PM] Kalu Nguyen: u stopped
[8/15/2011 4:38:10 PM] Kalu Nguyen: and
[8/15/2011 4:38:11 PM] Kalu Nguyen: then
[8/15/2011 4:38:14 PM] Kalu Nguyen: u bought
[8/15/2011 4:38:15 PM] Kalu Nguyen: i mean
[8/15/2011 4:38:17 PM] Kalu Nguyen: i went to my friend
[8/15/2011 4:38:19 PM] Kalu Nguyen: and bought
[8/15/2011 4:38:21 PM] Kalu Nguyen: and he
[8/15/2011 4:38:22 PM] Kalu Nguyen: bought
[8/15/2011 4:38:25 PM] Kalu Nguyen: my lunch
[8/15/2011 4:38:27 PM] Kalu Nguyen: thats
[8/15/2011 4:38:27 PM] Kalu Nguyen: not
[8/15/2011 4:38:28 PM] Kalu Nguyen: using
[8/15/2011 4:38:30 PM] Kalu Nguyen: thats
[8/15/2011 4:38:30 PM] Kalu Nguyen: not
[8/15/2011 4:38:31 PM] Kalu Nguyen: using
[8/15/2011 4:38:34 PM] Kalu Nguyen: how is it
[8/15/2011 4:38:35 PM] Kalu Nguyen: using
[8/15/2011 4:38:42 PM] Kalu Nguyen: no
[8/15/2011 4:38:45 PM] Kalu Nguyen: i just went to my friend
[8/15/2011 4:38:48 PM] Kalu Nguyen: to get me lunch
[8/15/2011 4:38:49 PM] Kalu Nguyen: cus
[8/15/2011 4:38:50 PM] Kalu Nguyen: im poor
[8/15/2011 4:38:52 PM] Kalu Nguyen: and have no money
[8/15/2011 4:38:53 PM] Kalu Nguyen: and i will
[8/15/2011 4:38:53 PM] Kalu Nguyen: starve
[8/15/2011 4:38:56 PM] Kalu Nguyen: if i dont get my lucnh
[8/15/2011 4:39:07 PM] Kalu Nguyen: wtf
[8/15/2011 4:39:08 PM] Kalu Nguyen: is a food
[8/15/2011 4:39:09 PM] Kalu Nguyen: stamp
[8/15/2011 4:39:10 PM] Kalu Nguyen: no
[8/15/2011 4:39:13 PM] Kalu Nguyen: i'm not
[8/15/2011 4:39:28 PM] Kalu Nguyen: a what?
[8/15/2011 4:39:32 PM] Kalu Nguyen: oh
[8/15/2011 4:39:34 PM] Kalu Nguyen: wat that
[8/15/2011 4:39:39 PM] Kalu Nguyen: oo
[8/15/2011 4:39:41 PM] Kalu Nguyen: free?
[8/15/2011 4:39:46 PM] Kalu Nguyen: ya but
[8/15/2011 4:39:49 PM] Kalu Nguyen: its just analogy
[8/15/2011 4:39:50 PM] Kalu Nguyen: made u buy me
[8/15/2011 4:39:51 PM] Kalu Nguyen: lunch
[8/15/2011 4:39:52 PM] Kalu Nguyen: every day
[8/15/2011 4:39:53 PM] Kalu Nguyen: yea
[8/15/2011 4:39:53 PM] Kalu Nguyen: and
[8/15/2011 4:39:54 PM] Kalu Nguyen: no
[8/15/2011 4:39:54 PM] Kalu Nguyen: NO
[8/15/2011 4:39:55 PM] Kalu Nguyen: WTF
[8/15/2011 4:39:56 PM] Kalu Nguyen: LISTNE
[8/15/2011 4:39:56 PM] Kalu Nguyen: erH#WFKwh3f
[8/15/2011 4:39:57 PM] Kalu Nguyen: i was just saying
[8/15/2011 4:39:57 PM] Kalu Nguyen: RAWR
[8/15/2011 4:39:59 PM] Kalu Nguyen: if i
[8/15/2011 4:39:59 PM] Kalu Nguyen: LISTEN
[8/15/2011 4:40:03 PM] Kalu Nguyen: ok
[8/15/2011 4:40:06 PM] Kalu Nguyen: cus
[8/15/2011 4:40:09 PM] Kalu Nguyen: if u bought me lunch
[8/15/2011 4:40:11 PM] Kalu Nguyen: everyday
[8/15/2011 4:40:11 PM] Kalu Nguyen: and
[8/15/2011 4:40:13 PM] Kalu Nguyen: no
[8/15/2011 4:40:14 PM] Kalu Nguyen: LISTNEwa[
[8/15/2011 4:40:14 PM] Kalu Nguyen: dh
[8/15/2011 4:40:14 PM] Kalu Nguyen: q3WDhqwd
[8/15/2011 4:40:15 PM] Kalu Nguyen: jqw
[8/15/2011 4:40:15 PM] Kalu Nguyen: jlkdqwl;k
[8/15/2011 4:40:15 PM] Kalu Nguyen: dd;wak;d
[8/15/2011 4:40:15 PM] Kalu Nguyen: a;wd
[8/15/2011 4:40:16 PM] Kalu Nguyen: l;awl
[8/15/2011 4:40:17 PM] Kalu Nguyen: dawl;kdlawdawk;dalk;d
[8/15/2011 4:40:21 PM] Kalu Nguyen: if u bought me lunch
[8/15/2011 4:40:23 PM] Kalu Nguyen: everyday
[8/15/2011 4:40:24 PM] Kalu Nguyen: and
[8/15/2011 4:40:27 PM] Kalu Nguyen: then u stop
[8/15/2011 4:40:29 PM] Kalu Nguyen: and my friend
[8/15/2011 4:40:30 PM] Kalu Nguyen: OFFERS
[8/15/2011 4:40:33 PM] Kalu Nguyen: to buy me lunch
[8/15/2011 4:40:34 PM] Kalu Nguyen: and im like
[8/15/2011 4:40:36 PM] Kalu Nguyen: oh, sure
[8/15/2011 4:40:37 PM] Kalu Nguyen: and
[8/15/2011 4:40:38 PM] Kalu Nguyen: thats not
[8/15/2011 4:40:39 PM] Kalu Nguyen: using
[8/15/2011 4:40:43 PM] Kalu Nguyen: how
[8/15/2011 4:40:44 PM] Kalu Nguyen: my friend
[8/15/2011 4:40:45 PM] Kalu Nguyen: OFFERED
[8/15/2011 4:40:47 PM] Kalu Nguyen: OFFERED
[8/15/2011 4:40:49 PM] Kalu Nguyen: wat if
[8/15/2011 4:40:51 PM] Kalu Nguyen: no
[8/15/2011 4:40:51 PM] Kalu Nguyen: friends
[8/15/2011 4:40:53 PM] Kalu Nguyen: will buy u
[8/15/2011 4:40:53 PM] Kalu Nguyen: lunch
[8/15/2011 4:40:56 PM] Kalu Nguyen: or
[8/15/2011 4:41:01 PM] Kalu Nguyen: "hey lets study together ill buy u lunch
[8/15/2011 4:41:02 PM] Kalu Nguyen: "
[8/15/2011 4:41:04 PM] Kalu Nguyen: sure
[8/15/2011 4:41:11 PM] Kalu Nguyen: lol..
[8/15/2011 4:41:13 PM] Kalu Nguyen: no..
[8/15/2011 4:41:15 PM] Kalu Nguyen: but
[8/15/2011 4:41:18 PM] Kalu Nguyen: the deal is
[8/15/2011 4:41:18 PM] Kalu Nguyen: this is
[8/15/2011 4:41:20 PM] Kalu Nguyen: laddering
[8/15/2011 4:41:21 PM] Kalu Nguyen: on an account
[8/15/2011 4:41:23 PM] Kalu Nguyen: which =
[8/15/2011 4:41:24 PM] Kalu Nguyen: no used
[8/15/2011 4:41:26 PM] Kalu Nguyen: no using
[8/15/2011 4:41:26 PM] Kalu Nguyen:..
[8/15/2011 4:41:29 PM] Kalu Nguyen: nope.....
[8/15/2011 4:41:30 PM] Kalu Nguyen: how?
[8/15/2011 4:41:40 PM] Kalu Nguyen: because
[8/15/2011 4:41:42 PM] Kalu Nguyen: i quit
[8/15/2011 4:41:44 PM] Kalu Nguyen: BECASUE
[8/15/2011 4:41:44 PM] Kalu Nguyen: I QUIT
[8/15/2011 4:41:45 PM] Kalu Nguyen: NO
[8/15/2011 4:41:46 PM] Kalu Nguyen: ITS CUS
[8/15/2011 4:41:47 PM] Kalu Nguyen: I QUIT
[8/15/2011 4:41:48 PM] Kalu Nguyen: SC
[8/15/2011 4:41:49 PM] Kalu Nguyen: LISTEN
[8/15/2011 4:41:50 PM] Kalu Nguyen: I JUST NOW
[8/15/2011 4:41:53 PM] Kalu Nguyen: I JUST NOW
[8/15/2011 4:41:54 PM] Kalu Nguyen: GOT A NEW PC
[8/15/2011 4:41:55 PM] Kalu Nguyen: SO I CAN
[8/15/2011 4:41:57 PM] Kalu Nguyen: FINALLY
[8/15/2011 4:41:58 PM] Kalu Nguyen: PLAY
[8/15/2011 4:41:59 PM] Kalu Nguyen: THE GAME
[8/15/2011 4:41:59 PM] Kalu Nguyen: MSELF
[8/15/2011 4:42:02 PM] Kalu Nguyen: CUS
[8/15/2011 4:42:04 PM] Kalu Nguyen: BEFORE THAT
[8/15/2011 4:42:05 PM] Kalu Nguyen: I DIDNT PLAY
[8/15/2011 4:42:07 PM] Kalu Nguyen: A SINGLE
[8/15/2011 4:42:08 PM] Kalu Nguyen: 1v1
[8/15/2011 4:42:14 PM] Kalu Nguyen: yea
[8/15/2011 4:42:16 PM] Kalu Nguyen: it is
[8/15/2011 4:42:17 PM] Kalu Nguyen: i just got
[8/15/2011 4:42:20 PM] Kalu Nguyen: my new pc
[8/15/2011 4:42:21 PM] Kalu Nguyen: like
[8/15/2011 4:42:22 PM] Kalu Nguyen: 3 months
[8/15/2011 4:42:22 PM] Kalu Nguyen: ago
[8/15/2011 4:42:26 PM] Kalu Nguyen: cus im a natural
[8/15/2011 4:42:27 PM] Kalu Nguyen: at this game
[8/15/2011 4:42:38 PM] Kalu Nguyen: i think i am...
[8/15/2011 4:42:40 PM] Kalu Nguyen: i know i am..
[8/15/2011 4:42:42 PM] Kalu Nguyen: i have
[8/15/2011 4:42:42 PM] Kalu Nguyen: before
[8/15/2011 4:42:44 PM] Kalu Nguyen: have i not?
[8/15/2011 4:42:47 PM] Kalu Nguyen: i can
[8/15/2011 4:42:54 PM] Kalu Nguyen: u havent played me
[8/15/2011 4:42:55 PM] Kalu Nguyen: consistently
[8/15/2011 4:43:01 PM] Kalu Nguyen: cus u cant
[8/15/2011 4:43:08 PM] Kalu Nguyen: nope
[8/15/2011 4:43:10 PM] Kalu Nguyen: it doesnt
[8/15/2011 4:43:14 PM] Kalu Nguyen: ur not smart
[8/15/2011 4:43:15 PM] Kalu Nguyen: ok?
[8/15/2011 4:43:18 PM] Kalu Nguyen: ur not smart
[8/15/2011 4:43:21 PM] Kalu Nguyen: im the smart one
[8/15/2011 4:43:22 PM] Kalu Nguyen: in this
[8/15/2011 4:43:23 PM] Kalu Nguyen: bcus
[8/15/2011 4:43:25 PM] Kalu Nguyen: im american
[8/15/2011 4:43:27 PM] Kalu Nguyen: and ur from
[8/15/2011 4:43:28 PM] Kalu Nguyen: gookland
[8/15/2011 4:43:38 PM] Kalu Nguyen: no
[8/15/2011 4:43:39 PM] Kalu Nguyen: i'm just saying
[8/15/2011 4:43:41 PM] Kalu Nguyen: i'm
[8/15/2011 4:43:45 PM] Kalu Nguyen: i'm more intelligent
[8/15/2011 4:43:49 PM] Kalu Nguyen: i have higher
[8/15/2011 4:43:50 PM] Kalu Nguyen: IQ
[8/15/2011 4:43:51 PM] Kalu Nguyen: than you
[8/15/2011 4:43:58 PM] Kalu Nguyen: bc
[8/15/2011 4:44:00 PM] Kalu Nguyen: ur common sense
[8/15/2011 4:44:01 PM] Kalu Nguyen: =
[8/15/2011 4:44:02 PM] Kalu Nguyen: bad
[8/15/2011 4:44:13 PM] Kalu Nguyen: ur common sense is like
[8/15/2011 4:44:16 PM] Kalu Nguyen: retard lvl
[8/15/2011 4:44:20 PM] Kalu Nguyen: it's like
[8/15/2011 4:44:20 PM] Kalu Nguyen: yea
[8/15/2011 4:44:21 PM] Kalu Nguyen: i can
[8/15/2011 4:44:22 PM] Kalu Nguyen: cus
[8/15/2011 4:44:25 PM] Kalu Nguyen: ill gve u
[8/15/2011 4:44:27 PM] Kalu Nguyen: examples
[8/15/2011 4:44:28 PM] Kalu Nguyen: k
[8/15/2011 4:44:31 PM] Kalu Nguyen: ill give u
[8/15/2011 4:44:32 PM] Kalu Nguyen: examples
[8/15/2011 4:44:34 PM] Kalu Nguyen: u go around
[8/15/2011 4:44:35 PM] Kalu Nguyen: and
[8/15/2011 4:44:38 PM] Kalu Nguyen: u say that i used u
[8/15/2011 4:44:40 PM] Kalu Nguyen: u
[8/15/2011 4:44:46 PM] Kalu Nguyen: go around and u play with
[8/15/2011 4:44:47 PM] Kalu Nguyen: every female
[8/15/2011 4:44:48 PM] Kalu Nguyen: gamer
[8/15/2011 4:44:49 PM] Kalu Nguyen: in the planet
[8/15/2011 4:44:51 PM] Kalu Nguyen: cus
[8/15/2011 4:44:52 PM] Kalu Nguyen: their females
[8/15/2011 4:44:55 PM] Kalu Nguyen: yea
[8/15/2011 4:44:56 PM] Kalu Nguyen: u play
[8/15/2011 4:44:57 PM] Kalu Nguyen: with the girls
[8/15/2011 4:44:59 PM] Kalu Nguyen: on SC2
[8/15/2011 4:44:59 PM] Kalu Nguyen: no
[8/15/2011 4:45:00 PM] Kalu Nguyen: nope
[8/15/2011 4:45:03 PM] Kalu Nguyen: nope
[8/15/2011 4:45:04 PM] Kalu Nguyen: u play
[8/15/2011 4:45:05 PM] Kalu Nguyen: customs
[8/15/2011 4:45:06 PM] Kalu Nguyen: with em
[8/15/2011 4:45:11 PM] Kalu Nguyen: when u find out
[8/15/2011 4:45:12 PM] Kalu Nguyen: their girl
[8/15/2011 4:45:13 PM] Kalu Nguyen: then u add em
[8/15/2011 4:45:14 PM] Kalu Nguyen: on fbook
[8/15/2011 4:45:15 PM] Kalu Nguyen: then u
[8/15/2011 4:45:16 PM] Kalu Nguyen: skype
[8/15/2011 4:45:17 PM] Kalu Nguyen: em
[8/15/2011 4:45:22 PM] Kalu Nguyen: and it's bullshit
[8/15/2011 4:45:23 PM] Kalu Nguyen: ur just
[8/15/2011 4:45:24 PM] Kalu Nguyen: addicted
[8/15/2011 4:45:24 PM] Kalu Nguyen: to
[8/15/2011 4:45:26 PM] Kalu Nguyen: girl gamers
[8/15/2011 4:45:27 PM] Kalu Nguyen: u have a fetish
[8/15/2011 4:45:29 PM] Kalu Nguyen: for girlg
[8/15/2011 4:45:30 PM] Kalu Nguyen: amers
[8/15/2011 4:45:34 PM] Kalu Nguyen: fetish for flo
[8/15/2011 4:45:36 PM] Kalu Nguyen: fetish for me
[8/15/2011 4:45:38 PM] Kalu Nguyen: fetish for aurroa
[8/15/2011 4:45:40 PM] Kalu Nguyen: fetish for
[8/15/2011 4:45:41 PM] Kalu Nguyen: every
[8/15/2011 4:45:42 PM] Kalu Nguyen: sc
[8/15/2011 4:45:42 PM] Kalu Nguyen: girl
[8/15/2011 4:45:47 PM] Kalu Nguyen: cus
[8/15/2011 4:45:48 PM] Kalu Nguyen: u have to
[8/15/2011 4:45:49 PM] Kalu Nguyen: add them all
[8/15/2011 4:45:51 PM] Kalu Nguyen: on fbook
[8/15/2011 4:45:52 PM] Kalu Nguyen: talk to em all
[8/15/2011 4:45:55 PM] Kalu Nguyen: be freidns w/ em all
[8/15/2011 4:45:58 PM] Kalu Nguyen: i have
[8/15/2011 4:45:58 PM] Kalu Nguyen: i do
[8/15/2011 4:46:00 PM] Kalu Nguyen: i do yella t kevin
[8/15/2011 4:46:02 PM] Kalu Nguyen: yea but
[8/15/2011 4:46:04 PM] Kalu Nguyen: u befreidn them
[8/15/2011 4:46:06 PM] Kalu Nguyen: cus their girls
[8/15/2011 4:46:07 PM] Kalu Nguyen: and cus u want
[8/15/2011 4:46:09 PM] Kalu Nguyen: to fuck them
[8/15/2011 4:46:14 PM] Kalu Nguyen: yes
[8/15/2011 4:46:16 PM] Kalu Nguyen: its what
[8/15/2011 4:46:17 PM] Kalu Nguyen: u truly
[8/15/2011 4:46:17 PM] Kalu Nguyen: want
[8/15/2011 4:46:20 PM] Kalu Nguyen: u truly want
[8/15/2011 4:46:21 PM] Kalu Nguyen: pussy
[8/15/2011 4:46:22 PM] Kalu Nguyen: and
[8/15/2011 4:46:24 PM] Kalu Nguyen: ur dick sucked
[8/15/2011 4:46:26 PM] Kalu Nguyen: no
[8/15/2011 4:46:28 PM] Kalu Nguyen: u want to fuck them
[8/15/2011 4:46:29 PM] Kalu Nguyen: at MLG
[8/15/2011 4:46:31 PM] Kalu Nguyen: when u meet
[8/15/2011 4:46:32 PM] Kalu Nguyen: them
[8/15/2011 4:46:39 PM] Kalu Nguyen: yea
[8/15/2011 4:46:41 PM] Kalu Nguyen: exactly
[8/15/2011 4:46:44 PM] Kalu Nguyen: exactly
[8/15/2011 4:46:48 PM] Kalu Nguyen: it can happen
[8/15/2011 4:46:49 PM] Kalu Nguyen: cus
[8/15/2011 4:46:50 PM] Kalu Nguyen: why do u
[8/15/2011 4:46:52 PM] Kalu Nguyen: wanna be friend
[8/15/2011 4:46:53 PM] Kalu Nguyen: with only girls
[8/15/2011 4:46:54 PM] Kalu Nguyen: of SC
[8/15/2011 4:46:55 PM] Kalu Nguyen: and if theres
[8/15/2011 4:46:57 PM] |
, which makes it really unique," said Adam Meyers, vice president of intelligence at cyber firm CrowdStrike.
Experts stressed the severity of the crippling ransomware attacks and warned that it likely would continue to expand throughout the U.S. Although Microsoft released a security update in March to fix the flaw that hackers are currently exploiting, it’s likely that many companies have not patched their networks, experts said.
“Given the rapid, prolific distribution of this ransomware, we consider this activity poses high risks that all organizations using potentially vulnerable Windows machines should address,” John Miller, manager of threat intelligence at the cybersecurity firm FireEye, said in a statement.
And U.S. hospitals may soon be in the cross-hairs, said Sean Curran, a senior director with West Monroe Partners, a tech consulting firm. Hospitals, he said, are often relatively unprepared for such incidents and often prioritize their limited budgets for patient care.
Digital privacy advocates were quick to blame the NSA for the incident, which will likely restart the debate about what the spy agency should do when it discovers "zero-day" software defects.
Kevin Bankston, director of New America’s Open Technology Institute, argued that Congress should hold hearings on spy agencies’ use of code flaws and when they should be required to notify manufacturers.
“If NSA had disclosed rather than stockpiled these [vulnerabilities] when it found them, more hospitals would be safer against this attack,” he tweeted.
The FBI and the White House National Security Council declined to comment. The Department of Homeland Security said it was aware of the reports and "stands ready to support any international or domestic partner’s request for assistance."
Several cyber threat information sharing centers for a number of U.S. industries — financial services, water, oil and natural gas — did not respond to questions about whether any of their members had reported intrusions. An energy industry group said it had seen no reports of infection in North America.
Arthur Allen, Laurens Cerulus, Helen Collis, Tim Starks and Cory Bennett contributed to this report.
This article tagged under: Microsoft
NSA
Europe
Russia
Spain
CyberattackBy John Kemp
LONDON, May 18 (Reuters) - Former Kansas City Fed President Thomas Hoenig suggested banks that are too big to fail are also too big to exist, and should be broken up (“Financial reform: post-crisis?” Feb 23, 2011).
But are banks that are too big to fail also too big to trade and too big to manage properly?
JPMorgan Chase & Co’s reported hedging losses suggest the bank, famed for a disciplined approach to measuring and managing risk, is struggling to cope with increased demands of scale, after swallowing up a string of other institutions in the last decade.
Massive hedging losses by the bank’s Chief Investment Office are the second time in under two years JPMorgan has been forced to own up when a big trade went wrong and the bank struggled to extricate itself because of the size of its positions.
In 2010, the bank lost several hundred million dollars on coal trades. Blythe Masters, the head of the bank’s commodity trading division, owned up to a “rookie error” when the bank’s management and risk oversight functions failed to prevent a large position that overwhelmed the liquidity available in the thinly traded coal market, and proved expensive to exit.
Now Chief Executive Jamie Dimon has issued a similar apology for big loss-making positions at the Chief Investment Office. “In hindsight, the new strategy was flawed, complex, poorly reviewed, poorly executed and poorly monitored,” he told a conference call on May 10.
HUBRIS AND COMPLACENCY
The CIO hedge is an order of magnitude larger than the earlier problem in coal. And it was supposedly a hedge where the coal trade was speculative.
But the common element of both is that the bank took positions that were so large relative to the rest of the market they were dangerously illiquid. When the trade went wrong JPMorgan could not get out without making its losses even worse.
The question is why the bank is repeatedly taking such dangerously large positions?
The short answer is over-confidence among the bank’s traders and managers, coupled with a failure of proper systems and controls.
Dimon has admitted the trade was poorly reviewed and monitored.
In a front-page article today, the “Wall Street Journal” suggests the operations of the Chief Investment Office were scrutinised less closely than other parts of the bank, perhaps because it had contributed $4 billion of net income or around 10 percent of the bank’s profits over the last three years (“Inside JPMorgan’s blunder” May 18).
“The big lesson I learned: Don’t get complacent despite a successful track record,” Dimon said in an interview earlier this week. “No one or no unit can get a free pass.”
But it is too simplistic to blame the problems entirely on hubris and occasional lapses of risk control. JPMorgan has been a consistent pioneer of more sophisticated approaches to measuring and controlling risks in both its trading book and its banking portfolio.
Unlike most investment banks, JPMorgan escaped largely unscathed from the subprime mortgage crisis. The success of JPMorgan’s risk management gave Dimon a bully pulpit to lecture regulators and lawmakers on the banking system’s ability to manage its own risks without micro-management by banking supervisors.
SIZE IS THE ROOT PROBLEM
The real problem arguably stems from JPMorgan’s size. As the bank has expanded through a series of acquisitions (including Chase, Washington Mutual, Bear Stearns, parts of Sempra Commodities), as well as organic growth, it seems to have been encouraged or even compelled to take larger positions.
There are several strands to the size problem. First as the bank gets bigger, the size of trades needed to “move the needle” of its results has increased significantly. For a bank of JPMorgan’s size, putting on oil trade expected to produce an extra $10 million of profits is immaterial. The bank needs trades that will yield tens of millions, hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.
JPMorgan has suggested the Chief Investment Office was set up to hedge the bank’s aggregated risk exposure. But the fact that it contributed so much of the bank’s profits over the last three years suggests it may have been seen as a profit centre.
That leads on to the second part of the size problem. Even if the bank thought it was hedging, the aggregated risks across all its divisions are so large it needs enormous hedges to offset them. But there are very few markets and instruments which can provide that much liquidity and hedging capacity. In effect, JPMorgan has become a whale in a fishpond.
From the press reports, the recent failed hedge was an attempt to hedge the bank’s exposure to a broad macroeconomic downturn especially in Europe.
I have cast doubt elsewhere on whether such large portfolio hedges are really effective and should receive special hedging treatment by regulators. But even if the logic of portfolio hedging is valid, there is no way a bank of JPMorgan’s size can effectively hedge macroeconomic or systemic risks.
The amount of potential macroeconomic and systemic risk in the portfolio of a bank the size of JPMorgan is enormous. Who or what could possibly take it on? Moreover, macroeconomic and systemic risks are by their nature common across the entire financial system.
It is almost impossible to identify other market participants willing to take them on in anything like the required size.
Moreover, if JPMorgan tries to hedge certain macro risks, other big investment and commercial banks are likely to try the same strategy, assuming they have the same information and roughly similar outlooks.
The only way JPMorgan could successfully execute this type of hedge would be to find another set of hedge funds or investment banks that were as optimistic about the outlook as JPMorgan was gloomy. If JPMorgan was right in its gloomy call, however, would the other banks and hedge funds be in a position to pay?
Systemic and macro risks are by their nature difficult if not impossible to hedge. The only effective hedge is to have lots of cash and other liquid assets on hand, a reasonably well-matched set of assets and liabilities, and the backstop of a lender of last resort to maintain confidence and provide unlimited liquidity.
Finally, JPMorgan seems to have fallen victim to control problems associated with managing risks across an enormous diversified institution.
The bank’s portfolio model relies on aggregating and managing risks centrally through a powerful chief executive and Chief Investment Office. But any centralised system of control is likely to struggle with a bank and portfolio as large and diverse as JPMorgan’s has become.
Dimon’s response has been to call for renewed rigor within the existing process, painting losses as an unfortunate aberration. But the real problem appears structural.
The solution is to decentralise risk management closer to the frontline, leaving the centre with a more detached and impartial supervisory role, or more radically to think about reducing the size and complexity of the bank.
Dimon has been fiercely critical of regulators like Hoenig who have called for large institutions to be broken up and subject to much more intrusive supervision. But Dimon’s failed hedging strategy has proved Hoenig right.The price of Bitcoin went up by over 210% during the past year, trading from about $450 in mid-2016 to record-breaking levels of $1,400 in May 2017. In the eight years since its founding, Bitcoin has braved skepticism, rejection, and experienced volatility, to the present day, when it’s slowly being recognized by governments and even dubbed as an emerging asset class. Here’s a look at the dynamics behind Bitcoin’s rising price.
Bitcoin was created in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis to operate outside of central governments, banks and financial institutions. Over these years, Bitcoin’s framework has challenged regulators, as most of them struggled to find ways to bring it under control. This led to some countries banning it or making it illegal, while some others remained observant and the rest worked out ways to tax and regulate its operations. However, the ‘uncertainty’ angle remained in sight. Although there still isn’t a very clear stance by many countries, a number of nations are coming out in support of the cryptocurrency.
Japan has recently recognized Bitcoin as a legal method of payment, although it continues to be treated as an asset, and not as a currency. In India, the Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance has constituted a committee to examine the existing framework around Virtual Currencies (VCs). The committee will not just examine the present status of VCs in India and around the globe, but will also suggest measures to deal with consumer protection and money laundering. The committee will be submitting its report by July.
At the same time, Russia, a staunch opponent of cryptocurrencies, has taken a U-turn. In an interview to Bloomberg, Russian Deputy Finance Minister Alexey Moiseev said that in an attempt to combat money laundering, the Russian authorities hope to legalize bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as a financial instrument in 2018. He further stated, “The state needs to know who at every moment of time stands on both sides of the financial chain. If there’s a transaction, the people who facilitate it should understand from whom they bought and to whom they were selling, just like with bank operations.” While, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), the central bank of the Republic of the Philippines, issued a guideline recognizing Bitcoin as a legal payment method.
The legitimacy of Bitcoin’s existence doesn’t just come in direct ways; approvals of investment products based on Bitcoin indicate what regulators think - the reason why Bitcoin prices tanked to about $900 levels from $1300 when SEC disapproved of the Bitcoin ETF by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. Nevertheless, the SEC was positive for the future, as the document read, “The Commission notes that bitcoin is still in the relatively early stages of its development and that, over time, regulated bitcoin-related markets of significant size may develop. Should such markets develop, the Commission could consider whether a bitcoin ETP would, based on the facts and circumstances then presented, be consistent with the requirements of the Exchange Act.” Interestingly, SEC has now granted a request for review of its decision of disapproval.
The efforts to bring Bitcoin-linked products are a direct result of its growing demand as more and more people are looking to invest in cryptocurrencies. Although there are products such as Grayscale Bitcoin Investment Trust (GBTC), which is traded OTC (filed with SEC for a NYSE listing) and exchange-traded funds from ARK Investment Management, they offer limited exposure and opportunity to invest in Bitcoins. While the former is meant only for accredited investors, the latter have a very small holding in Bitcoins.
However, there is an option to invest for the long-term in Bitcoins for retirement by opening a self-directed Bitcoin IRA account, approved by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The scheme has been welcomed warmly and has gathered around $10 million till date, which reflects the underlying confidence of investors. (Related reading, see: This is the First Bitcoin IRA Approved by the IRS)
Bitcoin start-ups have attracted huge investments in Bitcoin and blockchain companies with a total funding of $550 million in 2016, as per a report. Additionally, many prominent investors have been raising direct stakes in Bitcoin, thus suggesting an optimistic future for cryptocurrencies. Billionaire Mike Novogratz recently revealed that he holds 10% of his net worth in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. He now predicts Bitcoin to go past $2,000. (Related Reading, see: More Billionaires Are Buying Cryptocurrencies)
“Today Bitcoins have a market capitalization of $23 billion, if two years from now that number is $100 billion, I would not be surprised,” says Amith Nirgunarthy, CEO, BlockStreet.
The Bottom LineInterview with attorney for family of Anthony Lamar Smith:
Authorities withheld DNA evidence in St. Louis police killing
By Ed Hightower
25 September 2017
World Socialist Web Site reporters spoke with attorney Al Watkins in St. Louis last week following the “not guilty” verdict in the criminal case of former police officer Jason Stockley, who shot and killed Anthony Lamar Smith in December 2011. When Missouri Circuit Court Judge Timothy Wilson released the ruling on September 15, protests swept St. Louis. The ongoing demonstrations have been met with brutal police repression, including the “kettling” and mass arrest of peaceful protesters.
St. Louis police murder - Interview with the lawyer for the family of Anthony Lamar Smith
Watkins represented Smith’s family members in a civil rights lawsuit against officer Stockley and the city of St. Louis. The St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners agreed to a $900,000 settlement with the family in 2013, ending the civil lawsuit.
In a stage of the lawsuit known as discovery, Watkins requested that the city provide any DNA evidence involving a revolver allegedly brandished by Smith as well as additional video footage of the killing. Investigative notes by the FBI as part of its federal criminal investigation made reference to both DNA evidence and the video footage that Watkins requested. The city denied that it had either of these pieces of evidence.
Watkins told the WSWS: “During our court-ordered mediation in the civil rights case, the city failed to turn over DNA evidence linking Stockley to the revolver, as well as the additional video footage. It became clear to us during Stockley’s criminal prosecution that the city had had this evidence back when we were in mediation.
“Had we had this evidence prior, it would have increased the settlement value of the family’s claim. I brought this to the attention of the Missouri attorney general who handled Stockley’s defense in the civil case, and his response was, ‘We gave you everything that our office [the attorney general’s office] had in its file.’ That is not the legal standard for discovery. They had a duty to hand over not just what was in their file, but what was in the possession of the city of St. Louis, which they did not do.”
Failure to comply with a discovery request is grounds for disbarment or the permanent removal of an attorney’s license to practice law. It may also have criminal implications.
Watkins continued: “The whole package of justice in this case, not just the criminal case but in the civil remedies, the federal lawsuit, was compromised.”
It is not uncommon for wrongful death lawsuits involving police shootings to result in settlements or verdicts reaching millions of dollars.
Watkins also commented on the 30-page judicial opinion handed down by Judge Wilson on September 15 exonerating Stockley on charges of first degree murder and armed criminal action. The verdict turned both the evidence in the case and the applicable law upside down.
Any objective review of the videos of the police pursuit and subsequent killing of Anthony Smith, which document multiple violations of police department policy, as well as the dash cam audio of Stockley telling his partner, “We’re killing this motherfucker, don’t you know,” shortly before Stockley pumped five bullets into Smith, who was sitting in the driver’s seat of his car, make it clear that the cop committed murder.
Watkins explained: “You have to remember, Smith is ‘on paper,’ on parole, and has an ongoing bad relationship with Stockley. At the beginning of the encounter, Stockley is brandishing his own, personal AK-47 [a semiautomatic rifle with a 30-round magazine].”
A bystander’s video shows Stockley removing his gloves after the shooting, then rummaging in the police car and placing something in the victim’s car. At trial, Stockley claimed that Smith had a gun in his car, but the evidence showed that the only DNA on the weapon was his own.
“He said he went back to get a clot pack, designed to assist, like in combat, the cessation of bleeding,” Watkins said. He explained that this was contrary to police practice. If Smith had a gun, as Stockley claimed, the first task of the officer would have been to secure the gun, not provide first aid.
Most significantly, the footage does not show Stockley with the clot pack or anything else in his hands after he leaves the victim’s car for the second time. Attorney Watkins told the WSWS that the only explanation for this is that Stockley was planting a revolver in the victim’s car to fabricate evidence for his self-defense claim.
Watkins commented as well on the judge’s attempt to downplay Stockley’s recorded death threat. “The judge says, ‘You’ve got to look at subsequent actions to see what was meant in that stressful situation.’ So if you look at subsequent actions, the subsequent action is, quite interestingly, that Stockley shot and killed Smith. We’re not talking about a day later; we’re not talking about a few hours later. We’re talking about maybe, not quite, a minute later. Okay, so let’s look at that subsequent action. And the judge doesn’t. The judge simply dismisses it outright. So the whole concept of intent is, in effect, trashed.”
Watkins continued, “He [Judge Wilson] says that an ‘urban heroin dealer’ who did not carry a gun is ‘an anomaly.’ What does he mean by ‘urban?’ He means black. And the only thing he [Smith] had ever been found guilty of was stealing items from cars.”
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.Ok you crazy Draconians!
if you were wondering where to go for when the lights go out and madness begins, here is your entire list! We will start off with the first parties that CosGamer will be attending! (rest will follow afterwards!)
Wednesday August 31st 8pm – Till No one knows! BIG KAHUNA CON PRE PARTY
https://www.facebook.com/events/1069323903136878/
https://www.facebook.com/BigKahunaAtl/
with your special host:
Thursday September 1st 8 Bit Ball Party
Friday September 2nd 10pm – 2am Cosplay Deviants
https://cosplaydeviants.ticketleap.com/cdcatchem/
Saturday September 3rd : 3am till kingdom come! Secret Partys STAR RAVE
https://www.facebook.com/events/152684391836697/
Dragoncon Saturday Night Late Night StarRave by SecretPartys.Com / “Wars vs Trek ”
Once again SecretPartys.Com hosts the Saturday Night Late Night Rave for Dragoncon 2016.
Here’s a preview of last years DragonCon party!
And now the rest of the parties:
source http://www.dconparties.com/
DISCLAIMER: CosGamer.com is NOT directly affiliated with Dragoncon Inc. and is independently managed and owned with a main purpose of providing information for organized Cosplay events and after partys. CosGamer.com Reserves the right to exclude any event listing(s) and can not guarantee all information on this site is 100% accurate. You can message us for more details.President Obama is very upset at his critics, who are taking him and his administration to task for refusing to use the term “radical Islam” to describe our enemy in the terror war.
During his speech on Tuesday, in referring to the term “radical Islam,” the president stated angrily:
What exactly would using this label accomplish? What exactly would it change? Would it make ISIL less committed to try to kill Americans? Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this? The answer is none of the above. Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away. This is a political distraction.
It is interesting to note that our enemy has quite a preoccupation with this very same “political distraction.”
Indeed, back in 2011, Muslim Brotherhood front groups approached the Obama administration and demanded to look at the training materials for the FBI and law enforcement agencies to see what words they were using. It’s curious that instead of telling the Brotherhood to go away with the explanation that labels didn’t “accomplish” or “change” anything, the administration docilely obliged. More curious still, when the Brotherhood returned and demanded that all mention of words connected to Islam, such as “jihad,” “Sharia” and “radical Islam,” be purged from the manuals, the administration again docilely obliged.
So we have an intriguing situation: when people who want to protect America implore Obama to use the term “radical Islam” to describe the force waging war on us, he refuses and angrily responds that “different” names don’t make things go away. But when a totalitarian ideology that seeks to destroy our civilization (and boasts that it will do so by our own hands) tells us not to use the label “radical Islam” when we were doing that, Obama follows the orders.
And so, as author Stephen Coughlin has documented in his work Catastrophic Failure, the Obama administration rooted out all references to jihad and Islam from U.S. intelligence agency manuals. And this action and attitude has affected every realm of government. That’s why in the State Department, for example, an official is not even allowed to ask an immigrant about his views on jihad or Sharia law before approving his visa application. In fact, a “counterterrorism” government guide counsels that keeping Muslims out of the country for supporting Sharia law violates the First Amendment.
Such is the devious mentality behind Obama’s “defense strategy” in the terror war, which demands that American officials and investigators are to consider only violent or criminal conduct when trying to keep America safe. Radical ideology is to be ignored, particularly if it has the veneer of “religious expression.”
As a result, when the Muslim Orlando mass murderer, Omar Mateen, verbalized his support for killing unbelievers for the sake of Allah and Islam, it was to be ignored, and the FBI did ignore it. That’s why they let him slide. The Bureau didn’t want to break the administration’s rules and let the potential hazard to innocent American lives get in the way of fighting racism and Islamophobia.
And so we come to understand better why, when the Russians had warned the FBI about Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and the FBI looked into the brothers, Bureau investigators found nothing of concern. It is a bit difficult to find things of concern, you see, when speaking to jihadists entails never mentioning jihad.
And so Tamerlan and Dzhokhar went on to set off their bombs at the Boston Marathon Massacre, killing 3 people (including 8-year-old Martin Richard) and injuring an estimated 264 on April 15, 2013. And they made it very clear that they did it for the sake of Islam and Allah.
But labels don’t matter.
Labels did matter, though, to Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik on December 2, 2015, when they opened fire on Farook’s municipal government workmates at a Christmas party in San Bernardino, California, leaving 14 people dead and 21 wounded. Malik and Farook were inspired by the same ideas that the Tsarnaevs were inspired by. Indeed, just before the attack, Malik had been using her social media to announce her love of jihad and to pledge her undying devotion to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. She was linked to a jihadist mosque in Pakistan. Farook, meanwhile, had made contact with several Muslim terrorist organizations.
But the Americans who were slaughtered by Malik and Farook, in the administration’s view, were clearly a small price to pay for the necessary pursuit of a utopian label-free world. That’s why Malik’s social media proclamations were never discovered before the San Bernardino massacre — because immigration officials were forbidden to review social media as part of their screening process. The Obama administration, through the highest levels of the Department of Homeland Security, explicitly banned examination of the social media of immigration applicants. John Cohen, a former acting under-secretary at DHS for intelligence and analysis, explained that this rule was in place because of the fear of a “civil liberties” backlash and “bad public relations” for the Obama administration.
Even more intriguing was how the administration had actually shut down a project that would have most likely led authorities to Farook and Malik and prevented the attack in the first place. Investigator Phil Haney, a former Department of Homeland Security agent, has revealed that the government had quashed a surveillance program that he had created to identify global networks that were smuggling Islamists into the United States. The database investigated groups that had ties to Farook and Malik as far back as 2012. But the State Department and the DHS Security Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties believed that Islamophobia was at play and that the “civil rights” of the Muslims being monitored were being violated, even though an overwhelming majority of them were not even American citizens. The administration officials accused Haney of profiling Muslims, removed his security clearance and shut down his program, destroying all 67 records of information that he had gathered. One of those records included an investigation into an organization with ties to the mosque in Riverside, Calif., that Farook had attended.
Haney has emphasized that if his work had been allowed to continue that it very well could have prevented the San Bernardino massacre. According to Haney:
Either Syed would have been put on the no-fly list because association with that mosque, and/or the K-1 visa that his wife was given may have been denied because of his association with a known organization.
Haney has also stated that he was looking into Tablighi Jamaat, a Sunni Islamic group tied to the fundamentalist Deobandi movement – a movement that also has ties to the Pakistani school attended by Malik.
More disturbingly, Haney says that the terrorist attack in Orlando also very well could have been prevented if his investigation had not been shut down.
In contrast to the president’s seemingly befuddled query on what the use of the label “radical Islam” would accomplish, Sun Tzu, the Chinese general and military strategist who authored the masterpiece The Art of War, which serves as an indispensable guide on military strategy, offers a key insight on the crucial importance of identify one’s enemy.
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
In order to even have a chance of defeating radical Islam, therefore, which has declared war on us, Sun Tzu taught us the importance of making a threat assessment. We have to label our enemy and to isolate what inspires and sanctions the enemy’s war against us.
Stephen Coughlin emphasizes this urgent rule, explaining that, as Sun Tzu instructed, we must know what motivates the jihadists and always keep in mind that it is completely irrelevant whether their comprehension of their own doctrine is accurate or not, because we must know what motivates the enemy regardless of whether his motivations are based in legitimate understandings. In other words, Coughlin writes, a national security professional’s duty:
…is not to know true Islam; it is to identify and establish a functional threat doctrine, regardless of whether that doctrine accurately tracks with ‘true’ Islam or not. What matters is that we understand the enemy’s doctrines, not whether he is correct about them.
Today, unfortunately, with Obama in charge, the very opposite of what Sun Tzu and Stephen Coughlin urge must happen in order to defeat an enemy is taking place. Our language is controlled and the enemy cannot be named. Actually, naming the enemy is now hazardous for anyone working in the Obama administration. Coughlin notes: “Today, FBI and Homeland Security analysts are sanctioned if they refer to the Islamic Movement by name, even if citing to threat sources that use those same Islamic terms.”
Thus, Coughlin paints the horrifying portrait for us: the enemy has established “language dominance” over us and this situation “puts groups like the Muslim Brotherhood out of reach of investigators, national security analysts, and even concerned Members of Congress.” In other words, Brotherhood-linked groups and individuals are now above and outside of the law.
Yes, using “labels” really might accomplish something after all.
During his Tuesday speech, in referring to “radical Islam,” Obama pronounced vehemently: “Not once has an adviser of mine said, ‘Man, if we use that phrase, we are going to turn this whole thing around,’ not once.”
Doubtless the president’s statement is correct. His advisers surely do not want to be punished or let go. They know what their orders are – and what they are allowed, and not allowed, to say.
It is obvious why not once has anyone with whom Obama has surrounded himself with ever said anything to him that would empower the administration to defeat America’s enemies, defend this nation and save American lives.
Indeed, not once.
Jamie Glazov is the editor of Frontpagemag.com. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Russian, U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He is the author of United in Hate, the host of the web-TV show, The Glazov Gang, and he can be reached at jamieglazov11@gmail.com.The humble 2x4 LEGO Brick and the magic of Disney come together in this project, which I call 'Once Upon A Brick'.
The project sees classic Disney characters reimagined as LEGO 2x4 Bricks, whilst still retaining the individual characteristics that make them so beloved and well known, the world over.
When it came to choosing which Disney characters to use for this project, the possibilities were somewhat daunting. After all, there are a wealth of classic Disney characters I could have picked from, based on the companies' 90-year history. However, it only took me a second to realise that there really was no choice at all; it HAD to be Mickey Mouse and his friends, Donald Duck, Goofy and Pluto. The history of Disney was built around these characters and they were an obvious starting point for me.
Averaging 110 LEGO bricks per model and with each standing approximately 13cm tall, I feel that this project is the perfect fit for LEGO Ideas and I hope that you feel the same.
I have lots of other ideas for characters to expand the 'Once Upon A Brick' theme and I will be updating the project with new builds as I complete them. This not only gives you, the potential supporter, more examples of how the concept works, but will also give LEGO Ideas more choice, should this project succeed in reaching the target 10,000 supporters required to move through to the review stage.The NBA Finals continue Thursday night with Game 2 of the Dallas Mavericks and Miami Heat, and the Mavs have their backs against the wall, while Miami has a chance to take control of this series before it even gets started. Either way, the stakes are higher than you think.
Here's what's in play for the Mavs at this point. As Zach Lowe points out at Sports Illustrated, teams that win the first two games of a seven-game series have gone 196-11 in those series. In other words, if Dallas loses tonight, it gets seriously dicey from here on out.
And even though Dallas gets three games at home after this road trip to Miami, that doesn't exactly guarantee a comeback. Since the NBA Finals went to the 2-3-2 home-and-away format, there have only been two teams that swept all three of those middle home games.
So where does that leave us? With a must-win game for the Mavs, and our best shot at an instant classic with these NBA Finals. Because if Dallas wins tonight, then suddenly the whole series looks different, Dallas has homecourt advantage, and everyone that crowned the Heat after Game 1 looks like a complete fool. On the other hand, Miami can take a lot of the drama out of the next week just by taking care of business tonight.
It's not to say that we're guaranteed a great game, but both teams know what's at stake tonight, and everyone's going to play their asses off. So here's to hoping for a classic in Game 2, because this might be our last chance at real drama for the rest of these Finals.
Or, at the very least, let's hope Mark Jackson and Jeff Van Gundy don't drive us all to homicide.
With that, let's get into Talking Points...
Have You Heard About The Website Where You Can Buy All Sorts Of Drugs? It's actually kind of amazing that it so long for something like this to pop up, but at long last, there's a peer-to-peer commerce website that's here to serve all your shady, black market needs.
It's called Silk Road, and we can't link to it because it's only accessible through some weird back channel of the internet that requires A) supreme intelligence or B) highly motivated users, willing to learn anything if it means they gain access to free, cheap, awesome drugs.
Gawker investigates here:
Mark, a software developer, had ordered the 100 micrograms of acid through a listing on the online marketplace Silk Road. He found a seller with lots of good feedback who seemed to know what they were talking about, added the acid to his digital shopping cart and hit "check out." He entered his address and paid the seller 50 Bitcoins—untraceable digital currency—worth around $150. Four days later the drugs, sent from Canada, arrived at his house. "It kind of felt like I was in the future," Mark said.
Yeah... Kind of. It's kind of like Napster, too, which started in 1999.
Here is just a small selection of the 340 items available for purchase on Silk Road by anyone, right now: a gram of Afghani hash; 1/8th ounce of "sour 13" weed; 14 grams of ecstasy;.1 grams tar heroin. A listing for "Avatar" LSD includes a picture of blotter paper with big blue faces from the James Cameron movie on it. The sellers are located all over the world, a large portion from the U.S. and Canada.
In any case, check out the whole article here. I'm disappointed in the black market that it's taken this long to develop something like this, but it's pretty wild nonetheless. And to that point, I bet this whole concept sounds completely mind-blowing to anyone that's reading this high.
More Drugs! You Can Erase Bad Memories Now. Okay, so this sounds more like the future:
University of Montreal researchers say that the drug metyrapone reduces the brain’s ability to re-record the negative emotions associated with painful memories. In other words, bad memories are effectively blocked from being recalled or remembered.
Thank God! There's finally a way for Pau Gasol to put the 2011 NBA Playoffs behind him for good. Likewise, we can all use this drug to forget those awkward ages from 12-16 years old. Unless you're one of those people who peaked in junior high school, in which case you can go to hell.
There's a catch, though.
"Our findings may help people deal with traumatic events by offering them the opportunity to ‘write-over’ the emotional part of their memories during therapy," Marin said. One major hurdle, however, is the fact that metyrapone is no longer commercially produced.
But I bet you can find it on Silk Road...
Less Fun News! A Primer For Friday's Lockout Appeal. Courtesy of Andrew Brandt at the National Football Post, who's consistently dominated the coverage of the lockout so far. Also, there's actually some hope for the meeting tomorrow, now that the court's have canceled mediations next week. Again from Brandt:
Remembering Shaq. The first thing I did when Shaq retired yesterday was write this. After that, I spent the rest of the workday on YouTube, digging through various Shaq highlights. Say what you want about the guy, but no athlete produced more memorable footage than Shaq. To wit, Quickish put together an impressive collection of Shaq videos--highlights, quotes, commercials, etc--and if you haven't wasted an hour looking through old Shaq highlights, this is a good place to start.
Still wish that Shaq and Hakeem had played one-on-one though. Would've been so awesome:
Also, this Sports Illustrated cover would make for an incredible poster.
A Fascinating, Terrifying Story. About an arsonist who terrorized Washington D.C. during the '80s. It's difficult to read at times, but using letters from the man, himself, the Washington City Paper paints a pretty intense picture. It's scary to think about how easily he could pull all this off, and equally uncomfortable to hear him talk about his victims. But it's hard to look away, too. The insanity here is scary, tragic, and totally captivating. A lot like a fire, Captain Obvious might say.
Doc Rivers Talks About How He Almost Traded For Dwyane Wade. Via Sports Radio Interviews:
"Dwyane came in to work out with us when I was coaching the Magic and he really shouldn’t have. I think we were the 15th pick or the 14th pick. He had no business coming. He just came because of the Marquette connection. We had a workout. We had Keith Bogans and a couple of other guys. He dominated that workout more than I have seen any player dominate a workout to a point where we were scrambling trying to make a trade to get him in the draft and move |
apartment buildings in Williamsburg and Greenpoint and taking packages. Here are the NYPD's details of three incidents:
1) On Monday, October 19, 2015, between the hours of 1200 and 1500, the suspects entered the lobby of an apartment building on Woodpoint Road, within the confines of the 94 Precinct, and removed a package that had been left there, a queen size bed frame.
2) On Thursday, October 22, 2015, at 1407 hours, the suspects pried open the lobby door of an apartment building on Maspeth Avenue, within the confines of the 90 Precinct, and removed a package that had been left there, green tea and two Magic Props.
3) On Friday, October 30, 2015, between the hours of 0830 hours and 2345 hours, the suspects were buzzed into the lobby, by an unknown tenant, of an apartment building on Kingsland Avenue, within the confines of the 94 Precinct, and removed a package that had been left there, clothing and home goods.
Police also released video of the male suspect from the October 19th bed frame burglary:
Earlier this month, the NYPD asked for help in finding a man and a woman who stole packages from another Kingsland Avenue apartment lobby.
Anyone with information in regards to this incident is asked to call the NYPD's Crime Stoppers Hotline at 800-577-TIPS. The public can also submit their tips by logging onto the Crime Stoppers Website at WWW.NYPDCRIMESTOPPERS.COM or texting their tips to 274637(CRIMES) then enter TIP577.Justice Department To Seek Death Penalty For S.C. Church Shooting Suspect
Enlarge this image toggle caption David Goldman/AP David Goldman/AP
The Justice Department says it will seek the death penalty against Dylann Roof, accused of fatally shooting nine people at a historically black church in Charleston, S.C., in June 2015.
"The nature of the alleged crime and the resulting harm compelled this decision," Attorney General Loretta Lynch said in a statement.
The federal hate-crime charges against Roof "center on both the victims' race and their identity as churchgoers who were attempting to follow their religious beliefs when Roof attacked," as The Two-Way reported last summer. At the time, Lynch called hate crimes "the original domestic terrorism." Roof also faces federal weapons charges.
"The Justice Department says he selected the [Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church] and his victims to win notoriety and to try to ignite a race war," NPR's Carrie Johnson reports. "Roof has pleaded not guilty to the federal charges."
Roof's lawyer David Bruck declined to comment on Tuesday's decision in an email to Carrie.
There is a separate case against Roof filed by authorities in South Carolina. Prosecutors in that case are also seeking the death penalty, as we reported in September.
Survivors of the attack and family members of the deceased victims "had differing views on whether Roof should face execution," the Charleston Post and Courier says. An attorney for family members of three of the victims told the paper on Tuesday:
"The families will support this decision. Really, I think the families have mixed emotions about the death penalty. But if it's ever going to be given, this case certainly calls for it."
Roof is scheduled to be tried in January in the state case. It's unclear at this point when the federal trial will take place.However, he said Trump has weakened the U.S. position on trade.
"He is not seen by the Europeans as the leader of the West, as every other American president. He's been so critical of the European allies," Burns said in an interview with "Power Lunch."
The CNBC contributor and former U.S. ambassador to NATO under President George W. Bush also criticized Trump's immigration policy.
"He's trying to shut down immigration, I think, in a way that will hurt our economy and hurt the ethos and spirit of the country," he said.
"The actions of the last 12 months are a lot more important than this speech and this document, and the two don't really meet in the middle."
Trump has also been critical of NATO allies who he said are not paying their fair share. At his first NATO meeting in May, he called upon members to spend more in defending terrorism.
Burns agreed that NATO allies need to spend more, but noted that 20 of the 28 European allies began to raise defense spending in 2014.
"He needs to be a critic, obviously, but he also needs to encourage and lead, and he hasn't done that. It took him five months to say that he actually agreed with the heart of NATO: An attack on one is an attack on all," he said.
Meredith Sumpter, who directs the Asia practice at the Eurasia Group, said major powers are watching Trump's actions closely. If the U.S. is walking away from "the mantle of global leadership," they have key questions about trade and international institutions, she said.
"They are at this moment where they are wondering if the U.S. is not going to lead internationally then who will and what does that mean?" she said in an interview with "Power Lunch."What's the worst thing you've ever done around your workmates? Had a few too many drinks at the office Christmas do, perhaps, and chatted up the wrong person? Sent an off-colour email to the whole department by mistake?
Well, whatever you've done, it will almost certainly pale in comparison to what Carmarthenshire man David Morgan got up to with his boss's car, writes Michael Moran of The Quirker.
Morgan ‘borrowed’ his boss’s Land Rover without asking and crashed it. Then, while he was on bail for that offence, he took his boss’s Mini and crashed that as well. Into three cars.
He was over the alcohol limit on both occasions.
Swansea Crown Court heard that in July this year Morgan was disqualified from driving for 14 months for a drink-driving offence — but the following month he got drunk and took a Land Rover that belonged to his employer and crashed it into a van.
Morgan then drove off — and crashed into a car, injuring the driver, before making good his escape by driving away on the pavement.
The court heard Morgan was recognised by witnesses and was arrested by police nearby on suspicion of dangerous driving, to which his response was: "You can suspect all you want".
A subsequent breath test showed he had 66 microgrammes of alcohol in 100 millilitres of breath — the legal limit is 35.
The court heard that while he was on bail for those offences he went on a similar escapade — in October he took his by now former employer's Mini without his consent and later crashed it into three cars parked on Parkhill Terrace in Treboeth, causing more than £4,000 worth of damage to one of the vehicles and writing it off.
Photo: Google Maps
Ieuan Rees, prosecuting, said the 35-year-old was subsequently arrested and taken to Swansea Central police station — but while undergoing an evidential breath test he pulled the plug on the testing machine, causing it to crash.
He was tested again, and the test showed he had 74 microgrammes of alcohol in 100 millilitres of breath.
• 'Drink-driver' hides from police in nativity scene
Morgan, of Vicarage Lane, Cwmdu, had previously pleaded guilty to five offences relating to the October incident, including aggravated vehicle taking, driving under the influence and obstructing a PC, and to two offences relating the August incident — dangerous driving and driving while disqualified — when he appeared via videolink at the crown court.
Frank Phillips, in mitigation, said there was "another side" to his client's character who was a hard-working man, but he accepted he had a problem with alcohol.
A drink driver who is a'menace to society' has been jailed for two years: David Morgan of Cwmdu, Swansea has been? https://t.co/CpZUngPC0V — cardiffjournal (@cardiffjournal) December 15, 2015
Judge Paul Thomas QC said that when Morgan got drunk and got behind the wheel he was a "menace" to other road-users, and that was something the courts "will not tolerate".
The judge sentenced Morgan to a total of two years in prison, and disqualified him from driving for five years.Teen dies after drinking poppy tea
Updated
A southern Tasmanian teenager has died after drinking a lethal brew made from poppy heads.
The 17-year-old was found dead at his home on Sunday evening.
Inspector John Arnold says the young man died after brewing a batch of stolen poppy heads into a tea.
"If you consume those opioids in that unregulated way, the consequences can be obviously lethal," he said.
Inspector Arnold says poppy-related deaths are unusual.
"A 50-year-old northern Tasmanian man died in similar circumstances in February last year," he said.
"Prior to that, the previous death associated with poppy ingestion was back in 2004."
With the poppy harvest approaching, Inspector Arnold warns it is a serious offence to steal and possess poppy heads.
The coroner will investigate the death.
Tasmania's lucrative poppy crop is worth about $100 million.
Topics: food-safety, drugs-and-substance-abuse, death, hobart-7000
First postedRide-hailing app Uber (uber) said Monday it was joining a global public transport association to improve mobility in the cities it operates in.
Uber also said it was joining the International Association of Public Transportation (UITP) to connect more people to public transport.
Andrew Salzberg, Uber’s head of transportation policy and research, said aligning the company with public transport authorities was a good way to make Uber a better partner for cities.
UITP represents public transport providers around the world, including Transport for London (TfL) — which in September stripped Uber of its operating license.
Scandal-hit Uber has just had to reassure authorities it is tackling the way it does business after the disclosure of a massive data breach cover-up that has prompted investigations from regulators around the world.
Uber, currently valued at $69 billion, has been testing a more collaborative approach to regulators under its new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in a shift away from a more aggressive culture under former CEO Travis Kalanick.
“One of the big emphases that Dara has made… is that we want to be better partners for the cities we operate in,” Salzberg said, acknowledging that Monday’s announcement was part of the company’s effort to improve relationships with local authorities.
For more about Uber in London, watch Fortune’s video:
Uber said it would work on a series of training sessions with UITP starting with the so-called first and last mile issue of public transport to connect people better at the start or end of their journeys.
Salzberg said the company also wanted to help to reduce congestion on roads by encouraging people to move to shared modes of transport.
Alain Flausch, Secretary General of UITP, said Uber joining the association was a sign that the company wanted to have a better relationship with regulators.
“They are kind of saying to every politician: ‘We are joining the community and we want to help in the new ecosystem’,” Flausch told Reuters.
Flausch said he had told members of UITP that he would check the company stuck to its promises.
“It’s a work in progress and having Uber join is a good sign. Of course they keep their business model but … they need to be a bit more flexible and open to talking.”Jeremy Corbyn giving evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee’s investigation into anti-Semitism, flanked by Shami Chakrabarti. (UK Parliament)
A new report by an influential parliamentary committee has recommended that the UK outlaw the word “Zionist” when used “in an accusatory context.”
Published on Sunday, the Home Affairs Select Committee’s report also slams Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn for heading a party with “institutionally anti-Semitic” elements.
Despite its overwhelming focus on the opposition Labour Party, the committee admits that there is no evidence of a higher prevalence of anti-Semitic attitudes within Labour than in any other party.
At the same time, the report downplays allegations of racism and anti-Semitism in the governing Conservative Party.
Corbyn in a statement Sunday criticized the report’s focus on Labour, saying the Conservative-dominated committee had failed to look at “combating anti-Semitism in other parties.” He said that “politicizing anti-Semitism – or using it as a weapon in controversies between and within political parties – does the struggle against it a disservice.”
Palestine’s BDS National Committee said that the report “shows a flagrant disregard for Palestinian rights and history.”
European spokesperson Riya Hassan said the report would help “to suppress freedom of expression” and would encourage repression against advocates for Palestinian rights.
Defining anti-Semitism
The lawmakers’ report recommends adoption into UK law of a controversial definition of anti-Semitism which the BNC’s Hassan called “false, ahistorical and politicized.”
She said the discredited definition conflates criticism of Israel with racism against Jewish people and was “designed to protect Israel’s human rights violations from censure and accountability.”
In a statement, Palestine Solidarity Campaign chair Hugh Lanning said the definition would “have a chilling effect on what can be said in opposition to Israel’s policies of discrimination and oppression towards the Palestinian people.”
In May, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance adopted a definition of anti-Semitism that includes “claiming the existence of the state of Israel is a racist endeavor” or “applying double standards” to Israel.
As the parliamentary report acknowledges, the IHRA definition is based on the European Union Monitoring Center’s 2005 discussion paper on anti-Semitism.
That widely discredited paper was never officially adopted by any EU body and was eventually ditched by the EUMC’s successor agency.
But Israel lobby groups have persisted in promoting it as the “EUMC definition,” seeking to have it officially adopted.
The report attempts to mollify criticism by recommending two modifications: that it is not anti-Semitic “to criticize the government of Israel” or to “hold the Israeli government to the same standards as other liberal democracies.”
But the lawmakers still list as examples of anti-Semitism a broad range of political discourse, including “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination.”
This could potentially mean that calls for a nonsectarian democracy that gives full and equal rights to Israeli Jews and Palestinians could be defined as anti-Semitic. It could also outlaw the views of Jews who reject Zionism and the creation of a “Jewish state” on religious grounds.
“For the purposes of criminal or disciplinary investigations,” the report asserts, “use of the words ‘Zionist’ or ‘Zio’ in an accusatory or abusive context should be considered inflammatory and potentially anti-Semitic.”
Unfair criticism
The report has also been condemned by Jewish critics of Zionism, Israel’s official ideology.
Jonathan Rosenhead, a London School of Economics professor and activist with the group Free Speech on Israel, told The Electronic Intifada that “Zionism has been the cause of gross injustice to the Palestinians, so in that sense, every usage of the word Zionist is accusatory.”
According to the committee, Shami Chakrabarti’s recent report into alleged anti-Semitism in the Labour Party is “compromised by its failure to deliver a comprehensive set of recommendations.” It also claims that Chakrabarti’s recent appointment to Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet “has thrown into question the independence of the Labour Party’s inquiry.”
Corbyn hit back that the committee had unfairly criticized Chakrabarti, and that her report was an “unprecedented step for a political party, demonstrating Labour’s commitment to fight against anti-Semitism.”
He said Labour would continue to implement her report’s recommendations.
In June, Chakrabarti, a widely respected lawyer who headed the civil rights group Liberty for more than a decade, launched the report into allegations of anti-Semitism, many of which were fabricated or exaggerated.
Refuting widespread media claims, her report concluded that “the Labour Party is not overrun by anti-Semitism,” but that there is a “minority” of “hateful or ignorant attitudes.”
The Chakrabarti Inquiry was widely welcomed, even by some anti-Palestinian organizations.
Conservatives off the hook
The lawmakers’ report acknowledges that “the majority of anti-Semitic abuse and crime” comes from the far right.
It also states there is “no reliable, empirical evidence to support the notion that there is a higher prevalence of anti-Semitic attitudes within the Labour Party than any other political party.” Despite this, it focuses disproportionately on Labour.
While asserting that “no party can afford to be complacent,” the report dedicates only three paragraphs in its 70 pages to allegations of anti-Semitism in the ruling Conservative Party.
One of the two examples it cites allegedly took place at University College London in 2014. A member of the school’s Conservative Society allegedly said that “Jews own everything, we all know it’s true. I wish I was Jewish, but my nose isn’t long enough.”
Noting that the incident was never even investigated by the party, the report says that “questions have subsequently been raised about the veracity of the complaint.”
Such skepticism is absent, however, in the report’s detailed and highly flawed account of what transpired in Oxford University’s Labour Club after Alex Chalmers quit as chair in February.
Chalmers has never offered a shred of public evidence to corroborate his widely publicized claim that “a large proportion” of Labour students at Oxford are anti-Semitic.
As reported by The Electronic Intifada in April and May, Chalmers was implicated in a factional dispute within the Labour Party, which involved attempts to smear rivals with unsupported claims of anti-Semitism.
A dossier compiled in May by the trade union Unite shows a long list of racist statements by Conservative ministers and activists, including at least four alleged incidents of anti-Semitism.PITTSBURGH—Red wine and candlelight on the table before them, Deep Blue, the supercomputer that defeated reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, and Kasparov’s ex-wife, Yulia Vovk, quietly celebrated their 10th anniversary on Wednesday at a small French restaurant near Carnegie Mellon University, where Deep Blue was created. Those close to the couple said the two first met during Deep Blue’s match against Kasparov in 1996, and though the Russian grandmaster beat the computer four games to two, Vovk and Deep Blue struck up a friendship and continued corresponding via email. Sources said the intimate but platonic relationship blossomed into an indelible romance after Kasparov and Vovk’s marriage fell apart in 2005—with Vovk often complaining to friends that the increasingly distant Kasparov was “more of a chess robot than Deep Blue.” Soon thereafter, the couple reportedly shared their first romantic dinner at the same restaurant where they celebrated the occasion a decade later, having married in 2007 and gotten past the brief dalliance Vovk had with Jeopardy! champion Watson in 2012.
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On Sunday night, my first "Madden 2006" season concluded when the three-time champs (playing without an injured Tom Brady) squandered Super Bowl XL to a fired-up Eagles squad. That was immediately followed by another three hours completing my offseason tasks in franchise mode, which included re-signing every relevant Patriot with an expiring contract, scouting college prospects, drafting and signing those same college prospects, taking them through training camp and everything else. I even had to deal with Bill Belichick's stunning retirement and hire another head coach.
By the time I finally finished, it was midnight and my wife was Googling the words "divorce lawyers los angeles full custody" on her laptop.
Barry Gossage/NBAE via Getty Images Sorry, Diana Taurasi, but the Sports Guy isn't rooting for you.
Why am I telling you this? Because I have no business criticizing someone else's hobbies. We all have dopey things we enjoy. Maybe I like playing video games with the Patriots and pretending I run the team. Maybe you enjoy watching women playing basketball at the highest possible level -- a level that could roughly be compared to "a good intramural game at a Division 2 college, only if nobody could jump or dunk" -- and find the WNBA strangely intoxicating. Who am I to judge? So you have to believe me: I'm not telling anyone to stop watching the WNBA. Really, I'm not.
Here's all I'm asking...
Let's end the ongoing charade that this is a mainstream sport.
For the past nine years, the WNBA has been given countless chances, endless promotion, mainstream coverage and truckloads of capital. Has it helped? Absolutely not. Franchises keep folding and moving, regular-season ratings and overall attendance has dropped by 20 percent since the first two (heavily promoted) seasons, and none of the stars has captured the imagination of the general public.
Just this week, Sparks president Johnny Buss confessed to the L.A. Times, "Our attendance has leveled off. It would be one thing if it leveled off with the same interest. But it is diminished interest, and that concerns me.... I see a lot less interest in the WNBA."
He's not alone. After nine years of pushing and prodding, potential fans simply are not straddling the fence and saying to themselves, "Well, I'll give it one more shot, maybe solid fundamentals and tons of loose balls is what I've been missing in life." Nearly everyone has made up their minds at this point, just like we make up our minds on things like "I don't like anchovies on my pizza" and "I would rather not sit through a movie that stars Rob Schneider."
At the college level, women's basketball works for many reasons: school spirit, compelling coaches, passionate young players, a nearly suffocating amount of emotion, and a fan-friendly, do-or-die tournament that wraps everything up in March. I don't follow women's college basketball, but I understand why somebody would. During my junior year at Holy Cross, when our women's team made the Final Eight, our entire campus galvanized behind them. Yes, even me. Remove the student-alumni-college bond and here's what you have: A sport where players plod along, coaches get fired and only the quality play keeps fans coming back (or not coming back). If your goal is "mainstream acceptance" and your hook is "women playing hoops," you're in trouble from the opening gate -- most fans would rather watch men play basketball (for obvious reasons).
WNBA ATTENDANCE YEAR GAMES TOTAL AVERAGE 2005 221 1,806,362 8,173 2004 221 1,899,106 8,593 2003 238 2,100,630 8,826 2002 256 2,391,972 9,334 2001 256 2,323,161 9,075 2000 256 2,322,429 9,072 1999 192 1,956,281 10,189 1998 150 1,629,602 10,864 1997 112 1,082,093 9,662
Even WNBA stars worry about the league's future. Last month, Sheryl Swoopes told the Washington Post: "We're in our ninth season, and I'm very frustrated today from where we were five years ago. The league hasn't grown the way we've hoped. Talent-wise, the league has gotten better, and we know we're providing good family entertainment. But we're not noticed very much on the national sports scene and corporate sponsorships are hard to grow."
Don't be frustrated, Sheryl -- you're in a no-win situation. The mere concept of the WNBA is inherently flawed, like someone opening an inferior pizza place right next to the best pizza place in town, then using female chefs as a marketing hook. Who cares? It's still subpar pizza, right? As for those elusive corporate sponsors, female tennis players get them because of their sex appeal as much as their abilities (for further explanation, watch "SportsCentury: Anna Kournikova" some time). Many of them pretend that isn't what's happening, and they put up the good fight... but the fact remains, if Maria Sharapova looked like Amelie Mauresmo, the average male sports fan wouldn't be able to pick her out of a police lineup. Same for Jennie Finch, Danica Patrick or Brandi Chastain. In the words of Smilin' Jack Ross, these are the facts, and they are indisputable.
Well, the vast majority of WNBA players lack crossover sex appeal. That's just the way it is. Some are uncomfortably tall and gawky, while others lack the requisite, um, softer qualities to captivate males between 18 and 35. The baggy uniforms don't help. Neither does the fact that it's tough for anyone to look attractive at the end of a two-hour basketball game.
Then again, maybe these realities don't matter as much as one would think, because Sue Bird is downright adorable -- even when wearing Rip Hamilton's Schnozzaroo -- and I wouldn't watch 10 minutes of a WNBA game because of her. If Sue was walking around at the ESPYs in a cocktail dress, I'm watching. If she's running a pick and roll with Lauren Jackson, I'm flicking channels. And according to sagging attendance, I'm not alone.
Of course, after nine years of failed promos and cushy television coverage, there needs to be a P.C. reason for the league's failure that goes beyond something as simple as "it's just not that much fun to watch." Hey, let's turn it into a social issue! As the logic goes, the WNBA needs to stick around because the future of women's sports is at stake. For instance, when the WUSA crashed and burned two years ago, then-WNBA commissioner Val Ackerman told USA Today: "It's a sad day for women's sports. I remain as hopeful as ever. But there is a difference between people being with you in spirit and in ways that matter economically [like] ticket sales, sponsorships, TV viewers."
Geez, you think so, Val? More importantly, why should the WUSA's demise be considered a "sad day for women's sports?" Sad for whom? Should I feel sad that people didn't want to pay money to support a product few people wanted to watch? Was it sad that female soccer players aren't as talented as male soccer players, so it makes perfect sense that their sport would have failed because men's soccer has been treading water (barely) in this country for three decades? Was it sad that the relevant sponsors and networks didn't treat the WUSA like a de facto charity and start hemorraging crazy amounts of money to keep the league alive (much like the NBA is doing with the WNBA right now)? Where does the word "sad" come into play? I'm dying to know.
Apparently the WNBA can't catch on until we change the way everyone approaches women's sports in this country -- you know, people like me, writers who poke fun because the league is such an easy target. In that aforementioned L.A. Times article, WNBA president Donna Orender urged patience, pointing out that neither Major League Baseball or the NFL was an automatic hit coming out of the gate (of course, in MLB's case, this was 100 years ago, but whatever) and that "the growth of women's athletics is a much more recent phenomenon" because of Title IX (which would have been a fantastic argument if Title IX didn't go into effect 33 years ago). With everyone grasping for straws, it reminds me of the whole "soccer is the sport of the future!" craze, which started in the mid-'70s and continues to this day. That never made sense, either.
Hey, fudge the facts all you want. A product is still a product, whether it's a sports league, soft drink, cable channel, or whatever else. When consumers have been exposed to a product for a prolonged period of time, and only a few of them enjoy it and come back for more, how is that not the product's fault?
Which brings me to Big Question No. 1: How much money does the NBA have to pour into the WNBA before the equation changes from "potential business investment" to "unequivocal charity case"?
Take Vince McMahon's XFL idea, which NBC killed after one season despite solid attendance and ratings that tripled the WNBA that year. When the XFL was canceled, few people realized McMahon's biggest mistake was not giving the teams longer training camps so they could gel, that some of its players were good enough to eventually play in the NFL (most famously, Tommy Maddox), that some of its technical innovations helped to push the NFL's TV coverage into the 21st century (like cameras on the field, or players wearing microphones during games). Unlike with the WNBA, there was a foundation there for a spring football league with some attitude -- just look at the success of the Arena League -- and I will always believe NBC dropped the ball here. But when the plug was pulled, nobody really argued, and that was that.
The WNBA doesn't have to worry about a network losing faith in it, and here's why: It has David Stern as its Sugar Daddy. He's determined to sell the league to his NBA fan base, come hell or high water, no matter how much money it costs, even though there's no empirical evidence whatsoever -- seriously, it doesn't exist -- to suggest NBA fans could be swayed into liking the WNBA. It's almost like showing commercials for "The View" during "Monday Night Football." What's the point? If the NFL started a women's professional football league called the WNFL, would CBS, FOX or ABC ever kill valuable commercial time during NFL games promoting the WNFL to its fans? Of course not. And yet, with the NBA, it keeps pushing its sister league on us like an overboard mom pushing broccoli on her kids, even tying the WNBA's rights to its own TV contract. You can have us, but you have to take them, too.
WNBA FRANCHISE HISTORY 1. Charlotte Sting (1997-present)
2. Cleveland Rockers (1997-2003)
3. Houston Comets (1997-present)
4. Los Angeles Sparks (1997-present)
5. New York Liberty (1997-present)
6. Phoenix Mercury (1997-present)
7. Sacramento Monarchs (1997-present)
8. Utah Starzz (1997-2002)
Became San Antonio Silver Stars (2003-present)
9. Detroit Shock (1998-present)
10. Washington Mystics (1998-present)
11. Minnesota Lynx (1999-present)
12. Orlando Miracle (1999-2002)
Became Connecticut Sun (2003-present)
13. Indiana Fever (2000-present)
14. Miami Sol (2000-2002)
15. Portland Fire (2000-2002)
16. Seattle Storm (2000-present) Note: An expansion team in Chicago will begin play in the 2006 season.
Believe me, I'm not against the concept of the WNBA. When my daughter is old enough to start playing hoops -- if she so chooses -- I like knowing she could dream about playing professionally in this country (and not Bulgaria or Germany). It's just that the WNBA might not be around by then. Realistically, it has a handful of years left before Stern's retirement -- coming sooner than you think, by the way -- to expand beyond two of its biggest demographics: gays and lesbians (its most profitable fan base) and fathers and daughters (because a guy isn't likely to attend a WNBA game with another guy, but he's about 100 times more likely to take his daughter). To its credit, the league aggressively courts both groups -- witness all the Gay Pride promotions over the past few years, or even "Fathers and Daughters Week" this season.
As for the casual fans, the Donna Orenders of the world maintain that they need more time to "come around." Come around? Should we ignore the complete lack of progress in nine years? How far does this "come around" deadline extend to? 2010? 2020? Let's pick a year. Give us a firm deadline. In the mean time, attendance figures and ratings keep dropping, and the timeline for us to "come around" keeps shifting. And so they keep running WNBA ads during the NBA Finals, keep flying WNBA players to NBA All-Star Weekend... they even hikjacked "NBA Hardwood Classics" on NBA TV last week (which almost caused me to break my TiVo in 30 pieces). And every time something like this happens, and that WNBA gun is being held to my temple, it makes me (and many others) root against the league a little more.
Which brings me to Big Question No. 2: How can this be salvaged?
The simple answer: It's can't. Nine years isn't just a litmus test, it's a full-fledged sociological experiment... an experiment that didn't work. For instance, I tried to watch Game 1 of the Seattle-Houston series Tuesday night. Forget about the jarring lack of athleticism, how nobody plays above the rim, how the playoff games lack the life-or-death emotion of those March Madness affairs. This was just subpar basketball. For all the talk about fundamentals, nobody was challenging shots or denying guards from penetrating into the lane. The two teams ended up shooting a combined 39 percent, even though they were getting wide-open looks on both ends. For every decent play, there were three bad ones. And sure, maybe I just caught a bad game. But why would someone like me -- a die-hard sports fan who loves basketball -- watch this league on a regular basis? What's the lure? What am I missing?
Two changes should happen regardless of how you feel about the league. First, the WNBA should accept its place in the Sports Fan Pecking Order alongside NFL Europe, indoor lacrosse, minor-league hockey, bowling, celebrity poker and every other niche sport that appeals to a specific audience. (That's just where they are. None of those sports get preferential, wink-wink treatment from TV networks. Neither should the WNBA. If not for corporate nepotism, the WNBA would have pulled a WUSA and disappeared years ago. Don't forget this.) And second, Sugar Daddy Stern needs to accept the fact there's a fine line between promoting a business venture to your audience and antagonizing that same audience. Until he makes that connection, the league will remain an easy target for troublemaking schmucks like me.
In fact...
Last night, I originally planned on keeping a running diary of ESPN2's playoff doubleheader, thinking it would be funny to log every loose ball, every brick, every turnover and every mediocre play that prompted an announcer to overreact (and only because they're trying so desperately to make it seem like it's fun to watch women play basketball professionally, when it's really not). For once, I'm going to avoid twisting the knife and pass up one of the five easiest columns ever written. That's my gift to the WNBA, its sponsors, its fans and Stern himself.
In return, they can give me a gift: Leave me alone. Stop pretending that the WNBA can work on a mainstream level, stop pretending the league would still be kicking if it weren't for the NBA, and stop pretending regular sports fans are watching SportsCenter and dying for a WNBA playoff update. If you want the league to succeed, then create a "WNBA 2006" video game and tweak it so that WNBA arenas are always filled, players can dunk and block shots above the rim, teams aren't folding or going bankrupt, and playoff games are televised in prime time on a major network.
See, that's the great thing about video games -- they can make any fantasy come true.
Bill Simmons is a columnist for Page 2 and ESPN The Magazine. His Sports Guy's World site is updated every day Monday through Friday.UPDATE (via TPM): Bill O'Reilly is offering a rather high-flown explanation for the incident in which he shoved the Obama staffer in order to get access to the Illinois Senator during a rally in New Hampshire: He did it in the name of freedom...
..."I had no choice, ladies and gentlemen, but to uphold the Constitution," O'Reilly says, adding that his zeal to defend the "freedom of the press" explains why he went on to shove the Obama staffer, shout at him repeatedly, and call him a "son of a bitch."
Watch the video here.
UPDATE: Watch Huffington Post's Editor Roy Sekoff talk about O'Reilly's blow-up on Fox News:
Chicago Sun-Times' Lynn Sweet reports from New Hampshire:
The incident was triggered when O'Reilly--with a Fox News crew shooting--was screaming at Obama National Trip Director Marvin Nicholson "Move" so he could get Obama's attention, according to several eyewitnesses. "O'Reilly was yelling at him, yelling at his face," a photographer shooting the scene said.
O'Reilly grabbed Nicholson's arm, said "move" and shoved him, another eyewitness said. Nicholson, who is 6'8 said O"Reilly called him "low class."
Secret Service agents came after O'Reilly pushed Nicholson and the agents flanked O'Reily.
Read more here.
UPDATE: John Amato has video of Bill O'Reilly's call into Fox News about the incident. "I gently had to remove him from that position. No scuffle, I just moved him from the spot.. I might have called him an SOB, that's possible, nothing more than that. No one on this earth is going block a shot on the O'Reilly Factor. It is not going to happen." Watch the video here.
Photos/video of the incident by Off the Bus correspondent Joshua Cinelli:
Hillary Clinton also tangled with O'Reilly today. Marc Ambinder reports:
Clinton took her first question from a woman who said that Bill O'Reilly, who stood about 40 feet away from Clinton's left, asked her about Clinton's troop withdrawal plan from Iraq.
"Bill O'Reilly!" Clinton said, gesturing to the talk show host.
The crowd started to jeer, but Clinton raised her hand: "Oh no, no no -- he gets at least some credit for being here."
And she launched into a five minute disquisition on Iraq.In her latest column, Christie Blatchford wrote on possible reasons why no one was charged in the alleged sexual assault of Nova Scotia teen Rehtaeh Parsons.
The controversial column suggests the encounters that night may have been consensual.
“It isn’t so clear that [Parsons] was abused, let alone by two boys or three or four, let alone by the justice system,” Blatchford wrote.
Now Parsons’ parents are responding.
On a memorial page |
course, you don't," she said tartly. "You're a journalist." Then, to the rest of the table, "Guardian journalists are the worst. And Guardian sketchwriters are the worst of all."
I thought it was going to be a long evening. Conversation turned to teenagers. Euan Blair had recently been found, drunk, lying on his face in Leicester Square. I said that our children were coming up to the same age as their two eldest, and we were beginning to cope with some of the same problems. Her face expressed distaste and disbelief. "You have children?" she asked, as if appalled that such a ghastly person could propagate the species.
At this point, something in me snapped and I said: "Oh, stop it!"
She looked startled for a moment, then a broad smile appeared. Cherie had a very broad smile. Then she took up her cracker and handed me one end to pull with her. After that, she could scarcely have been more charming.
After the dinner, her husband, with guitar, joined a pick-up group with friends who had played together a few times. He looked happy and relaxed. It was the end of the year of the Iraq invasion, and to have nothing more to worry about than the next chord of In The Midnight Hour must have been an hour of blissful relief. Someone standing next to me said: "I saw them in France. But they won't play Summertime Blues this time. It's got that line, 'Gonna take my problem to the United Nations'."
Gordon Brown
Like many people who can treat others brutally, Gordon Brown has a very thin skin himself. I found myself chatting to him at a reception in Downing Street. I had recently had an emergency eye operation, of the kind that makes people's knees buckle if you provide too detailed a description. I knew he had had a similar operation after his rugby accident at school, so I asked him about it. He was clearly quite proud of the fact that he had had the first laser operation on a detached retina ever performed in Britain, and talked about it at some length. As a fellow sufferer I was fascinated, though I think anyone else overhearing would have disappeared, sharpish. I asked him if he had had any further trouble with the eye.
"I've had no complaints," he said cheerily.
"That's very encouraging," I replied.
"In that case, will you write something nice about me for a change?" he said.
I thought it was very uncool for a prime minister to admit to reading critical articles, and even less cool to complain about them. The correct pose is to be standing aloof and above any such trivia. Thatcher and Blair never admitted to reading a newspaper, and in fact probably didn't. They had people to do it for them.
David Cameron
David Cameron has the faultless courtesy of many Old Etonians. This is combined with a nervous awareness that having been to the school is no longer the guarantee of social and financial privilege it once was. Many Old Etonians have stories about being treated almost as social pariahs, finding for example that some Oxbridge colleges are actively opposed to admitting them.
Cameron is also remarkably competitive. This is a trivial example, but I recently asked the questions at an annual charity quiz in Notting Hill, the area of London near his home. I first did this in 2005, shortly before the election. Everyone knew that Labour was likely to win once again, and that Cameron had a good chance of leading the party after Michael Howard had been defeated.
Quizzes are usually hard fought, but Cameron, as the captain of his table, was incredibly determined, nagging his team-mates until the very last second to get crucial extra answers. In the end, I had to threaten that anyone who didn't get their reply sheets in within 10 seconds would lose all points for that round, adding, "Ten, nine, eight..." While I counted, Cameron flew from his table, barged to the front, and banged the paper down on the desk just as I shouted, "One!"
I reflected then that it was the last time I would ever be able to issue him with orders.In baseball, a walk-off home run is a home run that ends the game. It must be a home run that gives the home team the lead (and consequently, the win) in the bottom of the final inning of the game. Thus the losing team (the visiting team) must then "walk off" the field immediately afterward, rather than finishing the inning, and the winning team (the home team) can "walk off" the field with the win. The winning runs must still be counted at home plate.
History and usage of the term [ edit ]
Although the concept of a game-ending home run is as old as baseball, the adjective "walk-off" attained widespread use only in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The first known usage of the word in print appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on April 21, 1988, Section D, Page 1. Chronicle writer Lowell Cohn wrote an article headlined "What the Eck?" about Oakland reliever Dennis Eckersley's unusual way of speaking: "For a translation, I go in search of Eckersley. I also want to know why he calls short home runs'street pieces,' and home runs that come in the last at-bat of a game 'walkoff pieces'..." Although the term originally was coined with a negative connotation, in reference to the pitcher (who must "walk off" the field with his head hung in shame),[1] it has come to acquire a more celebratory connotation, for the batter who circles the bases with pride and with the adulation of the home crowd.
Other types of "walk-off" wins [ edit ]
Sportscasters also use the term "walk-off hit" as any kind of hit which drives in the winning run to end the game. The terms "walk-off hit by pitch", "walk-off walk" (a base on balls with the bases loaded), "walk-off wild pitch", "walk-off reach-on-error", "walk-off steal of home", "walk-off passed ball", and "walk-off balk" have been also applied, and the latter has been dubbed a "balk-off". It is a separate stretch of the term to call a hit a walk-off when what ends the game is not the hit but the defense's failure to make a play (as in a single with a possible out at the plate). The day after Eric Bruntlett pulled off a game-ending unassisted triple play for the Philadelphia Phillies against the New York Mets on August 23, 2009, the Philadelphia Daily News used the term "walk-off triple play" in a subheadline describing the moment.
Walk-off grand slam [ edit ]
A grand slam is a home run hit with all three bases occupied by baserunners ("bases loaded"), thereby scoring four runs—the most possible in one play. A walk-off home run with the bases loaded is therefore known as a walk-off grand slam.
Starting in the 1990s, a walk-off grand slam that erases a three-run deficit has come to be known as an ultimate grand slam.[2][3][4] There have been 29 such instances documented in major league history – all taking place during the regular season,[5] 15 of those coming with two outs.[6] Of the 29 home runs, only Roberto Clemente's was hit inside the park, at spacious Forbes Field on July 25, 1956.[a] Pirates manager/third base coach Bobby Bragan instructed him to stop at third, but Clemente ran through the stop sign to score the winning run.[9] Alan Trammell's June 21, 1988 [10] and Chris Hoiles' May 17, 1996 grand slams occurred under the cliché situation: bases loaded, two outs, full count, bottom of the ninth inning, and down by three runs.
The most recent walk-off grand slam was hit by Jason Kipnis of the Cleveland Indians on September 19, 2018, which was also his 1,000th career hit. Three players have hit two walk-off grand slams in a season, Cy Williams in 1926, Jim Presley in 1986, and Steve Pearce in 2017. Pearce's first was on July 27 (an 8–4 victory over the Oakland Athletics).[11] followed by his second on July 30 (an ultimate grand slam, for an 11–10 win over the Los Angeles Angels), becoming the first player in MLB history to hit multiple walk-off grand slams within the span of a single week.[12][13]
Only five pitchers in major league history have surrendered two game-ending grand slam home runs in one season, according to the Elias Sports Bureau:
Walk-off celebration injury [ edit ]
Walk-off celebrations typically consist of an entire baseball team leaving the dugout to meet a player at home plate after the batter hits a walk-off home run, or at whichever base the hitter happens to reach if a traditional base hit results in a walk-off victory. Players often encircle teammates who hit a walk-off before dancing and roughhousing to celebrate their victory. During a walk-off celebration on May 29, 2010, Kendrys Morales, then a member of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, broke his left leg while celebrating a walk-off grand slam.[14] As a result of this injury, team manager Mike Sciosia instituted new guidelines for his team that ensured a much tamer response to all subsequent walk-off victories.[15]
Relevant rules [ edit ]
The rules of baseball[16] provide that:
A batter is entitled to a home run only "when he shall have touched all bases legally." (Rule 6.09(d); also 7.05(a))
A batter is out, on appeal, for failing to touch each base in order or for passing a preceding runner. In some cases, all runs that score are negated. (Rule 7.10 and 7.12)
On a game-winning hit, a batter is credited for the full number of bases only if "the batter runs out his hit." (Rule 10.06(f))
A game-winning home run is allowed to complete before the game ends, even if it puts the home team ahead by more than one run. (Rule 4.11(c), Exception; also 10.06(g))
The first point above was problematic in the 1976 American League Championship Series between the New York Yankees and the Kansas City Royals. The Yankees and Royals entered the bottom of the ninth inning of the decisive fifth game with the score tied, 6–6; Mark Littell was the pitcher for Kansas City, and Chris Chambliss was the first batter for New York. Chambliss hit Littell's first pitch into the right field bleachers to win the game and the American League pennant for the Yankees. However, Yankees fans ran onto the field at Yankee Stadium to celebrate the victory, and prevented Chambliss from rounding the bases and touching home plate. Recognizing the impossibility of Chambliss successfully negotiating the sea of people who had been on the field, umpires later escorted Chambliss back out to home plate and watched as he touched it with his foot, thereby making the Yankees victory "official". (A comment to Rule 4.09(b) permits the umpires to award the run if fans prevent the runner from touching home plate.)
The third point above led to Robin Ventura's "Grand Slam Single" in the 1999 NLCS. In the bottom of the 15th inning, the New York Mets tied the score against the Atlanta Braves at 3–3. Ventura came to bat with the bases loaded, and hit a game winning grand slam to deep right. Roger Cedeño scored from third and John Olerud appeared to score from second, but Todd Pratt,[17] on first base when Ventura hit the home run, went to second, then turned around and hugged Ventura as the rest of the team rushed onto the field. The official ruling was that because Ventura never advanced past first base, it was not a home run but a single, and thus only Cedeño's run counted, making the official final score 4–3.
The fourth point above was not a rule prior to 1920; instead, the game ended at the moment the winning run scored. This rule affected the scoring of 40 hits, from 1884 to 1918, that would now be scored as game-winning home runs.[18] Babe Ruth would have been credited with 715 career home runs had the modern rule been in effect in 1918; in a 10-inning game Ruth's fence-clearing, walk-off RBI hit was scored a triple because the game was deemed over when the lead baserunner reached home.[19]
Playoff tiebreakers, postseason, and All-Star Game [ edit ]
World Series [ edit ]
In the charts below, home runs that ended a postseason series are denoted by the player's name in bold. Home runs in which the winning team was trailing at the time are denoted by the final score in bold.
Follow the linked year on the far left for detailed information on that series.
Playoff tiebreakers [ edit ]
Other postseason series [ edit ]
Wild Card Game [ edit ]
Year Date Batter Site Pitcher Situation Final Score Notes 2016 ALWC October 4 Edwin Encarnación, Toronto Rogers Centre Ubaldo Jiménez, Baltimore 2–2, 11th
1 out
2 on 5–2 With two runners on Edwin Encarnación drives the first pitch to left field to advance the Blue Jays to the ALDS.
Division Series [ edit ]
League Championship Series [ edit ]
All-Star Game [ edit ]
Other leagues [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
^ Big League Trivia; Facts, Figures, Oddities, and Coincidences from our National Pastime. (Indeed, as late as July 23 of that year, two days prior to the home run's 50th anniversary, an eyewitness account written by Pittsburgh-based sportswriter may have been done only once in the history of baseball."[7] [Emphasis added.]) However, the claim, as it appears on page 53, and has since been repeated extensively, in print and online (i.e. "Clemente is the only player to end a game with an inside-the-park grand slam."), is actually qualified (along with most of the book's items) by McEntire in the book's introduction. "Unless stated otherwise, I used the year 1900 – the beginning of the modern baseball era – as the starting point for the items in this book."[8] The source for this frequently cited factoid is Madison McEntire's 2006 book,. (Indeed, as late as July 23 of that year, two days prior to the home run's 50th anniversary, an eyewitness account written by Pittsburgh-based sportswriter John Steigerwald stated merely that it "have been done only once in the history of baseball."[Emphasis added.]) However, the claim, as it appears on page 53, and has since been repeated extensively, in print and online (i.e. "Clemente is theplayer to end a game with an inside-the-park grand slam."), is actually qualified (along with most of the book's items) by McEntire in the book's introduction. "Unless stated otherwise, I used the year 1900 – the beginning of the modern baseball era – as the starting point for the items in this book."
References [ edit ]The city of Vancouver was elected host city of the XXI Olympic Winter Games in 2010 at the 115th IOC Session in Prague on 2 July 2003. Eight cities applied to host the Games: Andorra la Vella (Andorra), Bern (Switzerland), Harbin (China), Jaca (Spain), PyeongChang (Republic of Korea), Salzburg (Austria), Sarajevo (Bosnia-Herzegovina) and Vancouver (Canada).
The following cities were accepted as Candidate Cities to host the XXI Olympic Winter Games in 2010 by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Executive Board on 28 August 2002 (in the order of drawing of lots):
Vancouver (Canada)
Salzburg (Austria)
PyeongChang (Republic of Korea)
Bern (Switzerland)
On 27 September 2002, the city of Bern withdrew its candidature to host the XXI Olympic Winter Games.
115th IOC Session, 2 July 2003, Prague: Election of the Host City of the XXI Olympic Winter Games:On the heels of collusion between the White House and the FBI, Donald Trump's press shop took the highly unusual step of canceling an on-camera briefing, then excluding major news organizations from the off-camera press gaggle that occurred in its place.
Donald Trump’s administration has been caught attempting to collude with the FBI to quash a story about the Trump campaign’s communications with Russia, and they have escalated their response to include a press blackout. At noon on Friday, the following update was made to the White House’s daily press schedule (via email from The White House):
UPDATE: The President will now sign the Executive Order at 12:00PM in the Oval Office. The President will now tape his Weekly Address at 4:00PM in the Oval Office. The gaggle with Press Secretary Sean Spicer will now be expanded pool and off-camera at 1:30PM.
Spicer was initially scheduled to hold an on-camera briefing at 1:15, which was open to all members of the press. As it turns out, though, the White House’s definition of an “expanded pool” actually means hand-picking outlets that exclude longstanding members of the White House press pool:
Just in: @CNN @nytimes @Politico & others blocked from attending White House gaggle with @PressSec. WH has so far offered no explanation — Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) February 24, 2017
CNN is reporting that in addition to those organizations that were excluded, organizations like The Associated Press and Time Magazine are boycotting the briefing, as well. Reaction by journalists was swift and blistering:
CNN was blocked from WH @PressSec's media gaggle today. This is our response: pic.twitter.com/8SfY2uYKEI — CNN Communications (@CNNPR) February 24, 2017
Can’t remember any press secretary from Clinton, Bush or Obama canceling briefing and handpicking small group for gaggle. @PressSec — Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt) February 24, 2017
Today's briefing was scheduled as an off-camera "gaggle" in Spicer's office; physical entry into Room denied. New low in press relations — West Wing Reports (@WestWingReport) February 24, 2017
Why Spicer wants hand-picked gaggle: 1) avoid on-camera goof 2) Trump can't watch a gaggle 3) get press to 'whine' 4) sow internal strife — Glenn Thrush (@GlennThrush) February 24, 2017
Congratulations to @AP and @TIME for boycotting today’s White House gaggle in protest of exclusion of other media. — Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt) February 24, 2017
As Peter Baker noted, this kind of move is completely unprecedented, and is a sure sign of a White House that is in crisis mode, and that thinks it can get away with anything. The resistance they have been encountering says otherwise, and they have just added most of the White House press corps to that resistance.Anthony Mundine contemplating retirement after WBC loss to Charles Hatley
Updated
Anthony Mundine is contemplating retirement after a crushing loss in his WBC Silver super welterweight title fight to American Charles Hatley.
The fight was stopped in the 11th round just as Mundine's father Tony threw in the towel at the Melbourne Convention Centre, handing Hatley a one-sided TKO victory.
Mundine never really recovered from a brutal second round when he was knocked down three times by the Texan, who pummelled the Australian with body blows as well as landing plenty on his chin.
He showed huge courage to fight on and even sent Hatley briefly to the deck in the 10th round but he could not secure the knock-out he needed to beat his 29-year-old opponent, whose record is now 26-1.
The 40-year-old Mundine admitted pre-fight he was only at 85 per cent with his preparation hampered by tendonitis in both elbows which limited his ability to spar as well as a dodgy hip.
It showed with the former world champion looking out of sorts from the opening round.
Mundine said despite the battering he took in the second round he was not hurt and did not want to stop in the 11th.
"They caught me enough to put me off balance but I wasn't hurt but the corner thought they did the right thing," Mundine said.
The loss scuppered hopes of landing a big-money world title fight against an international name like Miguel Cotto and Mundine said it could mean the end of his 15-year career.
"It could be my final fight but maybe not," Mundine said.
"I just want to get my body right because I had a lot of injuries coming into this fight and I will see what happens."
Mundine was gracious in his defeat, praising Hatley.
"I take my hat off," Mundine said.
"Charles boxed well and moved well. He had good distance and range and I got caught early reaching for him.
"I'm just disappointed; I came in with high expectations but Hatley fought a better fight and I was a bit off."
Hatley will now likely fight for the world championship vacated by Floyd Mayweather Jr.
AAP
Topics: boxing, sport, melbourne-3000, vic, australia, sydney-2000, nsw
First postedCAMP HUMPHREYS, Korea – Alpha Company soldiers and military police are still searching for 2nd Lt. Trevor Senseman after he reportedly ordered the brigade command sergeant major to stand at the position of attention before addressing him, sources confirmed today.
“No one has seen or heard from him in three days,” said Capt. Andrew Upshaw, the Alpha Company commander. “I know every LT has their screw-ups, but this? Not good.”
Upshaw is currently due to change out of command in three weeks, but the date could be pushed until his company executive officer’s whereabouts are determined.
The situation unfolded during ‘Motor Pool Monday’ when brigade Sgt. Maj. Billy Jackson paid an unannounced visit to greet and observe soldiers, according to sources.
“We scrambled around the second we saw him,” said Sgt. Dan Parsons, “but he waved and told us to carry on. He was drinking coffee out of a ceramic mug and just wanted to get away from the flagpole.”
Motor pool ops eventually returned to normal until 2nd Lt. Trevor Senseman confronted the sergeant major. Senseman approached Jackson and demanded confirmation on whether enlisted soldiers still had to salute officers.
“The pucker factor was off the charts,” Parsons said. “The sad part is we have a giant ‘No Hat, No Salute Zone’ sign posted in our AO.”
Jackson reportedly smirked as the second lieutenant continued shouting. That’s when the lieutenant told him to ‘lock it up.’
Sources say the sergeant major polished off his coffee, clicked his heels together, and rendered a salute with a loud, ‘Sir, forgive me, sir!’
“I’m a captain,” said Upshaw. “I’ve paid enough dues to get away with being a passive aggressive smartass to a sergeant major, but hemming one up? I still wouldn’t go there.”
All soldiers who witnessed the exchange claimed the confrontation appeared to be over. However, when Senseman failed to report for duty after lunch, soldiers started to speculate that his absence might be connected to Jackson.
“I thought, maybe Trevor’s at a dental appointment,” said Upshaw, “but I noticed the orderly room soldiers were more unsettled than usual. They told me what happened.”
With the help of his first sergeant, Upshaw brokered a meeting with specialists rumored to be active leaders in the local E-4 Mafia. The specialists offered no inside information despite offers of four-day passes and additional duty exemptions. They also declined to accept any concessions in exchange for their support, claiming the well-being of one lieutenant wasn’t worth risk of retaliation from the small but powerful E-9 Clan.
Jackson refused to speak with reporters but replied in an email that “Senseman wouldn’t be the second lieutenant to have wandered off and gotten lost and likely won’t be the last.”Yet the current crop of live-streaming apps face a history of video app failures. Viddy, a video-capture start-up that was a Facebook darling in 2012 and raised tens of millions of dollars, experienced early spikes in activity and at one point was seen as the “Instagram of video.” Socialcam, a competitor, was looked at much the same way. Both apps fizzled or were acquired after consumer interest waned over the course of a summer.
That isn’t preventing Twitter from betting big on the technology. The San Francisco-based company spent close to $100 million to acquire Periscope months ago, before the app had even been introduced, according to two people familiar with the matter. Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief executive, is particularly “obsessed” with using the app to capture real-time video, just as Twitter captures real-time conversations, these people said.
Mr. Beykpour said one advantage of Periscope was the short lag time between the stream and the ability to send text responses to the person streaming, essentially letting people communicate with the broadcaster in near real time. Periscope also takes advantage of a user’s Twitter followers to rapidly build a potential audience, and the app suggests other active Periscope users as people to follow. In addition, the app lets users store videos for replay or sharing later.
Although Periscope operates independently of its corporate owner — much like the Twitter-owned short-form video app Vine — it has access to Twitter’s money and technical support.
But Periscope has competition, including Camio and — in particular — Meerkat, which appeared this month and has gained traction with consumers and celebrities. In a matter of days after Meerkat was introduced, its use exploded and it soared to become the 177th most downloaded app in the United States and the 22nd most popular social networking app, according to App Annie, a mobile analytics firm. Meerkating, which describes the act of someone shooting a video live stream, is becoming a verb.
Image The new Periscope app from Twitter.
Much of that traction came from Meerkat’s breakout popularity during South by Southwest, the technology and music conference held in Austin, Tex., this month, where a number of fledgling start-ups have gained momentum by creating buzz.
Periscope was under development for a year, but Twitter failed to quickly introduce and market the product after it bought the company in January, the people close to Twitter said. That let Meerkat swoop in to take the spotlight. About two weeks ago, Twitter restricted Meerkat’s access to its social graph, which meant that a user’s Twitter followers would not automatically show up in Meerkat.Welcome to our inaugural podcast. Tales of Mythic Adventure is now live! We are happy to present Jeff and MOB as they talk about all things gaming and on Glorantha.
This will be a weekly podcast with many, many guests from the world of role-playing and beyond.
But without further adieu, let’s get to the notes on the first podcast….
INTROS (0:00-2:40)
Introduction to Tales of Mythic Adventure, with Jeff Richard (“Jeff”) and Michael O’Brien (“MOB”), and Rob the Producer (“Rob the Producer”). Discussion re the dispersed geographical nature of the Podcast, with Jeff in Berlin on a Chilly Spring morning, and MOB and Rob in Melbourne in autumn.
Discussion about the different ways in which autumn is name in the Northern and Southern hemispheres – fall not being so apposite in Australia as most of the native trees are not deciduous. Less informative discussion about if the water swirls in different direction in Southern Hemisphere toilets. Tone set for rest of series…
HOSTS QUALIFICATIONS TO HOST RPG GAMES PODCAST (2:42-14:50)
MOB explains that he is a long-term writer for the Glorantha world, with probably his most well-known work being Sun County, whose one line pitch would be ‘Spartans in the Wild West.’
MOB also came up the MGF (Maximum Game Fun) rules system, though “rules” might be taking things a bit far. They were devised on a day when lots of beer was drunk. Beer caps being in plentiful supply, they were tossed to randomise outcomes, with more complicated outcomes being developed as more beer was drunk.
The topic of beer leads to discussion about Jeff’s visit to Melbourne in 1998, where he was called upon to kill an injured Kangaroo in a small town in Victoria, on the basis that as an American he would know about guns. This happened on a day when Jeff was already confused by trying to understand the game of cricket. Also, beer…
Lucky escape by Jeff from kangaroo euthanasia due to self-euthanasia of kangaroo. Acknowledgement by Jeff that he has gone off topic.
Jeff Richard is Creative Director for Moon Design Publications, Glorantha, HeroQuest and RuneQuest, lead editor and writer for all things Glorantha, tasked with ensuring consistency and continuity across the lines.
Biggest work to date is the Guide to Glorantha, all 12 pounds of it. Plus another half dozen or so Glorantha Books.
Co-author HeroQuest Second Edition with Robin Laws.
Lead author HeroQuest Glorantha.
Minor bit part Robin Laws Drama system supplement ‘Blood Over Snow’.
MOB also raises his contribution to Tales of the Reaching Moon, produced by David Hall, who kept Gloranthan fandom going throughout the 1990’s. Proudest moment was an article identifying Sandy’s Peterson inspiration by Herschel Gordon Lewis, 60’s splatter director.
Long and dubiously relevant digression regarding precise number of maniacs in movie ‘10,000 Maniacs’, with conclusion that number of maniacs in product does not the number of maniacs promised on the box.
TALES OF THE REACHING MOON (14:51-18:50)
Tales of the Reaching Moon was a very important dead tree product in the early 1990’s, for those who did not have AOL dial up access to the Glorantha news group.
Tales started in 1989, when editorial decisions had to be made by letter between England and Australia (hopefully by airmail).
SUN COUNTY AND AFTER (18:51-21:58)
MOB then recounts the production of Sun County in 1992, when the production platform had advanced to the use of the Mac Plus. Ken Rolston was hired by Avalon Hill to work on Sun County, and MOB was then involved with the next five or so products that Ken produced as “Rune Czar”: River of Cradles, Shadows on the Borderlands, Strangers in Prax, Lords of Terror and Dorastor: Land of Doom.
This was, it is concluded, the short-lived Meringovian Renaissance for Glorantha, whereas Jeff is now the Iron Chancellor of Glorantha.
RENAISSANCE METAPHOR SETTLED (JEFF IS BISMARK 21:29-28:00)
Metaphor not settled as Jeff does not want to invade France, which he would have to do if he were Bismarck. What’s more, France is one of the centres of non-English Gloranthan game playing and is apart from that a very lovely place. Jeff then settles on the Medici.
MOB quotes Bismarck ‘Laws are like sausages. It is best not to see them made’, with reference to the creative process. They then describe the creative process in great detail, not taking their own advice.
Jeff feels that Glorantha is not even a game, but an exploration of fantasy, containing the pure gold of creative enterprise. Glorantha is therefore a set of myths that are not tied to any one game system, but is a literary work encompassing the sheer Joy of gigantic world creation.
King of Sartar, coming out in April [Editor: now available], is also not a game book, but a literary work.
Current Projects
Harmast’s Saga
Prince of Sartar Web comic
MOB feels that it is important that you should not write with a ‘handful of dice’. This doesn’t work as it constrains the fantasy by things a particular rule system does well. This discussion leads to…
GLORANTHAN RULE SYSTEMS AND PRODUCTS (28:01-34:00)
HeroQuest Second Edition
HeroQuest Glorantha Rules (April 2015)
13th Age in Glorantha
RuneQuest 6 – Adventures in Glorantha
White Bear Red Moon (Board game)
Nomad Gods (Board game)
Gods War (coming 2015). Gloranthan board game.
King of Dragon Pass (David Dunham, Robin Laws, Rob Heinsoo. Mobile version).
MGF Rules (Rune Metal Jacket, Diet of Worms). 2015
JEFF MGF QUESTIONS 34:01-
Q: What are you better at than the average gamer?
A: Interacting socially with other human beings.
Q: What are you worse at than the average gamer?
A: Rules minimaxing and manipulation. Question derailed by long disquisition on rule and rules engines. Introducing the concept of Myth crunch, using as examples the Mike Dawson scenarios “Gaumata’s Vision” and “Arlatan’s Tower”
Q: One thing that everyone knows about you?
A: Jeff really really really likes the look and feel of the ancient world for Glorantha rather than the medieval flavour found in other fantasy games.
Q: One thing that nobody knows about you?
A: Jeff is a retired and recovered US constitutional lawyer, who at one time filed a brief in the US Supreme Court relating to the limits of prosecutor immunity (he lost).
Guest for next week: Rob Heinsoo
Credits
Producer: Robert Love
Music by: audionautix.com
Introduction: Rick Meints
Note: We may need to wait for a few podcasts before we can see them in iTunes.“We feel we have the right to ask for help,” he said in the rebel’s eastern stronghold of Benghazi, Libya, where a cheer went up when the Arab League vote was announced. “If the international community chooses to play the role of bystander, we will have to defend ourselves.”
Even if the Security Council authorized the measure, American officials have said it would be warranted only if it appeared that Colonel Qaddafi’s forces were effectively relying on warplanes. A no-flight zone, they have said, would have little effect against helicopters or artillery, both of which the Libyan government has used extensively.
The White House, in a statement on Saturday, said it welcomed the Arab League decision, “which strengthens the international pressure on Qaddafi and support for the Libyan people.” But the statement did not mention a no-flight zone.
The defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, has largely dismissed such a zone as ineffective and ill-advised. Other administration officials have said that the level of violence in Libya would have to approach the scale of that in Rwanda or Bosnia in the 1990s before the United States would engage militarily.
An effective no-flight zone would require a leading Western role. No one else, with the possible exception of Russia, has the level of military sophistication, firepower and surveillance ability it would take to first disable Libyan air defenses, and then enforce the zone.
Photo
American officials also said that the Arab League would have to do more than endorse action — it would have to participate in it, too. “That doesn’t mean they have to fly airplanes,” one official said, “but there is much they can do, from providing airfields to gas and maintenance.”
At the Security Council, a diplomat from one member nation said the Arab League decision was “helpful, but there are quite a lot of reservations around the council table still.”
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The objections, including some from Russia and China, have centered on questions about whether the need for a no-flight zone has been demonstrated, and whether it has a strong legal basis and clear regional support.
The Arab League action checked one condition off the list, the diplomat said, but the others remain unsettled.
The Europeans have also been divided and have said that Arab League backing was critical to their ultimate decision. The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, was expected in Cairo on Sunday to discuss the no-flight decision with the Arab League.
Amr Moussa, the secretary general of the Arab League, said that a no-flight zone would protect ordinary people. “Our one goal is to protect the civilian population in Libya after what has been reported of attacks and casualties in a very bloody situation,” he said at a news conference after the vote.
Mr. Moussa said that he and other Arab League delegates were shocked by recent statements in Tripoli about the group. He was referring to a derogatory statement about the league made last week by Colonel Qaddafi’s son Seif al-Islam al-Qaddafi. After dismissing both “Arabs” and the Arab League, he said Libya did not need the league and did not even need Arab workers, but would rely on Bangladeshis and other Asians.
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The measure did not pass without tense debate. Syria and Algeria, in particular, argued that foreign intervention would destabilize the region.
Syria’s ambassador, Youssef Ahmed, said Arab states should oppose any step that “violates the sovereignty, independence and unity of Libyan territory.”
Those objections appeared to account for wording in the resolution that the Arab League rejected “foreign intervention,” and Mr. Moussa’s caveat that the action end as soon as the crisis is over.
The League has suspended Libya’s membership and opened contact with the rebels through the Libyan National Council, but it stopped short of recognizing the shadow government as the country’s legitimate authority.
Video
In Libya, the government’s growing confidence was apparent as it took a contingent of foreign journalists to the battlefields of the recently recaptured cities of Bin Jawwad and Ras Lanuf.
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a 20-megapixel micro four thirds camera retailing for just under $2000 without a lens. Side by side with the iPhone X, Fstoppers was impressed with the results.
Not only did the iPhone perform admirably in daylight and slow-mo tests, but appeared to nearly equal or surpass the GH5 in terms of color vibrancy and contrast in numerous environments.
The GH5 did come out on top in terms of video stabilization and low-light capabilities, however. The iPhone was also bested when it came to zooming in a subject, resorting to digital zoom after pushing past the limits of the telephoto lens.
Apple’s successful “Shot on iPhone” campaign has consistently highlighted the continuous improvements to the iPhone’s camera system, and this year’s update looks to be a solid leap forward once again. The full comparison below is worth a watch, filled with great side-by-side comparison shots. Which camera do you prefer? Let me know in the comments, and feel free to drop me a line if you’re filming anything neat with your own iPhone X.(NaturalNews) A chemical that naturally occurs in broccoli may help protect the lungs against the damage that leads to lung disease, according to a study conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and published in theThe researchers studied the lung cells of 39 humans with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a condition in which the airways narrow and it becomes chronically difficult to breathe. They compared these to tissue samples from patients without COPD, which is particularly common among tobacco smokers.The cells of lungs suffering from COPD were found to be deficient in a protein produced by a gene called NFR2, which regulates a variety of processes that clear out toxins and pollutants from the lungs. Perhaps for this reason, the lungs also had significantly lower levels of antioxidants and the proteins that prevent antioxidants from degrading. The more severe the COPD, the lower the levels of antioxidants and all these proteins.Previous research in mice has shown that shutting off the NFR2 gene in mice leads to the development of early onset severe emphysema, a common symptom of COPD. In the current study, however, the researchers found that the NFR2 gene in the COPD-afflicted lungs was working fine, suggesting that the NFR2 protein was simply being degraded rapidly after production.When they added the broccoli compound sulforapane to these cells, they found that all NFR2-mediated antioxidant lung defenses were returned to normal. This suggests that sulforapane and other strategies for restoring NFR2 activity may eventually be used as COPD treatments."Controlled restoration of NRF2 antioxidant defenses together with existing therapies, such as smoking cessation and use of anti-inflammatory agents, may greatly help in attenuating COPD progression as well as in preventing disease exacerbations," the researchers wrote.Other studies have suggested that sulforapane can help protect blood vessels from the damage caused by diabetes, and that a diet high in vegetables from the same family as broccoli (brassica, or cruciferous) can protect against cardiovascular disease and cancer.Sources for this story include: news.bbc.co.uk; www.medpagetoday.comA screengrab of an Amazon webpage showing its private-label men’s clothing collection, Buttoned Down.
Amazon already makes private-label trail mix, dog crates and surge protectors. And recently, its list of exclusive goods grew even longer, as the e-commerce giant announced that it has begun selling a private-label men’s clothing collection called Buttoned Down. For now, it features a small assortment of men’s dress shirts, but it will eventually include pants, casual shirts and sweaters.
It’s not terribly remarkable that Buttoned Down exists: Amazon long has made clear that it has big ambitions in the apparel business, and it has already rolled out private clothing labels for women. But the messaging around the new men’s line is where things get interesting — and where we could be getting a glimpse of how Amazon generally wants to try to win in the fashion category. (Jeffrey P. Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, owns The Washington Post.)
Peruse the product pages for Buttoned Down shirts, and it is instantly clear that Amazon is trying to position them as premium products. Buttoned Down is not vying for shoppers who buy their clothes from general merchants such as Walmart and Target, it is trying to compete for those who turn to the likes of Nordstrom. The page touts details that are meant to telegraph quality, including shatter-resistant buttons and lay-flat seaming. And it tries to suggest that these shirts, priced from $39 to $49, are comparable to pricier items. “We are committed to making shirts that stack up to brands you would pay double for,” the product page reads. This screengrab of the product page gives you an idea of how Amazon is looking to drive home that message:
A screengrab of an Amazon webpage showing its private-label men’s clothing collection, Buttoned Down.
Another strong indicator of Buttoned Down’s upscale ambitions? A highly liberal return policy. The company promises a “no questions asked” refund at any time if a customer is not happy with the product. This sounds awfully similar to the Nordstrom playbook: The upscale department store has long been known for its famously generous return policy, which is thought to be helpful in building customer loyalty.
So why does any of this matter to those of us who are not men in the market for new office attire? Because if Amazon manages to deliver on these promises and then replicates this formula across a wider array of goods, it could create an earthquake in the broader retail industry. If Amazon is going to offer premium apparel at non-premium prices, that could put enormous competitive pressure on department stores and specialty retailers that do a big business in these kinds of garments.
Of course, that’s only true if the product ends up being as good as Amazon pledges. If customers start buying Buttoned Down shirts and find they’re not actually comparable to a $92 garment from Brooks Brothers, then maybe it doesn’t quite catalyze shoppers to move en masse to Amazon’s lower-price versions.
In a news release announcing the line’s arrival, Amazon said Buttoned Down was one of the first of its private label clothing brands to be available only to members of its Prime subscription program. Here’s why that is intriguing: Until now, the key reasons to pony up for Prime have been its promise of speedy shipping and the growing bundle of services such as music streaming and photo storage that come with it.
But a Prime-exclusive clothing line could suggest that in the future, one of Prime’s main selling points could be a vast array of products that you can’t get anywhere else. If Amazon can build a solid reputation for those goods, that could prove a powerful lure to an already popular program. And it could also change somewhat the playing field on which other retailers are fighting for your online shopping dollars.
Amazon’s latest foray into the clothing business comes as it occupies an increasingly dominant place in the category. According to one analysis, the online shopping behemoth is on track to overtake Macy’s as the largest seller of clothing in the United States in 2017. And yet, Amazon has key hurdles to clear as it aims to grab more market share here, particularly when it comes to aspirational, upscale pieces. The site still has the feel of an “everything store,” not of an impeccably curated emporium. It remains to be seen whether that ultimately proves to be a compelling environment for peddling fashion.
More from The Washington Post:
Why Amazon launched a streaming show that looks a lot like QVC
This poll captures Amazon’s staggeringly big role in online shopping
A chart about leggings sales that should scare every old-school apparel chainOn its surface, the new Netflix movie featuring vintage-geek icon Pee-wee Herman, Pee-wee’s Big Holiday, is not unlike Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, the cult classic that Paul Reubens starred in and co-wrote in 1985. Like its forebear, it features—in Reubens’ words—”almost no plot,” and its playful protagonist looks much as he did then, save for an extra lick of makeup. Viewers seeking differences will do better to search not on the screen but in the glow it casts on their own faces. After all, the fans who embraced Big Adventure have grown up, and many will take their children along on this wacky holiday when it debuts on March 18.
The new film is produced by Judd Apatow and directed by John Lee, both of whom have made their marks on more adult-oriented fare: Apatow is best known for movies like Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, while Lee’s credits include Comedy Central’s Broad City and Inside Amy Schumer. But Pee-wee’s Big Holiday, like Reubens’ previous work, targets fans of all ages. The simple storyline finds Pee-wee entranced by a mysterious stranger, the scene-stealing Joe Manganiello, who encourages the bow-tied sprite to take his first vacation. His encounters along the way inspire a new awakening for Pee-wee, who, when asked early on whether he’s ever wondered what life is like outside his hometown, answers with a resounding “Nope!”
Pee-wee’s charms are still linked to his full-throated giggle and beatific grin, the way he reacts to pinwheels and magic tricks with the delight of a toddler inhabiting the body of a man. Reubens, now 63, has never assigned an age to his alter ego, and if some viewers are too befuddled by this—is he a mannish child or a childish man?—to make sense of him, Reubens understands. “Pee-wee sticks out,” he says. “I don’t make any comments on [whether he] sticks out in a good way, bad way, is a freak, isn’t a freak. I’m just saying that you notice if Pee-wee Herman walks into a room.”
But for many, when Pee-wee walks into a room, something magical happens, beyond the whirring, pancake-griddling stunts of his Rube Goldberg machines. Paul Rust, who co-wrote Big Holiday with Reubens, explains the enchantment that had him obsessed as a child. “My favorite quality of Pee-wee is that he’s not a weirdo in his world—he’s accepted by everybody as normal,” Rust says. “For anybody growing up feeling out of place, it’s this utopia fantasy world where everybody’s weird, everybody gets along. That’s a bigger fantasy to me than Lord of the Rings.”
In that setting, it’s perfectly conceivable that hunky Manganiello—whose Brandoesque attitude and jukebox dexterity Pee-wee describes as “cool, double cool, triple cool!”—could waltz off the set of Magic Mike XXL and become best friends with a white-loafered nerd whom, were this a teenage sitcom, he might otherwise slam into a locker.
It’s this friendship, presented with utter sincerity, that serves as the movie’s emotional rudder. Though there’s humor in the unexpected pairing, the actors play it with the innocence of children who do not yet count the judging side-eye as part of their vocabularies. “I thought of it through the lens of a 10-year-old,” says Manganiello. “What’s a biker to a 10-year-old? What’s James Bond to a 10-year-old? What is friendship to a 10-year-old?”
In Pee-wee’s early days in the ’80s, people often conflated Reubens with his creation—a confusion he perpetuated by staying in character in real-world situations (or at least Hollywood’s version) like The Dating Game and late-night television. “My goal was to make people think it was real,” he says. “The only thing I felt funny about was that for me that was conceptual art, except it was so conceptual that I was the only person who knew it.” By now, it should come as little surprise that—save for the body they share—the man and his man-child are entirely distinct: Reubens is mild-mannered where Pee-wee is spastic, discerningly self-aware where his character is blissfully naive.
Reubens dreamed up Pee-wee in 1977 when he was performing with the Los Angeles-based improv troupe the Groundlings. The character drew inspiration from children’s TV personalities, like Pinky Lee and Captain Kangaroo, that had enraptured a young Reubens in the 1950s. A 1981 HBO special brought Pee-wee to a wider audience, leading to Big Adventure, which he co-wrote with Groundlings friend Phil Hartman and which a young Tim Burton directed, and a second film, Big Top Pee-wee. He then launched a weekly television show, Pee-wee’s Playhouse, which aired from 1986 to 1990 and won 15 Emmys.
The character went dormant in the 1990s after Reubens’ 1991 arrest on charges of exposing himself in an adult theater; later that year, he pleaded no contest to a charge of indecent exposure and agreed to pay a fine of $50 and produce an anti-drug PSA to fulfill a community service requirement. But Reubens, who has always maintained his innocence, gradually began to make appearances as Pee-wee in the early aughts and in 2010 staged a warmly received theatrical show. Still, the hiatuses always outlasted stints in the public eye, so it would be fair to call Pee-wee’s Big Holiday something like a comeback.
But how do you best revive an icon? By leaving him be. Reubens may be some 40 years older than when he created Pee-wee, but the character isn’t. No matter how long the gray suit and red bow tie collect dust, Reubens says, returning to Pee-wee is “like [seeing] an old friend you don’t see for a long time.” If anything has evolved, it’s Reubens’ writing, which has benefited from the wisdom earned with age and loosened with his desire to expand the character’s horizons. “My rules for Pee-wee Herman evolved because I wanted to do more, and I realized that whatever was confining [me] was my own rules about it.” If the tenor of Pee-wee’s jokes sounds familiar, Reubens says, it’s because his humor “isn’t that contemporary. It has a corny, sweet edge that isn’t really hip, so I just take my chances.”
Pee-wee isn’t contemporary, nor is he timeless—not in the conventional sense, at least. He’s a product of the ’70s who came of age in the ’80s thanks to a sprinkling of references to ’50s children’s television. With that context all but absent from the minds of today’s viewers, it’s up to us to conform—or stand out. It’s Pee-wee’s world. We’re just the weirdos along for the holiday.
Write to Eliza Berman at eliza.berman@time.com.Cal rolled past Hawaii in the opening game of the college football season on Friday night, 51-31. It was a bit of a weird one, with early onside kicks and mostly optional defense and, above all else, the game being played in Sydney, Australia.
The game’s unusual locale was not lost on the Bears and Rainbow Warriors. And how could it have been? Australia is quite far from both Berkeley and Honolulu.
Australia has a long history of playing sports that are kind of like American football but different in myriad ways. One is rugby, in which players can score a "try" by running the ball past the other team and then downing it in the "try zone," like an end zone.
When Hawaii’s Marcus Kemp scored an early touchdown on a 39-yard catch-and-run from quarterback Ikaika Woolsey, he gave a nod to the locals.
Aside from rugby, Australian rules football is really popular Down Under. The flagship league is the Australian Football League, and the rules of that sport also have a good bit in common with the American game. Aussie rules football players can score "goals," and when they do, umpires make a signal that looks like firing two pistols.
So, Cal receiver Chad Hansen, when you haul in a 17-yard score from quarterback Davis Webb, how are you going to respond?
Here’s to continued American-Aussie harmony in the years to come.Brent Scowcroft (; born March 19, 1925) is a former United States Air Force officer who was the United States National Security Advisor under U.S. Presidents Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush. He also served as Military Assistant to President Richard Nixon and as Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs in the Nixon and Ford administrations. He served as Chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2005 and assisted President Barack Obama in choosing his national security team.
Early life and education [ edit ]
Scowcroft was born March 19, 1925, in Ogden, Utah, the son of Lucile Scowcroft (formerly Ballantyne) and James Scowcroft, a grocer and business owner.[1] He is a descendant of early 19th-century British immigrants from England and Scotland, along with immigrants from Denmark and Norway. He elaborated upon his relationship with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in a 1999 oral history: "I have close personal ties to some of the church leadership. They would not consider me a good Mormon. I don’t live by all of the rules the Mormons like—I like a glass of wine and a cup of coffee. But yes, I do consider myself a Mormon. It’s part of a religious and a cultural heritage."[2]
Scowcroft received his undergraduate degree and commission in the United States Army Air Forces from the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York in June 1947. With the establishment of an independent United States Air Force in September 1947, his commission transferred to USAF. Scowcroft also earned an M.A. (1953) and Ph.D. (1967) in international relations from Columbia University.
Career [ edit ]
Before joining the Bush administration, Scowcroft was Vice Chairman of Kissinger Associates. He has had a long association with Henry Kissinger, having served as his assistant when Kissinger was the National Security Adviser under Richard Nixon, from 1969.
He is the founder and president of The Forum for International Policy, a think tank. Scowcroft is also president of The Scowcroft Group, an international business consulting firm. He is co-chair, along with Joseph Nye, of the Aspen Strategy Group. He is a member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations and a board member of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Atlantic Council.[3]
Following his commissioning as an Air Force Second Lieutenant in 1947, he subsequently completed pilot training in October 1948 and then served in a variety of operational and administrative positions from 1948 to 1953. In the course of his military career, Scowcroft held positions in the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Headquarters of the United States Air Force, and the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. Other assignments included faculty positions at the United States Air Force Academy and the United States Military Academy, and Assistant Air Attaché in the American Embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.
As a senior officer, General Scowcroft was assigned to Headquarters U.S.A. Air Force in the office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, Plans and Operations, and served in the Long Range Planning Division, Directorate of Doctrine, Concepts and Objectives from 1964 to 1966. He next attended the National War College at Fort McNair, followed by assignment in July 1968 to the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. In September 1969, he was reassigned to Headquarters U.S. Air Force in the Directorate of Plans as Deputy Assistant for National Security Council Matters. In March 1970 he joined the Joint Chiefs of Staff organization and became the Special Assistant to the Director of the Joint Staff.
Scowcroft was appointed Military Assistant to the President in February 1972, and in August 1973 he was reassigned as Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. He was promoted to Lieutenant General on August 16, 1974 and retired from active duty at that rank on December 1, 1975.
His military decorations and awards include the Air Force Distinguished Service Medal, the Legion of Merit with oak leaf cluster and the Air Force Commendation Medal.[4]
Scowcroft has chaired or served on a number of policy advisory councils, including the President's General Advisory Committee on Arms Control, the President's Commission on Strategic Forces, the President's Blue Ribbon Commission on Defense Management, the Defense Policy Board and the President's Special Review Board (Tower Commission) investigating the Iran–Contra affair. He also serves on the Guiding Coalition of the nonpartisan Project on National Security Reform. He was appointed Co-Chair of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future from 2010–2012 alongside Lee Hamilton.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Scowcroft was in an E-4B aircraft, also known as the National Airborne Operations Command Center (NAOC), on the tarmac waiting to takeoff and fly to Offutt Air Force Base, when the first hijacked airliner hit the World Trade Center (WTC). Scowcroft's aircraft was en route to Offutt when the second hijacked airliner struck the WTC and Scowcroft was involved in observing the command and control operations of both President George W. Bush in Florida and Vice President Dick Cheney, who was in the White House.[5]
Scowcroft was a leading Republican critic of American policy towards Iraq before and after the 2003 invasion, which war critics in particular have seen as significant given Scowcroft's close ties to former President George H.W. Bush.[6][7][8][9] Despite his public criticism of the decision to invade, Scowcroft continued to describe himself as "a friend" of the Bush administration.[10] He also strongly opposed a precipitous withdrawal, arguing that a pull-out from Iraq before the country was able to govern, sustain, and defend itself "would be a strategic defeat for American interests, with potentially catastrophic consequences both in the region and beyond."[11] Scowcroft supported the invasion of Afghanistan as a "direct response" to terrorism.
President George H.W. Bush presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991. In 1993, he was created an Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace. In 2005, Scowcroft was awarded the William Oliver Baker Award by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance.
In 1998, he co-wrote A World Transformed with George H.W. Bush. This book described what it was like to be in the White House during the end of the Cold War, as the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s. Notably, both figures explained why they didn't go on to Baghdad in 1991: "Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."
His discussions of foreign policy with Zbigniew Brzezinski, led by journalist David Ignatius, were published in a 2008 book titled America and the World: Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy.
Scowcroft is a member of the Honorary Council of Advisors for U.S.-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce (USACC).[12] Critics have suggested that Scowcroft is unethical in his lobbying for the Turkish and Azeri governments because of his ties with Lockheed Martin and other defense contractors that do significant business with Turkey.[13] He is a member of the board of directors of the International Republican Institute.[14] He is on the Advisory Board for Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs[15] and for America Abroad Media.[16]
Scowcroft endorsed Hillary Clinton in the run-up for the 2016 U.S. presidential election.[17]
Scowcroft award [ edit ]
Scowcroft was the inspiration and namesake for a special presidential award begun under the George H. W. Bush administration. According to Robert Gates, the award is given to the official "who most ostentatiously falls asleep in a meeting with the president." According to Gates, the president "evaluated candidates on three criteria. First, duration—how long did they sleep? Second, the depth of the sleep. Snoring always got you extra points. And third, the quality of recovery. Did one just quietly open one's eyes and return to the meeting, or did you jolt awake and maybe spill something hot in the process?"[18] According to Bush himself, the award "gives extra points for he/she who totally craters, eyes tightly closed, in the midst of meetings, but in fairness a lot of credit is given for sleeping soundly while all about you are doing their thing."[19] Scowcroft had gained a reputation for doing such things to the extent that it became a running gag.[20]
Personal life [ edit ]
Scowcroft married Marian Horner in 1951. His wife, a Pennsylvania native, trained as a nurse at St. Francis School of Nursing in Pittsburgh and graduated from Columbia University. They had one daughter, Karen Marian Horner Scowcroft, a diabetic. Marian Scowcroft died on July 17, 1995, at George Washington University Hospital.[21] In March 1993, when Scowcroft was awarded by Queen Elizabeth with an Honorary KBE, his daughter was also received by the Queen.[22]
Honors [ edit ]
Honorary degrees [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]is leaving Linsanity in the dust.Remember when some fans and talking heads criticized the Knicks last summer for signing Felton and choosing not to re-sign? That seems like ancient history now. Felton went for 16 points, 7 rebounds, 2 assists and 0 turnovers Tuesday night as the Knicks beat the Celtics, 87-71, to take a 2-0 lead in the series. Lin?In the Houston Rockets’ Game 1 loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder, Lin went 1-for-7 for 4 points and 4 turnovers. “Tonight Felton was aggressive,” Celtics big mansaid. “I felt like he was the ‘X-factor.'” Felton was shipped away in thedeal two years ago, and didn’t play with the Knicks for the last two postseasons. As a result, he’s relishing this postseason even more. “It’s been great,” Felton said. “New York is probably one of the best places to play basketball…Just the intensity, just the fans, how much they get involved into the game. It’s great, so I was definitely sad and upset a little bit that I left the first time but things happen, I’m back, it’s been great and I’m loving every moment of it.” When the Knicks seized control of the game with a 32-11 third quarter, Felton went 3-for-4 for six points. “We got stops and Raymond did a great job of really pushing it and getting us into something,” Knicks coachsaid. While Felton andcombined for 7 assists, Celtics point guardmanaged just 2, underscoring how much Boston misses“When Rondo’s out there, they’re in a kind of certain flow,”said. “When he’s not out there in certain situations, they really don’t know who to go to, they don’t know what plays to run, and that’s credit to a great point like Rondo. Whenever he’s in the game it seems like he knows two, three plays ahead of time what he wants to do and what plays to run and who they’re going to run it for.“Fortunately for us, they’re a little fuzzy up top on who they want to get it to and why and we’re doing a great job of pressuring them to make sure they don’t have enough time to think about that.” With the Knicks up 2-0 as the series head to Boston, Rondo is on the shelf and Lin isn’t making Knicks fans wish he was still in New York. Not with the way Felton has played. Photo: New York PostFan campaign tops iTunes download chart after one day sales
Rage Against The Machine‘s ‘Killing In The Name’ was leading X Factor winner Joe McElderry in the iTunes download chart, after a campaign to get the track to claim the Christmas Number One kicked in yesterday (December 13).
A fan-organised Facebook group urged people to buy the track as a download as the race for next week’s Number One opened.
Yesterday proved the first test for the fan campaign, which has over 500,000 supporters, and the track currently tops iTunes‘ singles chart, while McElderry is at Number Three with ‘The Climb’. Of course it must be noted that The X Factor winner was not announced until last night, while the campaign against it enjoyed a full shopping day.
The iTunes chart is independent of the official chart rundown, but as downloads are expected to dominated the Christmas Number One countdown, it is a good barometer of the race.
The X Factor‘s Simon Cowell has previously attacked the fan campaign, branding it “stupid”.Police allege Mr Gill failed to stop at a stop sign when he crashed into the family's car as the Becketts were driving to Koo Wee Rup to take their children to school. Police fear Mr Gill, an Indian national in Australia on a temporary bridging visa, will attempt to flee the country if granted bail, similar to the way Puneet Puneet fled to India five years ago while on bail, using a friend's passport. Investigators are attempting to extradite Mr Puneet so he can answer charges over the death of Queensland student Dean Hofstee, 19, who was hit by a car as he walked across a road in Melbourne with a friend in 2008. Detective Acting Sergeant Trevor Collins, of the major collision investigation unit, said the community was well aware of the time it had taken investigators to find Mr Puneet, and the difficulties they faced trying to have him returned from India. "It's been an extremely lengthy and difficult process but his fleeing the country all those years ago was extremely easy," Detective Acting Sergeant Collins told the court.
"My concern is this person (Mr Gill) will certainly have the knowledge and access to other passports and adopt the same method of leaving the country." The court heard Mr Gill had told police his gearbox jammed as he approached the intersection and he continued moving. But Detective Acting Sergeant Collins said the theory was "extremely implausible". He said the intersection had warning signs and rumble strips designed to alert drivers to stop, and dismissed any concerns road users had about the approach. "If the accused, in my mind, had any issue with seeing vehicles over the paddocks either to the left or to the right then that would have been resolved by the accused stopping at the stop sign," he said. The weather and visibility were both good at the time of the crash, the court heard.
The court heard Mr Gill lived in Noble Park with his brother, who was of similar appearance and was currently overseas. Detective Acting Sergeant Collins said he had Mr Gill's passport, after a woman who had claimed to be the driver's wife delivered the passport to police while he was in hospital. Police were checking to find the woman's identity, the court heard. Mr Gill's barrister, Abdullah Altintop, said his client was married to an Australian citizen and was making attempts to be granted permanent residency. He said Mr Gill had supporters who would provide surety if bail was granted.
Mr Gill had been working for his employer for about six weeks, the court was told, but it was unclear how long he had held a heavy vehicle licence. The court was also told Mr Gill had lost demerit points previously for driving offences. When asked by Mr Altintop if Mr Gill posed any risk to the community if granted bail, Detective Acting Sergeant Collins replied: "No, other than his inability to stop at stop signs." The detective said police had requested mobile phone records to see if Mr Gill was on the phone at the time of the crash, and were also testing a sample taken from the driver for medicine related to epilepsy. Mr Gill had no alcohol or illegal drugs in his system, the court heard.
Mr Gill, dressed in a red T-shirt, said nothing during the first stage of his application. He is charged with four counts of culpable driving causing death and four of dangerous driving causing death, and single counts of reckless conduct endangering life and failing to obey a traffic control signal. His bail application will resume at 2pm.Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard has ridiculed the prospects of future fossil fuel development in his province as it pursues efforts to transform into a carbon-free economy.
“The future of Quebec does not rest on fossil fuels,” Couillard said in an interview published this weekend in Montreal daily newspaper, La Presse.
Couillard made the comments after his government unveiled a new energy strategy last Thursday that proposed to reduce oil consumption by 40 per cent in Quebec by 2030. The energy strategy would also support more energy conservation in the province and would include new legislation to support the ongoing transformation to a low-carbon economy.
While some Quebecers have suggested that the province can get rich by starting new fracking and oil exploration in the eastern part of the province, Couillard joked during his conversation with the newspaper's editorial board that some deposits in that region would have enough gas for “23 days of consumption in Quebec.”
Last week, Quebec Energy Minister Pierre Arcand told National Observer that the province was aiming to boost its renewable energy generating capacity and electrify its transportation fleet. The province is aiming to have 100,000 electric cars on its roads by 2020 and plans to build on an existing 800 electric charging stations across its territory. The government also announced major investments in electric train and metro expansion in Montreal last week.
Couillard told La Presse’s editorial board that the province’s future was linked to water and its state-owned utility company, Hydro Quebec, which largely supplies hydroelectric power.
“We’ll remake Hydro Quebec, into an amazing economic engine for Quebec,” Couillard told the newspaper.
He also criticized proponents of a new oil exploration project on Ile Anticosti - an island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, on the Atlantic coast. The former Parti Québécois government signed a contract, reportedly worth up to $100 million, with energy company, Petrolia, to explore for oil on the island.
Couillard has said that Quebec is forced to proceed with the contract, but he expressed concerns about authorizing drilling and fracking activity - injecting high pressure liquids to fracture rocks beneath the surface. He said the company would only be allowed to proceed if the provincial environment department determines it is safe, the CBC reported in March
But he was skeptical about whether it made environmental or economic sense to proceed, noting that there isn’t adequate infrastructure to export any oil from the island.
“Those who think we’ll get rich with oil are mistaken. There are simply not the resources that some have suggested,” Couillard told La Presse. “We’re talking about (needing) billions of dollars in infrastructure to get the resource out of there (Anticosti Island.) No one is asking how we will do it. By helicopter, by levitation, by teleportation? Setting aside the environmental concerns, this project is excessively (and) economically fragile.”
Video of Politique énergétique 2030
The Quebec government's new energy strategy. (French video)Miao Deshun, who was 25 when he was jailed in 1989, has been in prison for almost three decades and has had no contact with outside world for years
The last prisoner being held in China in connection with the 1989 Tiananmen protests is set to be released later this year after nearly three decades behind bars.
Miao Deshun, who was 25 at the time of the mass pro-democracy demonstrations, was one of about 1,600 Chinese people jailed following a brutal military crackdown on 4 June 1989 in which hundreds of lives are believed to have been lost.
Hong Kong's Tiananmen museum to close amid claims of China pressure Read more
In August that year Miao, a worker from Hebei province, was convicted of arson for allegedly hurling a basket on to a burning tank along with four colleagues. He received a death sentence with a two-year reprieve that was commuted to a life sentence in 1991.
The protester’s sentence was reduced on three subsequent occasions – most recently in March this year – meaning he is now due for release on 15 October, the Dui Hua Foundation, a US-based human rights group, announced this week.
“We welcome this news, and express the hope that he will receive the care he needs to resume a normal life after spending more than half of it behind bars,” John Kamm, Dui Hua’s executive director, said in a statement.
Life outside prison is unlikely to be easy for Miao, who is reported to have multiple health problems.
Zhang Yansheng, a fellow Tiananmen convict who was released on parole in 2003, told the US-funded Radio Free Asia he had spent time in prison with Miao and suspected he would struggle to understand “today’s China”.
“He has some severe mental health issues, and I think it could take him a long time to get accustomed to life on the outside. I have a pretty hard time myself right now, but it’ll be even worse for him,” Zhang said.
Dui Hua said Miao, who is now 51, has had no contact with the outside world for many years, having requested that relatives stop visiting him more than a decade ago.
“People who served sentences with him in the 1990s remember him as a very thin man who refused to admit wrongdoing and participate in prison labour,” the group said in a statement. “He is said to have spent time in solitary confinement.”
Following a nationwide roundup, China punished hundreds of people for involvement in what the Communist party claimed had been a counter-revolutionary “riot”.
But the families of those gunned down by government troops have yet to receive justice or compensation, and even today public remembrance of the massacre is outlawed despite calls for an inquiry.
This month marks the 50th anniversary of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which began in May 1966 and inflicted a decade of chaos and bloodshed on China, claiming more than one million lives.
But Andrew Walder, a China expert from Stanford University, said the Tiananmen protests represented an even more uncomfortable subject for the Communist party’s leaders.
“Much more sensitive is what happened in 1989 because that hits much closer to home. That was the one time that the regime was actually shaken to its foundations – even though that was a much smaller upheaval, a much shorter upheaval, a much more contained upheaval than [the Cultural Revolution].” |
some of the ship movements of their fleet. So as the CO, you can at your discretion choose to assault those targets of opportunity, maybe getting enemy weaponry, plans and schematics to enemy technology, further intel on their fleet movements and so forth."
One of the more impressive things about Infinite Warfare is how you can seamlessly transition between environments. Take the opening level, for example. From a boots on the ground situation we jump in our Jackal then fly into space. In some missions, rather than blow up an enemy destroyer from the safety of your ship, you can try to board it. Here, you'll pop the canopy of your Jackal, jump out, and enter zero-g combat on the hull, using a thruster to aid movement.
You can then blow up the ship from the inside, hot-footing it back to your Jackal and flying off in suitably dramatic fashion. You fly to The Retribution, jump out and mill about on the bridge - no loading screens throughout.
There are different planets (we know of Titan and an asteroid spinning out of control near the sun) you can go to and different ships you can attack. And there are different types of side missions. Some of these sequences will be hot, and some of them will be stealthy, where you'll pop the canopy to your Jackal and hide in an asteroid field waiting for an enemy ship to jump in. In these situations, you move through, sometimes in disguise, the corridors of an enemy ship behind enemy lines, hearing SetDef soldiers chat about the war.
As mentioned, you can land on Titan, and you can also land on an asteroid that's spinning out of control near the sun. You land on this asteroid to find out what knocked it out of orbit, and where the resources earth is waiting on to help rebuild its fleet got to. Not only are you worried about making sure there's cover between you and the guy who is fighting you, but you have the searing heat of the sun right above you to deal with. You can only move between open areas during this quickly spinning night cycle. So, it's 15 seconds of light and then 15 seconds of dark. It reminds me a bit of cult classic sci-fi Vin Diesel movie Pitch Black.
Your Jackal is a persistent vehicle you upgrade over time. One of the ways you do this is by completing certain Ship Assault missions. For example, one sequence sees you steal an enemy prototype fighter, and then have access to its weapons on your Jackal.
The Retribution also acts as a persistent hub, evolving as the story progresses. It was heavily damaged during the initial sneak attack on Geneva, and you did not have time to resupply before you went out on this mission. As you play through the game, The Retribution finds its feet, and so the bridge sorts itself out.
I get the impression Infinity Ward is keen to stress that Infinite Warfare has the kind of weapons Call of Duty fans are familiar with - despite it leaping into space and ever further into the future - in a bid to reassure the franchise's core fanbase that, actually, don't worry, Call of Duty hasn't gone full Halo. So, when you have boots on the ground stuff going on, most of your weapons are ballistics-based. "We didn't want to be all like pew pew lasers," Minkoff says.
But there are fancy sci-fi gadgets at your disposal, too. One of the new weapons is the Seeker Drone, which is, basically, a grenade with four legs. You can throw it out and it will go to whatever enemy is closest to the middle of your screen, then jump on the enemy and attack it as long as it can find a path there. Once it's on the enemy they'll try to get it off them and ultimately explode. Enemies also have these, too, particularly in stealth scenarios. Say you take out an enemy silently - if he had a Seeker Drone following him, it will come after you. And if it gets you, you have to try to shake it off before it blows up.
Then there's the wrist computer, which you can use to hack various enemies. For example, you can hack a robot inside an enemy dropship and then make it self-destruct, which blows up the dropship. This is a systemic mechanic - an opportunity available when you see an enemy dropship. Or, you can hack individual robots, take over their perspective and attack from them.
In some situations you'll have access to support vehicles, which are triggered from your wrist computer (up on the d-pad). In the Geneva mission you have access to other S.C.A.R.S Jackals, so can call in an airstrike whose use is restricted by a cooldown timer. In other missions you have access to heavy armour or ballistic weaponry.
The zero-g combat involves using a boost pack with thrusters and a grapple hook to help you move about, but in some locations in the game, the boost pack gives you a movement system similar to that in Black Ops 3, so expect plenty of leaping about all over the place.
Infinity Ward will no doubt hope Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare's campaign helps address some of the negativity surrounding the game, fuelled in part by Activision's decision to make the much-anticipated Modern Warfare remaster exclusive to the Legacy, Legacy Pro, and Digital Deluxe editions. For many it won't, and that's understandable, because, come on Activision, we should be able to buy the remaster separately.
The entire situation is a bit of a shame really, as there's a lot going on with Infinite Warfare that's different, at least compared to previous games in the series. I sense a little bit of Halo: Reach in there with the transition from boots on the ground to space dogfighting, a little bit of Mass Effect with the warship and Ops map, and a dash of Star Citizen with the zero-g first-person shooting, which is all good. It would be too much to suggest Infinite Warfare rewrites the Call of Duty rulebook, but the campaign has piqued my interest, and it's been a while since a Call of Duty campaign has done that.DIPHU (Assam): A national level athlete was allegedly branded as a'witch'and assaulted by a group of people of her own village Cherekuli in Karbi Anglong district in Assam, police said on Thursday.Superintendent of police M J Mahanta said Debajani Bora, medal winner in javelin at several national meets, was dragged to a 'namghar' (community prayer hall), tied to a post and beaten up by the group last evening.The group was allegedly instigated by the 'namghar' head Radha Laskar saying that she was a witch and was responsible for various problems faced by some villagers, Mahanta said.Bora became unconscious following the assault and her family members took her from the 'namghar' to Dokomoka Primary Health Centre with severe injuries in her back and neck, the SP said.Her family members filed an FIR today and two persons, including Laskar, was arrested while search was on to nab the others, Mahanta said.Bora, a mother of three and wife of a farmer, was selected to represent the country at an international meet at Malaysia in 2011-12 but could not attend it due to financial constraints.Console gamers mash buttons as well as PC gamers
It's been a while since we've gotten an update on how that console port of Diablo III might be coming along, but Polygon checked in with Blizzard over the weekend and got a choice quote. Apparently the project is still being tested out, though the company does have a version running on consoles. It's going to take a bit of work before any sort of announcement though. Especially considering the team is hard at work at what's likely Diablo III's first major expansion.
Chief creative officer Rob Pardo's exact words on the console port's progress are as follows:
"We're still kind of exploring it. We've got builds up and running on it. We're hoping to get it far enough along where we can make it an official project, but we're not quite ready to release stuff about it, but it's looking pretty cool."
While a console port of Diablo III would be outstanding, the team at Blizzard is still focused on producing content. Considering Blizzard's love of expansions, and how much free content they've already put out, I figure the team's working hard to get something out for next summer. Seeing as May 15 was Diablo III's original release date, the one year anniversary would probably be perfect for an expansion.
Jay Wilson, lead designer of Diablo III, commented on the team's current labors:
"The whole team is essentially working on the next big Diablo thing. A lot of that stuff will show up next year at some point."
Look forward to more news on the Diablo III front soon, as it sounds like Blizzard is hard at work on both a console port and tons of new content. Maybe this is what Project Blackstone is?Copyright by WKRN - All rights reserved Courtesy: Metro Nashville Police Department
Copyright by WKRN - All rights reserved Courtesy: Metro Nashville Police Department
Brent Remadna - NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) - A man is in jail after a United Airlines flight was forced to make an emergency landing in Nashville Monday night.
According to an affidavit, United Express flight 3550 was scheduled to fly from Cincinnati to Houston but made an emergency landing in Nashville after a man, identified as Mohammed Nasser Aldoseri, broke out of the plane's bathroom door and spoke very loudly in Arabic.
The affidavit goes on to say the suspect's actions "caused extreme concern for passengers and the flight crew."
The report states the plane's captain chose to divert the flight to Nashville around 9:30 p.m. where the plane made a safe landing and the 26-year-old man was arrested.
"The captain came on and said, 'We can't back up until everyone is in their seat with their seatbelt on, including the guy in the bathroom talking on the cell phone,' and it was that guy," explained Kyle Huff. "So the flight attendant started banging on the door and he finally came out."
Huff, who was a passenger on the plane, told News 2 that when Aldoseri came out of the bathroom, he seemed "a little bit off."
"His face just looked like he was not all there," he explained.
Aldoseri had slurred speech and was unsteady on his feet, according to the affidavit. When airport police got to him he was reportedly passed out in his seat.
"Once we landed, they turned the lights on and within 10 seconds three cops came on the plane went to the back, got the guy off, and took him away in handcuffs," Huff told News 2.
Aldoseri told police he had already gotten sick after drinking eight lemon drop shooters in Cincinnati before he got on the plane.
"I was totally confused on what was going on and then they just got this sleepy guy from the back, still didn't tell us anything," said Huff. "I was very confused and kind of scared. I also didn't know if I wanted to get back on the plane."
Aldoseri was charged with public intoxication and disorderly conduct.
The United flight continued to Houston after the brief delay in Nashville.
United Airlines released a statement Tuesday morning that said in part, "The Embraer 170 carrying 53 passengers and four crew members landed normally in BNA, where law enforcement met the aircraft at the gate and removed the passenger from the aircraft. The flight then continued on to IAH."No more piranhas found after draining the reservoir
By Jhoo Dong-chan
No additional flesh-eating tropical fish was found in Maok Reservoir in Hoengseong, Gangwon Province, where four of such fish had been caught earlier, while authorities drained the reservoir in the search effort.
Workers from the Wonju Regional Environmental Office drained the reservoir for two days from Monday to see its bottom to find another possible piranhas or red-bellied pacus.
But no tropical fish was found.
The drainage comes after the National Institute of Ecology (NIE) and the Research Center for Fish at Kangwon National University jointly caught three 15 to 19-centimeter-long piranhas and one 30-centimeter red-bellied pacu last week following a citizen’s report that the exotic fish were seen in the reservoir.
It was the first time for both species to be found in the county’s waters.
The organizations threw nets to catch fish if there was any. But as it failed to catch any, it then drained the reservoir.
It is unclear how the fish, usually seen in tropical waters such as rivers of the Amazon, were ended up in the reservoir here. A NIE official said they only suspect that the fish were raised as pets and released at the reservoir.
“The import of piranha and red-bellied pacu is not illegal because Korea doesn’t have a rule about it,” the official said.
He said it is very unlikely for the fish to swim into nearby streams because of the reservoir’s low water level and installed wire net around it.
“Even if escaped, the tropical fish would not survive the coming winter,” the official added.
Experts, however, warn a possibility for such fish to adapt to the country’s environment.
Busan Sea Life Aquarium director Kim Moon-jin said that nutrias, red-eared slider turtles and bullfrogs are the cases where foreign species have adapted themselves to the environmental changes, calling for the government to set up regulations for the trade of “invasive species” to protect the country’s ecosystem.
Invasive species are those introduced to an environment where they are not native and have a negative impact on its ecosystem.
Nutria, a dog-sized rat native to subtropical and temperate South America, was introduced in Korea around 2006.
Coming from South America like nutria, piranhas and red-bellied pacus are ferocious predators that hunt in groups. Piranha’s teeth are so sharp, with indigenous people making tools and weapons with them.Bitcoin is hovering just above $100 after a brief dip to $87 in intraday trading late last week. However, the price has fallen steadily since the end of May when revelations first began to surface about the NSA’s classified surveillance programs of telephone and internet metadata, which perhaps raised new fears around the currency’s pseudo-anonymity. Whatever the case, further doubts have arisen about global efforts to reign in digital economies. And as seems to accompany such news recently, technical outages have tended to exacerbate uncertainty whenever new fears abound, and Mt. Gox’s sockets are down once again this Monday.
In an article of the G8 Summit publication this month, John Lyons, chief executive of the Cyber Security Protection Alliance, called upon governments around the world to completely outlaw alternative payment mechanisms, such as Bitcoin. Lyons stated: “If treasuries and financial institutions around the world were to block those transactions and permit only legitimate currencies to be used on the internet through regulated payment service providers and cards (such as Visa, MasterCard and American Express), then the flow of many billions of dollars to criminal groups would be stemmed.”
The market capitalization of Bitcoin is again less than US$1 Billion in total. It is most widely owned by known internet entrepreneurs such as the Winkelvoss twins and presumably by like-minded individuals who are not likely using Bitcoin for criminal purposes, so the figure of “many billions” is probably overstated, if Bitcoin was meant to be the main target of his statement. Nonetheless, such fears tend to work their way around Bitcoin forums and may have increased selling of the currency over the past few weeks. Vigorous debate on the topic is certain to follow at the G8 summit in Northern Ireland on June 17th and 18th.
The G8 Summit publication can be found at: http://www.newsdeskmedia.com/files/G8-UK-2013.pdf....the question was whether there is a right to have appointed counsel in such civil contempt proceedings. Typically, such civil contempt findings must be based on the fact that there is a valid child-support order, and that the noncustodial parent was able to comply with it, but failed to do so.
In a 5-4 decision the Court held that the state is not necessarily obligated to provide counsel for indigent parents facing incarceration for civil contempt related to the failure to pay child support. At a minimum, however, states must have in place procedures to ensure "a fundamentally fair determination of the critical incarceration-related question, whether the supporting parent is able to comply with the support order."
Thomas further argued (with Justice Antonin Scalia, but not Chief Justice John G. Roberts or Samuel Alito joining) that the majority opinion did not consider the effects of this decision with respect to child support payments, and expressed concern that the majority opinion would undermine state efforts to collect child support payments.[4]
A person being in arrears on child support payments is not unusual: in 2008, 11.2 million U.S. child support cases had arrears due.[1] The number of persons kept in jail or in prison for child support arrears is not generally tracked. Based on a publicly available collection of relevant data, an estimated 50,000 persons are kept in jail or in person [sic]on any given day in the U.S. for child support arrears.[2] Hence Turner v. Rogers does not merely concern a technical question of legal procedure. Being in arrears on child support payments is a situation that many persons experience. Moreover, as a result of child support debt, many persons in the U.S. are being imprisoned.
I was working on some continuing education articles today on legal issues and came across the case of Turner vs. Rogers that I thought would be of interest to readers here. In this case (which examines child support) according to an article on mental health and medical rights by Steven R. Smith, JD:There is much more to this case than the lack of counsel being provided that I will not get into here but I was disappointed to see that Justice Clarence Thomas authored a dissenting opinion:What didn't surprise me is how many people (my guess is mostly or all men) are imprisoned for not paying child support: If 50,000 on any given day is accurate, it is unbelievable how many men are being kept in jail for owing money. Many people feel that child support is a different kind of debt but I disagree. Debtors' prisons are long gone, so much so that people are actually nonchalant and even contemptuous about owing others money. They know that jail is not an option for them.I believe that the jails are full of fathers because of their sex exclusively. We have a higher percentage of deadbeat moms, but few are held accountable and I doubt that many, if any, of the 50,000 in jail on any given day are female. Why does our society allow men to be thrown in jail this way? Are there that many chivalrous men and white knights like Thomas out there who believe that men's rights end when it comes to reproduction? Are there that many totalitarian women out there who believe that a man in jail is par for the course and a source of smug satisfaction?Given how many of our nation's men sit in jail over child support, I guess the answer is a resounding "yes."We continue to legalize misandry but at what cost?A FIFTH of science papers on the topic of genes contain name conversion errors owing to Excel's obsession with converting things into dates.
The findings come in a report published in BioMed Central by researchers Mark Ziemann, Yotam Eren and Assam El-Osta, who explained that the errors are easily made when using Excel's default settings.
"The spreadsheet software Microsoft Excel, when used with default settings, is known to convert gene names to dates and floating-point numbers," said the report.
"A programmatic scan of leading genomics journals reveals that approximately one fifth of papers with supplementary Excel gene lists contain erroneous gene name conversions."
The problem has been rife since 2004, just three years before it emerged that Excel couldn't cope with anything involving the number 65,535.
Many of the problems involve simple misreading of information such as dates. The report said that gene symbols SEPT2 (Septin 2) and MARCH1 (Membrane-Associated Ring Finger) are converted by Excel into 2-Sep and 1-Mar, thus completely removing their point.
RIKEN identifiers are automatically converted by Excel into floating point numbers, the researchers found, for example from accession 2310009E13 to 2.31E+13. SEPT2 has been converted into 2006/09/02.
This is all starting to get a bit complicated, but the problem is obvious: you don't mess with genetics. Stupid errors with DNA led to Jurassic Park's untimely disaster (three of them, in fact).
And while "Life finds a way" may be a stretch when applied to nature bending its wrath around stubbornly coded spreadsheets, we could be looking at an army of giant Clippys launching an attack on the mainland if we're not too careful.
"Supplementary files in Excel format from 18 journals published from 2005 to 2015 were programmatically screened for the presence of gene name errors. We screened 35,175 supplementary Excel files, finding 7,467 gene lists attached to 3,597 published papers," concluded the report. µADVERTISEMENT
Almost seven years after the Great Recession officially ended, America's economic recovery has finally commenced.
What do I mean by "finally commenced?" Hasn't the recovery been underway since mid-2009, with a record-setting, 73-month run of unbroken job creation, including Friday's jobs report?
Well, yes. But this gets to an important nuance in what we mean by "recovery." Another way to put the question is, what does the economy look like when it's operating at full health? I'd propose a pretty straightforward answer to that: When labor markets are really tight — i.e. when the supply of available jobs outpaces the supply of available workers by such a degree that "over a broad range of occupations and industries, employers would like to employ more workers than they do," as economist Hyman Minsky put it.
When that happens, workers have the leverage to demand better pay and working conditions, since they can just leave for another job if those demands aren't met. So incomes rise and they typically rise fastest for the poorest workers. Employers also can't be too picky about who they hire. They can't afford to turn down applicants because of their criminal history, credit history, possible disabilities, education, or other unusual circumstances. And tight labor markets also force employers to hire people who might otherwise have been shoved to the fringes of the economy by prejudice and discrimination — so really tight labor markets disproportionately help African-Americans and other minorities.
America isn't there yet. Indeed, the last time it did was arguably not during the business cycle peak in 2007, but during the peak in the late '90s. But last Friday's job report — which details job growth in March — reconfirms that, in the last few months, the labor market has finally started actively pushing in that direction.
First is labor force participation. That's the number of people over age 16 in the economy who have actively looked for work in the last four weeks. Again, this peaked in the late '90s at 67 percent, then ticked down to 66 percent by 2007. Then it collapsed with the Great Recession, and just kept heading down, until it hit 62.4 percent this past September. Then it began to nudge back up, reaching 62.9 percent in February, and 63 percent in March.
That's a slow climb, but it keeps the turnaround going. And the turnaround is the key thing: When the economy goes into a deep dive the way it did in 2008, a lot of people can just give up on finding work entirely, which is what causes labor force participation to fall. Some of this is retirements, yet even accounting for that, 63 percent is too low.
But the turnaround means that job growth has finally reached the point where it's not just pulling people into employment from the labor force — it's pulling people from outside the labor force back into employment too. As Ben Casselman noted at FiveThirtyEight, the number of people entering the labor force because they got a job has been steadily rising, while the number of people entering the labor force because they've merely started looking for work has fallen.
Meanwhile, the Economic Policy Institute's "missing worker" metric — which tracks potential workers who by all rights would be either employed or looking for work, but aren't due to a lack of job opportunities — finally started falling in mid-2015, and dropped again from February to March.
Another sign is the prime age employment ratio. This is a slightly different metric: It takes every American between ages 25 and 54, and just asks if they have a job or not. Its advantage is that it isn't distorted by people who are likely in school (under 25) or retired (over 54). This is another metric that peaked in the late '90s at 81.9 percent, but only got to 80.3 percent in the business cycle of 2007. Then it fell to 75 percent with the Great Recession and has been slowly climbing since. It actually plateaued for much of 2015, which freaked everyone out. But then it picked up again around November, and increased from 77.8 percent in February to 78 percent in March.
The U.S. still has a long way to go. There's no reason the prime age employment ratio shouldn't get back to 81.9 percent or thereabouts, for instance. African-Americans' unemployment rate is falling, but was still 9 percent in March. Especially disturbing is the long-term unemployment rate — people haven't found work for at least 27 weeks — stopped falling in mid-2015 and has been at a standstill since.
Lastly, the clearest sign of tight labor markets — steady and high wage growth, usually around 4 percent — remains absent. We were at a roughly 2.3 percent for March, and if you squint you can maybe see a slight upward trend in the growth rate since 2012.
But the point is, the rise in the labor force participation rate — backed by the fall in missing workers and the renewed rise of the prime age employment ratio — means the economy has reached a new stage. Employers have tapped out or are close to tapping out the supply of unemployed workers in the labor force, and are now bringing in new hires from outside it. When that supply of new workers is tapped out too — when the labor force cannot grow any more, but pressure on employers keeps building anyway — that's when wages will really take off.
In a better world, U.S. policymakers would be doing everything they could to help this process along. But the least they could do is not impede it. That means you, Federal Reserve.A leading Teesside manufacturer has invested millions in a state-of-the-art facility at Wilton - creating 40 new high-level jobs.
The £7m Saturn Processs Development Laboratories, by Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies, “demonstrates the strength of the UK’s life sciences sector”, Lord Prior, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for business, has claimed.
He spoke during a dedication ceremony for the new facility that saw biotech leaders and dignitaries from across the world gather at Redcar’s Wilton Centre.
The 10,000 sq ft facility, part funded by Let’s Grow via the Government’s Regional Growth Fund, speeds up the production of bio-pharamaceuticals and has been branded a “vote of confidence” in the area, by Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen.
Lord Prior said: “Fujifilm’s investment in a new facility on Teesside demonstrates the strength of the UK’s life sciences sector and brings more highly-skilled jobs to the region.
“The UK has a very strong science and innovation base and through our Industrial Strategy we are ensuring we continue to be at the forefront of pioneering research and the destination of choice for inward investment.”
(Image: Evening Gazette)
Mr Houchen added: “Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies’ decision to invest in its Saturn laboratory at Wilton not only represents a significant economic and employment boost for our area, but a vote of confidence in Tees Valley as a place to do business, and to research, develop and manufacture cutting edge biotechnology products.
“The high quality roles created by this investment show we have the skills and talent to attract and retain blue-chip global employers. Our ability to bring in inward investment of this kind is critical for our future economic growth and the prosperity of families across our region.”
Mr Daisuke Matsunaga, Consul General of Japan in the UK, also addressed the audience during the event.
Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies also has a base on Billingham’s Belasis Avenue.
Parent company, Tokyo-based FUJIFILM Holdings Corporation, recorded global revenues of more than £15bn for the year ended March 31.Ticats withholding payments to city; Team has various concerns about Tim Hortons Field, but city says 'they're petty' (July 10)
It amazes me that the city cannot understand why the Hamilton Tigers Cats would hold back some of their payment on Tim Hortons Field. All you have to do is look back to day one. Once the money was offered to erect the Pam Am field the city fathers went wild. Do we want it, don't we want it? How long did it take to decide that? Then when they decided we want it built, where was it going to go?
There is a CFL team in the west getting a new stadium soon. But, lo and behold, while it is being constructed the team is playing at the old stadium. What a fantastic plan for someone to come up with. It has been over four embarrassing years since this whole circus came to town. The Tim Hortons company must wonder what they got themselves into. Fred Eisenberger is back in as mayor with most of the same players as when it all started and still the stadium is not completed. The fact that the city fathers cannot understand why the Tiger Cats hold back a stadium payment says a lot for the people from the mayor down.
I was born in Hamilton and have watched Hamilton teams play for about 70 years. I saw my first football game while sitting on the branch of a tree on Melrose St. The Hamilton teams playing then were the Tigers and the Wildcats. I sold pop at the football games in the stadium as a young child. The first Grey Cup I attended was in 1957. I have had season tickets for many years and did the Guelph thing plus the Moncton trip. I have been a Tiger Cat fan since day one in 1950.
The opinions I expressed are my own but, I feel many others have the same thoughts. I can be found in my seat at all home games barring a major calamity. Sec. 216 Row 10 Seat 1.
David E. Pettersen, Port DoverAs the nation is in the midst of sorting out the “National Emergency” that President Donald Trump declared recently, a myriad of reactions have flooded into the public eye. Lawsuits, and legal barriers, and clever commentators galore have been directed against the president’s declaration. Yet, one thing seems to be quite clear - all the ones fighting the president are the ones who are denying there is any emergency. Yet, those denying that there is a national emergency, are the ones who are fomenting it.
The national emergency in the United States in 2019 is the cancer of division within the nation, and it has been growing inside the nation from the time of the American Civil War. The national emergency that exists today must not be limited to the Border Wall that has become more than a dividing barrier between nations - it has divided American citizens amongst themselves. The national emergency is not only a foreign enemy that would like to breach the nation’s borders. But, the broader national emergency is the domestic enemy within the U.S. that is also adept at aiding and abetting the enemies of the nation. Rush Limbaugh recently made public his assertion that the real national emergency is the covert coup attempt at taking over the presidency.Is chivalry dead and, if it is, who really cares? Should it be expected that men open doors for their female co-workers? Or stand up when they enter the room? Do women even want men to do this? Is "chivalry" just another word for chauvinism?
A Twitter post with an image of a man and woman walking side-by-side on the street caused a storm when few could identify what was "wrong" with it.
Was it wrong because the couple had not linked arms? Or because he was not carrying her bag?
Under traditional rules of etiquette, the man should in fact have been walking on the road side, not the woman. This was to protect her from being splattered from mud from passing, er, carriages.
Unfurling capes over inconveniently-placed puddles or kissing the back of a woman's hands with an accompanying deep bow would not be contemplated by any but the most cultured or confident of men. What was once considered gallant behaviour is now purely vaudeville.
Clearly, the rules of etiquette change.
In 1955, an issue of The Australian Women's Weekly featured six tightly-packed pages on "etiquette for today". Fifty-five years later, former editor Ita Buttrose released A Guide to Australian Etiquette featuring issues barely dreamt of in the Fifties.
Preventing "trolley rage" at the supermarket. Mobile phone etiquette. Eating Middle Eastern food. De facto relationships.
Yet Buttrose insists that while times may have changed, good manners never go out of fashion. "Good manners are about respect and are essential for civilised living," she writes.
Long live chivalry
The well-mannered man is valued as highly as ever; it's just the details that have changed. Women still want men to be gentlemen, just in a different way.
"Chivalry is not dead in our eyes," says Amberlie Cameron-Smith, a deportment instructor. "It's not a sign we can't do it for ourselves. It's about a man being a gentleman. It's just really lovely."
Simple acts of chivalry can have a dramatically pleasing effect. Something as straightforward as a man giving up his seat for a woman or allowing her to get off or on a train first usually makes both parties feel good. It puts a sprinkle of magic into everyday life.
Lizzie Wagner is a corporate image consultant who travels Australia instructing businessmen on etiquette. Wagner says chivalry can – and should be – learnt.
"It's really important in business and in life to know the behaviour skills of manners and communication," Wagner says. "The more charming, the more well mannered you are, the more influence you have and the more successful you'll be."
Golden rules
Amberlie Cameron-Smith says if men are seen to be cold or rude they are generally not well regarded in their professional world.
"There seems to be a gap in knowledge about the rules of courtesy," she explains. "For men in their mid-20s to late 30s, it seems to have been forgotten somehow... they're not sure exactly what they should be doing."
Cameron-Smith's rules of chivalrous behaviour include:
DO hold the door open for a woman.
DO wait for a woman to enter the lift first and exit before you.
DO give your seat to a woman on public transport.
DO rise slightly and sit with her when a woman joins your table.
DO open the car door for a woman and open it again when you arrive at your destination.
"It's really nice," says Cameron-Smith of the car door suggestion. "Young girls giggle about it a bit, but it's a lovely gesture."
Is chivalry still important? Or do you think it's outdated?
- executivestyle.com.au
Head to our Facebook page for more from Stuff Life & Style<div class="yk-row"> <div class="yk-horizontal-row"> <div class="yk-col4"> <div class="yk-pack p-list " > <div class="p-thumb"> <a href="javascript:void(0)" data-href="//v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMzk4NDUzMzE0MA==.html" data-videoid="XMzk4NDUzMzE0MA==" class="quickplay quickplayIcon" data-scm="20140670.rcmd.2574.video_XMzk4NDUzMzE0MA==" data-spm="a2ha1.12325017.9_4.1" data-trackinfo='[object Object]' mid="2574" > </a> <i class="bg"></i> <img class="quic lazyImg" alt="https://vthumb.ykimg.com/054101015C2A1E1AADD0169B0345A9D9?x-oss-process=image/resize,w_290/interlace,1/quality,Q_100/sharpen,100" src="//static.youku.com/v1.0.166/index/img/sprite.gif"> </div> <ul class="p-info pos-bottom"> <li class="status hover-hide"> <span class="p-time"> <i class="ibg"></i> <span>03:44</span> </span> </li> </ul> <ul class="info-list"> <li class="title"> <a class="quickplay" href="javascript:void(0)" data-href="//v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMzk4NDUzMzE0MA==.html" data-videoid="XMzk4NDUzMzE0MA==" data-scm="20140670.rcmd.2574.video_XMzk4NDUzMzE0MA==" data-spm="a2ha1.12325017.9_4.1" data-trackinfo='[object Object]' mid="2574" > [官方MV] HYNN _ Let Me Out (1 Take Live) </a> </li> <li class="subtitle"> <span> 热度 47 </span> </li> </ul> </div> </div> <div class="yk-col4"> <div class="yk-pack p-list " > <div class="p-thumb"> <a href="javascript:void(0)" data-href="//v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNDAwNDM3ODY5Mg==.html" data-videoid="XNDAwNDM3ODY5Mg==" class="quickplay quickplayIcon" data-scm="20140670.rcmd.2574.video_XNDAwNDM3ODY5Mg==" data-spm="a2ha1.12325017.9_4.2" data-trackinfo='[object Object]' mid="2574" > </a> < |
with stories this hokey, the series retained an essential charm, because of the durability of its cast and characters, and because both its head and its heart were always in the right place.
"Let That Be Your Battlefield," for example, includes a mini monologue by Kirk to the ship’s visitors warning that violence and the use of force are relics of the past and will not be tolerated aboard his ship.
"You’re new to this part of the galaxy," Kirk says, "which is governed by the United Federation of Planets. We live in peace, with full exercise of individual rights." The original was full of moments like this; it was a show that knew what it stood for, and it wore its values on its gold-ringed uniform sleeves.
Clashes of ideas and values remained part of the Star Trek franchise throughout its various incarnations.
Star Trek: The Next Generation forced its crew to face down out-of-control collectivism and capitalism, respectively, in the form of alien societies the Borg and the Ferengi. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine grappled with terrorism and religious fundamentalism. Star Trek: Voyager stranded its crew far from Federation space, challenging them to see how their ideals held up without a support network.
The movie versions of Star Trek were driven more by action spectacle than the TV shows but never lost sight of Roddenberry’s original vision. In 1991, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country gave the original crew a fitting sendoff with a story about the end of the Klingon empire that worked as a parallel to the end of the USSR and the Cold War.
Star Trek Beyond once again pits the Enterprise against those who oppose its values
But when the franchise rebooted in 2009 under director J.J. Abrams, that all went away. Abrams transformed Trek into a modern blockbuster franchise, rapid-fire and action-heavy, with little time for social and political engagement. His focus was on the characters themselves and their personal and emotional journeys, rather than on the context and ideology of the world in which they lived.
Abrams borrowed all the visual trappings of the franchise, and connected his films to the original series via a variety of fan-friendly Easter eggs — but stripped the story of its reason for being. Yes, his update was fast and frenetic and full of sci-fi spectacle in a way the series had never managed before, but it felt deeply hollow: The Abrams vision of Star Trek had no ideology except nostalgia.
It’s fitting, then, that as Star Trek Beyond opens, Captain Kirk (now played by Chris Pine) and the crew of the Enterprise feel like they’re drifting, struggling to find a purpose. Life, Kirk says in a winking nod to the 50-year-old franchise’s history, has begun to feel "episodic."
Turns out that’s not such a bad thing: The movie feels more like an episode of the original Star Trek than either of Abrams’s outings, because it once again pits the crew of the Enterprise against a foe driven by a warped ideology that runs counter to their own.
(Warning: major plot spoilers ahead.)
The villain in Beyond is an outlaw alien named Krall (Idris Elba), who sets the action in motion when he uses a fantastically destructive swarm attack to chew apart the Enterprise and strand the crew on an alien planet.
Krall, a ridge-faced alien of a type the crew have never seen before, turns out to have a vendetta against the Federation and all it stands for. "Federation is an act of war," he barks at one point, "Federation has taught you that conflict should never exist." He boasts of having grown up in a place where he "knew pain" and where "struggle made us strong — not peace, not unity."
As it turns out, Krall is actually a former soldier and Federation ship captain whose body has been warped by alien technology. He grew up fighting the wars that led to the Federation’s creation and, after struggling to fit in to a peaceful era, eventually went insane.
"You won the war!" Kirk shouts during the movie’s climactic battle. "You gave us peace!" Krall, a soldier who never bought into the Federation’s ideals, was a victim of that peace — a person left without a purpose.
Krall’s motivation and background are not as fleshed out as they could be — it’s still a big summer action movie, after all — but they’re very much in keeping with the spirit of the original series, where the villains were often mirror images of the heroes who simply took a different path, and the Federation’s particular ideas were central to the conflict.
It’s a callback to classic Trek that’s far more effective than any of Abrams’s empty nostalgia ploys, because it delivers what both Kirk and Krall are searching for: a reason for being.When implementing the Vagrant AppIndicator for Ubuntu, I really lacked the documentation on this subject. I’ve found the official documentation too sparse and having broken links (there is still one broken by the time of this writing) and the only way to proceed was to experiment a lot and dig into open-source implementations of a couple of other application indicators. So, I’ve decided to release this guide, hopefully comprehensive enough and useful. Here I show, step-by-step, how the AppIndicator could be implemented in Python. I try to keep it short and concrete, yet understandable.
Minimal set-up - the very basic indicator
The very basic AppIndicator in Python would be like this:
from gi.repository import Gtk as gtk
from gi.repository import AppIndicator3 as appindicator
APPINDICATOR_ID ='myappindicator'
def main ():
indicator = appindicator. Indicator. new ( APPINDICATOR_ID, 'whatever', appindicator. IndicatorCategory. SYSTEM_SERVICES )
indicator. set_status ( appindicator. IndicatorStatus. ACTIVE )
indicator. set_menu ( gtk. Menu ())
gtk. main ()
if __name__ == "__main__" :
main ()
Few notes on it:
First, we import Gtk and AppIndicator basic implementation. Thing to note here is that in some older documentation you may find importing gtk module - that would be an older Gtk 2, while we use Gtk+ 3 here. A most simple AppIndicator, in order to be actually displayed, would need to be activated ( set_status(...ACTIVE) ), and would need to have a menu associated with it. If any of these conditions is not met, the application will start, but there will be no AppIndicator displayed though. Thus, after instantiating the one, we set it up correctly. A note on AppIndicator constructor: it accepts a unique indicator name (so think of a name no one else would use), an icon name (more on it later, let’s put any string here for now) and an indicator category. You can dir() all categories from appindicator.IndicatorCategory to see which are available. The category typically impacts where in the system tray the AppIndicator is placed - that is, the ordering between AppIndicators. You may want to experiment with different categories to see what the result is. Lastly, gtk.main() starts the Gtk endless loop. This function call will not quit until the Gtk application ends itself. Thus, in the case of the code above - it never ends.
If you run this code now from Python REPL or, run this script
you should now see the AppIndicator in the “system tray”, with a standard “no icon” icon.
This is our basic starting point. Let’s start improving it now.
Can’t stop?
First thing you’ll notice - there is no “normal” way to stop the AppIndicator. We didn’t add a call to stop the Gtk main loop anywhere, and even Ctrl+C doesn’t really work. For now, the only thing you can do is to find the id of the process and kill it. Or, simply close the terminal you’ve started the application in.
First quick win would be to fix “Ctrl+C” behavior. Add:
import signal
and the following line into the main method, anywhere before the Gtk main loop is started:
signal. signal ( signal. SIGINT, signal. SIG_DFL )
This will make the AppIndicator reacting normally to the “Ctrl+C” in the terminal - at least it can be stopped now.
This sets the handler for “INT” signal processing - the one issued by the OS when “Ctrl+C” is typed. The handler we assign to it is the “default” handler, which, in case of the interrupt signal, is to stop execution.
However, for the end user we would certainly want to add a more convenient way to stop it - which would typically be a dedicated menu item in the indicator’s main menu. Let’s add it now.
Add menu items
AppIndicator is built on Gtk, so there is nothing specific in the way you create a menu. Gtk+ 3 has a great tutorial. Below is the example of the menu for out AppIndicator. Let’s add “Quit” menu item.
Add two new functions:
def build_menu ():
menu = gtk. Menu ()
item_quit = gtk. MenuItem ( 'Quit' )
item_quit. connect ( 'activate', quit )
menu. append ( item_quit )
menu. show_all ()
return menu
def quit ( source ):
gtk. main_quit ()
And, replace indicator.set_menu(gtk.Menu()) with indicator.set_menu(build_menu()), to assign the new menu to an indicator. Not digging into Gtk details, few notes on this however:
Do not forget to call menu.show_all(), or the menu will not contain the new items added to it. Action listener assigned to the menu item receives a single argument - an event source, which in this case is the menu item itself. We don’t need to use it in this implementation so could have replaced the argument name with _. Calling gtk.main_quit() stops the Gtk main loop, effectively making the previous call to gtk.main() to return, and thus, our main() function to return and application to stop.
Now if you run it and click on an indicator icon - there will be “Quit” menu item, which, when clicked should stop the indicator application.
But, the indicator itself still looks quite ugly. Let’s find a better icon for it now.
Custom icon
There are two options for an indicator icon: use one from the icon library installed with the Gtk, or, use a custom one. To use the icon from the Gtk library, simply, give its name to the AppIndicator constructor. For example, following change:
indicator = appindicator. Indicator. new ( APPINDICATOR_ID, gtk. STOCK_INFO, appindicator. IndicatorCategory. SYSTEM_SERVICES )
Will result in:
Prebuilt Gtk icons depend on the Gtk distribution, but there are few which normally present in every distribution. You can search the documentation to find the list of all icons, like this one for example.
Although probably little better than “no icon” icon, yet this doesn’t look unique. Alternatively, you can use a custom image as an icon. I think that the best choice for an icon is the SVG image, as it will scale nicely if the UI theme requires system tray icons to have size different from the one you’ve tested on.
Create your icon, or download one, or use this sample icon I’ve created for this guide. Save it somewhere on disk, and use the path to an icon instead of the icon name when constructing the AppIndicator. Path should be absolute, so, if you save an icon into a file sample_icon.svg in the same directory as the AppIndicator python program, update the call to the constructor as follows:
import os
#...
indicator = appindicator. Indicator. new ( APPINDICATOR_ID, os. path. abspath ('sample_icon.svg' ), appindicator. IndicatorCategory. SYSTEM_SERVICES )
Run, and now it should look like this:
Nice! Note that an icon can also be changed while the indicator is running, with indicator.set_icon() method.
Showing balloon (bubble) notifications
With all above we have now a ready-to-use base for an AppIndicator. Now, the AppIndicator doesn’t do that much yet. As an example, let’s add some behavior to it - for example, give us some nerdy Chuck Norris joke from The Internet Chuck Norris Database. We would display jokes in a balloon notification typically popping out in upper right corner of the screen in Ubuntu.
We would need 3 elements here. First, let’s add a function to fetch a joke:
import json
from urllib2 import Request, urlopen, URLError
#...
def fetch_joke ():
request = Request ( 'http://api.icndb.com/jokes/random?limitTo=[nerdy]' )
response = urlopen ( request )
joke = json. loads ( response. read ())[ 'value' ][ 'joke' ]
return joke
now, add a menu item and an action listener:
def build_menu ():
#...
item_joke = gtk. MenuItem ( 'Joke' )
item_joke. connect ( 'activate', joke )
menu. append ( item_joke )
#...
def joke ( _ ):
#...
and, finally, show the joke in a balloon notification:
from gi.repository import Notify as notify
#...
def main ():
#...
notify. init ( APPINDICATOR_ID )
gtk. main ()
#...
def joke ( _ ):
notify. Notification. new ( "<b>Joke</b>", fetch_joke (), None ). show ()
def quit ( _ ):
notify. uninit ()
gtk. main_quit ()
Again, few notes:
To show notifications we use notify API which we first import and initialize with the unique application name - in our case could be the same as the one used for an indicator itself. To show a notification we construct a Notification instance and show() it. There is no 3rd argument in the code above, which is a path to an icon. If you pass None as above, there will simply no icon. Be nice to Gtk and uninit() notify API before quitting the application
Now, if you run the AppIndicator at this point, clicking on its “Joke” menu should display a fun balloon notification:
That’s it! I take no more your attention, and hope this sample AppIndicator could serve a good base for a new indicator implementation ;)
You can find here the source code of this implementation and use it as you want (consider it as MIT). Or you can also check out the Vagrant AppIndicator for Ubuntu as a more real-world example which also provides theming support (dark & light UI themes) and a way to distribute an AppIndicator in a Python package.By John Bolton
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) sent its aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, through the Taiwan Strait early this month, at least in part responding to President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) telephone conversation congratulating US president-elect Donald Trump.
That is Beijing’s style: Make an unacceptable long-distance telephone call, and an aircraft carrier shows up in your backyard. It is akin to proclaiming the South China Sea a Chinese province and constructing islands in international waters to house military bases; to declaring a provocative air defense identification zone in the East China Sea; and to seizing Singaporean military equipment recently transiting Hong Kong after annual military exercises in Taiwan.
It is high time to revisit the “one China policy” and decide what the US thinks it means, 45 years after the Shanghai Communique. Trump has said the policy is negotiable. Negotiation should not mean Washington gives and Beijing takes. The US needs strategically coherent priorities reflecting not 1972, but 2017, encompassing more than trade and monetary policy, and specifically including Taiwan. Let us see how an increasingly belligerent China responds.
Constantly chanting “one China policy” is a favorite Beijing negotiating tactic: Pick a benign-sounding slogan; persuade foreign interlocutors to accept it; and then redefine it to Beijing’s satisfaction, dragging the unwary foreigners along for the ride.
To Beijing, “one China” means the PRC is the sole legitimate “China,” as sloganized in “the three noes”: no Taiwanese independence; no two Chinas; no one China, one Taiwan. For too long, the US has unthinkingly succumbed to this wordplay.
However, even in the Shanghai Communique, Washington merely “acknowledges” that “all Chinese” believe “there is but one China,” of which Taiwan is part.
Taiwanese public opinion surveys for decades have shown fewer and fewer citizens describing themselves as “Chinese.” Who allowed them to change their minds?
Washington has always said unification had to come peacefully and by mutual agreement. Mutual agreement has not come in 67 years and will not in any foreseeable future, especially given China’s increasingly brutal reinterpretation of another slogan — “one country, two systems” in Hong Kong.
Beijing and its acolytes expected that Taiwan would simply collapse. It has not. Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) 1949 retreat was not a temporary respite before final surrender. Neither the Shanghai Communique nor former US president Jimmy Carter’s 1978 derecognition of the Republic of China persuaded Taiwan to go gentle into that good night — especially after the US Congress enacted the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979.
Eventually Taiwan became a democracy, with the 1996 popular election of Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) as president, the peaceful, democratic transfer of power to the opposition party in 2000, and further peaceful transfers in 2008 and last year. So inconsiderate of those free-thinking Taiwanese.
What should the US do now? In addition to a diplomatic ladder of escalation, it can take concrete steps helpful to US interests. Here is one prompted by China’s recent impoundment of Singapore’s military equipment. Spoiler alert: Beijing will not approve.
The US could enhance its East Asia military posture by increasing military sales to Taiwan and by again stationing military personnel and assets there, probably negotiating favorable financial terms. It need not approximate former US general Douglas MacArthur’s image of Taiwan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier,” or renegotiate a mutual defense treaty.Turkish PM: Shaking hands with al-Assad, Hitler is the same
ANKARA
AA Photo
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu on March 17 rubbished suggestions that talks should be held with President Bashar al-Assad, saying that negotiating with the Syrian leader would be no different from shaking hands with Nazi tyrant Adolf Hitler.U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said in a weekend interview that Washington would have to talk with al-Assad eventually if peace was to be forged, in comments that drew a strong rebuke from Ankara, which said there was nothing to negotiate with al-Assad.“If you sit down and shake hands with al-Assad after all those massacres and despite the chemical weapons that you [the United States] declared a red line, then your hand will be never be erased from history,” Davutoğlu told his ruling Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) lawmakers in parliament.He drew parallels between the Syrian president and Nazi leader Hitler, late Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, and Iraq’s toppled dictator Saddam Hussein.“It makes no difference to shake hands with Hitler or Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic, Saddam, or al-Assad,” he said.However, just a few hours after Davutoğlu’s statement, the U.S. Embassy to Turkey issued a statement through its Twitter account, underlining that the policies of the United States government have been consistent.“The [U.S. government] has been consistent. The only solution to the crisis in Syria is a political settlement in keeping with Geneva principles and reaching that political settlement will involve negotiation at some point with representatives of the regime,” the Embassy said in response to Davutoğlu’s accusations that Washington has violated its own red lines in Syria.U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki on March 16 moved to clarify Kerry’s words, saying that al-Assad would never be part of peace negotiations.Psaki’s statement was welcomed by the Turkish prime minister the next day.“We welcome that denial. But I call on all Western public opinion, Europe and America. You will have no sincerity if you dare to cooperate with the Syrian or Egyptian regimes by ignoring the democratic demands of the Syrian and Egyptian peoples while at the same time considering democracy and human rights as natural rights when it comes to Europe,” Davutoğlu said.He also reiterated Turkey’s full support for the Syrian National Council’s (SNC) efforts to oust Bashar al-Assad, underlining that it was important to keep the SNC powerful against Damascus. “The Syrian people have been left between the terror of the al-Assad regime and DAESH [the Arabic acronym of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant],” he said.Happy Fourth of July everyone! With all the fireworks, hot dog eating, beer guzzling and all things that make America great going on (that is in no way, shape, or form a Trump endorsement) take a second to check out this week's cut list.
The All-Star Break is right around the corner so the season is basically half over at this point. If you are a fringe playoff team in your league, now is the time to make some moves.
Editor's Note: RotoBaller has the best Premium MLB Subscription for only $1.99 per week. We have all the tools to help win your seasonal and daily leagues: Hitter & Pitcher Streamers, Matchup Ratings for every player, Sleeper Surgers for AVG, HR, Ks, PLUS Daily DFS Cheat Sheets, Lineup Picks, Expert Lineups, Stacks and Avoids.
Week 14 Players to Consider Cutting
1) James Paxton (SEA, SP)
Droppable in 12 Team Leagues
James Paxton got fantasy players excited with his improved velocity and strikeout totals. However, it looks like the league has adjusted to him and it hasn't been pretty. The WHIP over his last four starts has been 1.50 or higher in each outing. Paxton is giving up a lot of hard contact, and, given his propensity to put runners on base, that's a recipe for disaster. If you want to roll the dice on his potential be my guest, but I would pursue other SP options.
2) Joc Pederson (LAD, OF)
Droppable in 12 Team Redraft Leagues
Just when Pederson had a tiny bit of momentum going, he suffers a sprained AC joint. The Dodgers are a mess thanks to this injury bug. Even before the injury though, Pederson was still having an underwhelming season considering the potential he has. Once hyped as a potential 30-30 player, he was on pace for around 25 dingers and 8 steals. Not that those aren't respectable numbers, but it makes him just a slightly above average talent, especially when the weak average is considered. He's still very young, so while he's not yet a bust, in redraft leagues you shouldn't hesitate to pull the trigger if someone better is out there.
3) Fernando Rodney (MIA, RP)
Droppable in All Leagues
As good of a move as it is for the Marlins in real life, Rodney's fantasy value has been absolutely crippled. He's now the eighth inning guy behind A.J. Ramos, which still gives him value in holds leagues. However he's no longer a closer, meaning he can be kicked to the fantasy curb in most formats. Naturally though, he should be kept on watch lists just in case anything should happen to Ramos.
More Options: C.C. Sabathia, Denard Span, Archie Bradley, Matt Adams, Cody Reed, Kevin Pillar, Gio Gonzalez
Hot Seat for Getting Cut
So these are some guys you shouldn't cut just yet, but who would be the first to go on most rosters if you need to add someone else.
1) Michael Saunders (TOR, OF)
Saunders has been very good this season, but is currently in a bit of a funk. He showed some signs of life on Saturday, so the seat is a little less hot at the moment. However, outside of his three-homer barrage, Saunders hasn't done much of anything lately for the Blue Jays. The peripherals are still there fortunately, as he's hitting the ball very hard and the OBP is impressive. The reality was though that he was going to regress a bit with his high K rate and low BB%. That being said, there is still upside here in a potent lineup. He just needs to get going again.
2) Aaron Nola (PHI, SP)
This won't be a popular entry, but let's face it; Nola has been awful lately. His last five starts have been extremely underwhelming and his season ERA is up to 4.69. One of the positives here is that he is still missing bats, but the scary thing here is that no one seems to know what's wrong with him. The seat is pretty hot for him at the moment, because if he doesn't get things going over his next few starts it may be time to cut him in redrafts. In keepers, be patient with this future stud.
3) A.J. Reed (HOU, 1B)
You don't want to cut him just yet after likely having stashed him for most of this season. This goes double in keepers and dynasties where Reed's future is still very bright. He hasn't found success early on in his major league tenure though, and could be in danger of getting sent back down if he can't get into a groove. The fact that Alex Bregman is knocking on the door could also force the Astros' hand in terms of shuffling their infield around. Reed did connect for his first big league homer, so maybe that gets him going. He is on a lukewarm seat at the moment until he starts hitting.
4) Jung Ho Kang (PIT, SS/3B)
I was gung ho about Jung Ho this season because of his power potential at two premium positions. Early on the rewards were pretty impressive too. Over the last month though, his production has tapered off dramatically, and he is also getting frequent rest days. Right now he and Starlin Castro, who has been featured on this list before, are essentially the same player. A low number of runs scored, decent power, but underwhelming average and RBI. He's a better player than Castro and is worth hanging onto in deeper/keeper leagues. In shallow redrafts though, I wouldn't blame you if you dropped him and just rolled with the hot hand.
Reverse Jinx - Brighter Days Ahead?
Danny Valencia (OAK, 3B/OF):
My last reverse jinx ended up being more of a regular jinx as Lorenzo Cain ended up on the DL. Hopefully it goes better for Valencia. He's been great this season, as he's actually hit well against both lefties and righties. Unfortunately he's cooled off a bit lately, as he hasn't recorded a homer or RBI since June 25th. I wouldn't worry too much though, he should get back on track soon. He's still making hard contact and his BABIP doesn't suggest drastic regression either. Reverse jinx activate!
Graveyard - Previously Disposed Of
Addison Russell, Jaime Garcia, Joe Panik, Travis Shaw, Tommy Joseph, Jhonny Peralta, Dan Straily, Trayce Thompson, Trevor Rosenthal, Michael Conforto
Zombies - Resurrected and Living Well
Albert Pujols (LAA, 1B)
This one is a bit of a stretch, because I featured him on the Hot Seat earlier in the season. However the Machine is alive and well. Pujols' average is actually up to a respectable.251 on the season with 15 homers and 55 RBI. He's on pace for around 30 homers and 100 RBI. Nothing to scoff at all, especially given that it's coming from a 36 year old player.
Live Expert Q&A Chats - Every Weekday @ 1 PM and 6 PM EST (DFS)
Fantasy Baseball Chat RoomUser:LessHeard vanU - removal of extended privileges
Resolved Resolved
I should be grateful if my Oversight and Administration privileges, and any others extending from granting of same, would be removed promptly (no need to drop everything, I have not and am not planning to do anything with them). I would be further grateful that confirmation is provided to my talkpage, since I still get notification of such updates. Thank you. LessHeard vanU (talk) 20:54, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
Thank you for your efforts in both capacities. I have removed your admin rights and made a request on meta for a Steward to do the same for oversight. WJBscribe (talk) 22:02, 9 July 2012 (UTC) I have removed the oversight-userright following meta request. Regards. --MarcoAurelio (talk) 22:07, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
best wishes, Mark. Br'er Rabbit (talk) (Jack) 22:13, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
Thank you.LessHeard vanU (talk) 12:34, 10 July 2012 (UTC)
Usurpations
Hello. Please, could somebody check the Wikipedia:Changing username/Usurpations page? Some requests are just one step from approval. Thanks --Mates245 (talk) 10:19, 10 July 2012 (UTC)
Desysop request (2)
Could I please have the admin bit removed from my account? I've found myself using the tools less and less recently, mostly because I have gone back to adding information and writing articles and would prefer to keep it simple like it used to be. Maybe one day I might like the bit back, but for now I'm just going to get on with some writing! Thanks, BigDom 21:12, 10 July 2012 (UTC)
Done, restored some of the other bits and pieces that trusted users should always have. Thanks for all your good work, don't be a stranger. The Rambling Man (talk) 21:18, 10 July 2012 (UTC) I'm not going anywhere, just concentrating on writing and adding content since that's always what I've enjoyed most. Big Dom 21:22, 10 July 2012 (UTC) Good call. The Rambling Man (talk) 21:27, 10 July 2012 (UTC)
Resolved Resolved
Just noticed that the next round of inactive administrators were scheduled to be removed on July 10.
Regards, — Moe ε 12:16, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
Done. With some sadness at deminishing admin numbers. WJBscribe (talk) 23:58, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
Recover password without e-mail
Hello, I am user HappyWheeler4Life. I want to recover my password without using my email address, which I did not enter during registration. Can you help? 75.49.219.222 (talk) 13:35, 13 July 2012 (UTC)IP address (insert ip here)
Officially, no. Is there a user in good standing with whom you have exchanged email in the past? --Dweller (talk) 13:49, 13 July 2012 (UTC) Another problem, I don't HAVE an email address. 75.49.219.222 (talk) 16:59, 13 July 2012 (UTC)IP address (insert ip here) You own a website, but don't have an email address? Curious. Nonetheless, I have an easy solution. User:HappyWheeler4Life has very few edits to Wikipedia. Please feel free to discard that account and create a new one. I suggest that before you do, you create an email address, in case you forget your password again. You also need to read this article before introducing any more material from your own website into Wikipedia. --Dweller (talk) 18:12, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
Re-sysop request
I voluntarily gave up my bit. Please re-sysop me. Thanks.--Chaser (talk) 20:16, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
Done, welcome back, and thanks for the info. The Rambling Man (talk) 21:08, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks. I'm going to go delete the main page now. ;-) --Chaser (talk) 23:42, 13 July 2012 (UTC) Sadly, it is not possible anymore ;-) EngineerFromVega ★ 05:31, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
Can I please be re-sysopped as well? I've been in the habit of not logging in lately, but I'm still active. --LDC (talk) 15:47, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
Done --Dweller (talk) 15:55, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
Flipcart.com
Dear sirs.I have ordered from this website two days ago.My order was a Himalayan Face wash.my order id is 23754089.I have not received my order yet.no one is taking phone there.Please do something quickly as I don't want to lose my money.Thanks.my phone number <redacted>.my name :<redacted>.
I have lost access to my account
Hi, my username is Cicero in utero. I cannot remember my password, nor can I remember the e-mail account that was associated with my Wikipedia account. I have checked all three of my main e-mail accounts and cannot find the password reminder I requested, leaving me to believe that the e-mail account I had associated with my username was an old Hotmail account I have since deleted. Is there anything I can do? I am really married to my odd handle and don't want to have to change it. Please help! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.234.244.26 (talk) 21:55, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
I'm sorry, but we do not have any way to change your password for you, or access it. Without some sort of means to confirm you are the account owner, we also can't allow you to usurp it. What you could do instead is create a new account called "Cicero in utero II", and leave a note on your (new) userpage stating that you used to be User:Cicero in utero. You'll probably need to request the account at tools:~acc due to the anti-spoofing system; make sure to explain what happened so they don't decline the request. A link here wouldn't hurt. Hersfold (t/a/c) 03:11, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
Heads up - Perth case
Bureaucrats-- this is just a heads up on the Perth arbitration case which is set to close tomorrow. There will be at least one desysop in the decision. Once the decision is formally posted, I'll leave an additional note here on which remedies passed.
Best regards, Lord Roem (talk) 15:06, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
I am deeply troubled by the proposal to desysop Gnangarra and have posted comments on the proposed decision talkpage to that effect. I hope the Arbs supporting that remedy will reconsider. If they do not, I don't think I could in conscience action a remedy I so strongly disagree with. I urge other bureaucrats who come to consider whether to action that part of the decision to reflect on the fact that we are all volunteers, and none of us are required to do anything. WJBscribe (talk) 20:39, 17 July 2012 (UTC) I agree it is a bad decision and I think Arbcom is making a mistake if they desysop Gnangarra. That said, I don't think they have deviated so far from policy (obvious math error, blatant corruption, etc.) that civil disobedience is warranted. I believe I'm neutral to the parties (I haven't looked at the case in detail yet), but assuming I am, I'll reluctantly perform the desysop when the time comes. MBisanz talk 00:41, 18 July 2012 (UTC) I think that's disappointing. In WJBscribe's position I'd also refuse to do the desysop, and I can't understand the motivation of anyone who wouldn't. Malleus Fatuorum 01:42, 18 July 2012 (UTC)
Please note that the outcome of the case may be changing in part as a result of additional voting. (Not commenting on any other issue.) Newyorkbrad (talk) 00:49, 18 July 2012 (UTC)
Pursuant to Remedy 3 of the final decision in the Perth case, User:Kwamikagami is to be desysopped. He may "regain the admin toolkit through a fresh request for adminship".
For the Arbitration Committee,
Lord Roem (talk) 14:53, 18 July 2012 (UTC)
I did it. Secretlondon (talk) 15:00, 18 July 2012 (UTC)
Claiming unused/abandoned namesake for unified login
I'm trying to help User:Hanauma on the German wiki to get a unified login, and there's a conflict with an account with the same name in the English wiki, created in 2006 and never used. Is it possible to claim this account? Thanks! --22:49, 19 July 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sarefo (talk • contribs)
Resolved: Resolved: Maxim (talk) 22:20, 21 July 2012 (UTC) Renaming is a courtesy granted to users in good standing, and especially given what has happened previously with the vanishing, there is no valid case here for a rename. Per this reasoning, and further comments by other bureaucrats below, this request is denied.22:20, 21 July 2012 (UTC)
Hello. ScienceApologist (talk · contribs) has made a request to bureaucrats on their talk page regarding the name of their account. They have asked for it to be posted here. You can find further details at User_talk:ScienceApologist#Please_request_this_of_a_bureacrat. Regards, Steven Zhang Get involved in DR! 21:17, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks for the note Steve. I know SA in real life, so I'm recused. But even if I was not recused, I would be inclined not to grant this request for the same reasons EdJohnston expresses on that page. MBisanz talk 15:16, 21 July 2012 (UTC) (Disclosure: I unvanished him.) Given his comments that he will continue editing, his request inherently cannot be granted. As EdJohn |
Francis Carmont impressed observers in his most recent fight. The performance has earned him a bout in his hometown.
Carmont and "Filthy" Tom Lawlor have agreed to meet in a middleweight matchup at UFC 154 on Nov. 17 at Montreal's Bell Centre, according to MMA Fighting's Ariel Helwani.
Carmont, who trains at Montreal's Tri Star Gym, is 3-0 in the UFC. His most recent victory was a strong second-round submission win over Karlos Veloma. Carmont has won eight straight fights, seven via finish inside of two rounds.
Lawlor (8-4, 1 no-contest), a native of Fall River, MA, is also coming off a highlight-reel performance. He earned knockout of the night honors for his 50-second finish of veteran Jason MacDonald on May 15. Lawlor has won two of his past three fights.
UFC 154 is expected to be headlined by the return of Carmont's Tri Star teammate, welterweight champion Georges St-Pierre, in a match with interim champion Carlos Condit.HOUSTON, TX/24-7PressRelease/ -- Independence Day is not the only important fourth this July. Hot on the heels of the holiday is the fourth annual International Space Station (ISS) Research and Development Conference, which takes place in Boston July 7 to 9. Launching this year's event is a keynote speaker who lives up to one of the core conference themes of gaining a new perspective: Elon Musk, chief executive officer and lead designer at SpaceX.
"To welcome this diverse set of new and existing ISS users we were looking for a keynote speaker whose name is synonymous with the future of innovation," said Brian Talbot, marketing and communications director with the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS). "Elon Musk is an ideal fit for this role. Elon's passion for discovery and exploration appeals to business leaders, research and development professionals, and the space community."
Musk was at the helm in designing the Dragon spacecraft--the first commercial vehicle to berth with the space station. SpaceX continues to transport resupply missions to and from the space station multiple times each year, the latest launch having departed on Jan. 10. NASA recently selected SpaceX, along with Boeing, to finalize their vehicle designs capable of ferrying a commercial crew to the station.
The multidisciplinary space station's array of research areas for new and potential users is reflected in the span of topics for the conference's call for papers. This includes biology and medicine, human health in space, commercialization and nongovernment utilization, materials development, plant science, remote sensing/Earth and space observation, energy, STEM education, and technology development and demonstration. The deadline for submissions of abstracts is March 2.
During the conference, attendees will have a chance to build connections, talk innovation with peers and experts, and grow their current knowledge of microgravity research. While visiting sessions at the Boston Marriott Copley Hotel, they also can learn about the latest results, upcoming investigations in orbit, and opportunities to get their ideas from concept to launch.
"The focus of this year's conference is bringing a new population of users to the space station by showing how the orbiting laboratory can be a valuable part of their future," said Christian Maender, NASA's ISS National Laboratory Office deputy manager for commercial utilization at the agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston. "Now in its fourth year, the conference will explore a wide range of important areas of research and development that leverage the station as an incredible platform for learning, discovery and innovation."
Registration for the ISS Research and Development Conference is now open and additional speakers will be announced in the coming weeks. The event is organized by the American Astronautical Society and CASIS in cooperation with NASA. The annual meeting is the only U.S. conference to detail the space station's many capabilities along with an array of research and technology development.
This July the ISS Research and Development Conference will be a fourth to remember, complete with participants interested and already successful in launching more than just fireworks towards the heavens. While quite the impressive display of sparks with each take-off, it's the benefits from space station research and technology that will keep the world watching.Buy Photo Detroit issued 913 permits for new construction last year, up from 806 the previous year, SEMCOG says. (Photo: Daniel Mears / The Detroit News)Buy Photo Story Highlights The last time Detroit wasn’t a Top 20 city by population was the 1850 census, when it ranked 30th.
Detroit’s population was 677,116 as of last summer, down 3,107 residents from the previous year.
Metro Detroit is 14th among the nation’s metropolitan areas, with a population of 4.3 million.
Metro Detroit’s fastest growing areas were Lyon Township, Utica, Oakland and Macomb townships.
For the first time since before the Civil War, Detroit is not among the nation’s 20 most populous cities.
Detroit’s population was 677,116 as of last summer, a loss of 3,107 residents from the previous year, according to estimates released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau.
That’s the smallest decline in decades, but it was enough to drop the city to 21st in the nation, surpassed by Seattle, Denver and El Paso, Texas.
The last time Detroit wasn’t a Top 20 city by population was the 1850 census, when it ranked 30th, according to the bureau. In 1940, it was the fourth largest city behind New York, Chicago and Philadelphia.
“A lot of Detroiters really think of themselves as being in one of the country’s biggest cities, and that’s just not true anymore,” said Kevin Boyle, an author and history professor at Northwestern University, who grew up in Detroit.
“It’s just a fundamentally different place than it was a half century ago.”
The slide is a vivid reminder of shrinking clout in state and national politics and programs. At the city’s peak of 1.8 million people in 1950, it held 29 percent of the state’s population. Today, it’s less than 7 percent.
Local experts downplay the significance of rankings, saying the focus needs to be on improving quality of life and educational and employment opportunities for those who remain.
The good news is Detroit’s decline is the smallest in decades. The previous year’s population loss was 9,727. And the decline is far lower than the annual average drop of about 24,000 that Detroit saw in the 2000s.
“That’s pretty positive,” said Xuan Liu, manager of research and data analysis for the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments. “It is a reflection of both the improvements we’ve seen in the city and the changing demographic trends. There are new jobs and more development.”
But the loss still was the largest in the country, passing Chicago’s drop of 2,890. The Midwest has lost population with the South and West gaining. The 11 fastest growing cities were in Texas, Utah, California, Arizona, Iowa, Colorado, Tennessee, Florida and South Carolina.
Metro Detroit still ranks14th among the nation’s metropolitan areas, with its population of 4.3 million in the six counties of Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, Livingston, St. Clair and Lapeer.
Kurt Metzger, a demographer and director emeritus of Data Driven Detroit, predicts Detroit will see a population increase in 2016, primarily because of the pace of new development and other quality of life improvements.
“We are almost out of the woods,” Metzger said.
He noted many poor residents who may want to move have fewer options because of rising housing prices in the inner-ring suburbs.
Mayor Mike Duggan said city data shows population growth this year, primarily on the city’s west and southwest sides, along with downtown and Midtown.
“We are at a real historic point,” said Duggan, who has said his success as mayor will be measured by whether he can attract residents. “I do believe in the last year we have started to grow.”
The city issued 913 permits for new construction last year, up from 806 the previous year, according to the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments. And about 1,400 formerly vacant houses are now occupied under sales by the Detroit Land Bank since May 2014, city officials said.
The fastest growing communities in Metro Detroit continued to be Lyon Township, at 18,114; Utica, 4,942; Oakland Township, 19,154; and Macomb Township, at 86,973.
Communities on the state’s west side reported the largest growth, led by Allendale Township, 22,937 and Grand Rapids, 195,097.
“It was again townships leading the charge,” Metzger said.
Lyon Township lead the area with 343 permits issued for single-family homes in 2015, according to SEMCOG.
“During the economic downturn developers couldn’t afford to build for what properties were selling for,” said Realtor James Wolfe, who sells homes in the area. “Now that the market has come back, buyers are looking for new construction.”
Macomb Township supervisor Janet Dunn said builders are developing luxury houses, subdivisions and condominiums that are attracting families from across Metro Detroit.
Dunn said most of the lots in Macomb Township that were vacant during the economic recession are now occupied.
“I only anticipate getting more and more residents... probably putting us in the Top 3 (fastest growing towns),” Dunn said.
Other communities that lost the most population include Flint, at 98,310; Saginaw, at 49,347, and Dearborn, at 95,171.
Experts cautioned the numbers are estimates. The census uses new housing permits and demolitions, and that may not mirror Detroit’s population changes, they say. SEMCOG has done its own analysis and pegs Detroit’s population at 656,000.
Lyke Thompson, director of Wayne State University’s Center for Urban Studies, said it is a crucial time for Detroit and it’s important for leaders to focus on creating jobs and improving education.
“It could tip either way depending on what policymakers actually do,” Thompson said.
cmacdonald@detroitnews.com
Staff Writers Mike Martindale and Nicquel Terry contributed.
Read or Share this story: http://detne.ws/1ToJDZgContinuing our series of interviews with users of Prometheus, Laurent COMMARIEU from iAdvize talks about how they replaced their legacy Nagios and Centreon monitoring with Prometheus.
Can you tell us about iAdvize does?
I am Laurent COMMARIEU, a system engineer at iAdvize. I work within the 60 person R&D department in a team of 5 system engineers. Our job is mainly to ensure that applications, services and the underlying system are up and running. We are working with developers to ensure the easiest path for their code to production, and provide the necessary feedback at every step. That’s where monitoring is important.
iAdvize is a full stack conversational commerce platform. We provide an easy way for a brand to centrally interact with their customers, no matter the communication channel (chat, call, video, Facebook Pages, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, SMS, etc...). Our customers work in ecommerce, banks, travel, fashion, etc. in 40 countries. We are an international company of 200 employees with offices in France, UK, Germany, Spain and Italy. We raised $16 Million in 2015.
What was your pre-Prometheus monitoring experience?
I joined iAdvize in February 2016. Previously I worked in companies specialized in network and application monitoring. We were working with opensource software like Nagios, Cacti, Centreon, Zabbix, OpenNMS, etc. and some non-free ones like HP NNM, IBM Netcool suite, BMC Patrol, etc.
iAdvize used to delegate monitoring to an external provider. They ensured 24/7 monitoring using Nagios and Centreon. This toolset was working fine with the legacy static architecture (barebone servers, no VMs, no containers). To complete this monitoring stack, we also use Pingdom.
With the moving our monolithic application towards a Microservices architecture (using Docker) and our will to move our current workload to an infrastructure cloud provider we needed to have more control and flexibility on monitoring. At the same time, iAdvize recruited 3 people, which grew the infrastructure team from 2 to 5. With the old system it took at least a few days or a week to add some new metrics into Centreon and had a real cost (time and money).
Why did you decide to look at Prometheus?
We knew Nagios and the like were not a good choice. Prometheus was the rising star at the time and we decided to PoC it. Sensu was also on the list at the beginning but Prometheus seemed more promising for our use cases.
We needed something able to integrate with Consul, our service discovery system. Our micro services already had a /health route; adding a /metrics endpoint was simple. For about every tool we used, an exporter was available (MySQL, Memcached, Redis, nginx, FPM, etc.).
On paper it looked good.
How did you transition?
First of all, we had to convince the developers team (40 people) that Prometheus was the right tool for the job and that they had to add an exporter to their apps. So we did a little demo on RabbitMQ, we installed a RabbitMQ exporter and built a simple Grafana dashboard to display usage metrics to developers. A Python script was written to create some queue and publish/consume messages.
They were quite impressed to see queues and the messages appear in real time. Before that, developers didn't have access to any monitoring data. Centreon was restricted by our infrastructure provider. Today, Grafana is available to everyone at iAdvize, using the Google Auth integration to authenticate. There are 78 active accounts on it (from dev teams to the CEO).
After we started monitoring existing services with Consul and cAdvisor, we monitored the actual presence of the containers. They were monitored using Pingdom checks but it wasn't enough.
We developed a few custom exporters in Go to scrape some business metrics from our databases (MySQL and Redis).
Soon enough, we were able to replace all the legacy monitoring by Prometheus.
What improvements have you seen since switching?
Business metrics became very popular and during sales periods everyone is connected to Grafana to see if we're gonna beat some record. We monitor the number of simultaneous conversations, routing errors, agents connected, the number of visitors loading the iAdvize tag, calls on our API gateway, etc.
We worked for a month to optimize our MySQL servers with analysis based on the Newrelic exporter and Percona dashboard for grafana. It was a real success, allowing us to discover inefficiencies and perform optimisations that cut database size by 45% and peak latency by 75%.
There are a lot to say. We know if a AMQP queue has no consumer or if it is Filling abnormally. We know when a container restarts.
The visibility is just awesome.
That was just for the legacy platform.
More and more micro services are going to be deployed in the cloud and Prometheus is used to monitor them. We are using Consul to register the services and Prometheus to discover the metrics routes. Everything works like a charm and we are able to build a Grafana dashboard with a lot of critical business, application and system metrics.
We are building a scalable architecture to deploy our services with Nomad. Nomad registers healthy services in Consul and with some tags relabeling we are able to filter those with a tag name "metrics=true". It offers to us a huge gain in time to deploy the monitoring. We have nothing to do ^^.
We also use the EC2 service discovery. It's really useful with auto-scaling groups. We scale and recycle instances and it's already monitored. No more waiting for our external infrastructure provider to notice what happens in production.
We use alertmanager to send some alerts by SMS or in to our Flowdock.
What do you think the future holds for iAdvize and Prometheus?
We are waiting for a simple way to add a long term scalable storage for our capacity planning.
We have a dream that one day, our auto-scaling will be triggered by Prometheus alerting. We want to build an autonomous system base on response time and business metrics.
I used to work with Netuitive, it had a great anomaly detection feature with automatic correlation. It would be great to have some in Prometheus.The videos O’Keefe made led to the collapse of ACORN. O'Keefe agrees to fork over $100K
Conservative activist James O’Keefe has agreed to pay $100,000 to a former employee of ACORN in National City, Calif., in order to settle a lawsuit, according to media reports and federal court documents.
In the documents, O’Keefe says he “regrets any pain” he caused Juan Carlos Vera, who was surreptitiously interviewed by O’Keefe in August 2009, according to the Los Angeles Times. The video appears to show Vera agreeing to help O’Keefe and another activist, Hannah Giles, smuggle young girls into the Untied States to work as prostitutes. O’Keefe also admitted in the settlement he didn’t know Vera had contracted police after their conversation when he distributed the video.
Story Continued Below
The lawsuit argued O’Keefe broke a state law barring the secret recording of someone’s voice or image. Jerry Brown, then California’s attorney general and now its governor, gave O’Keefe and Giles immunity from criminal prosecution in exchange for turning over unedited videos made in National City, Los Angeles and San Bernardino.
( PHOTOS: The GOP, Fox political purge)
An attorney for O’Keefe said the payment was a “nuisance settlement.” O’Keefe “has a full career ahead as a talented investigative journalist,” Michael Madigan told the paper.
The videos O’Keefe made led to the collapse of ACORN, which worked in low-income communities to register voters and organize campaigns. The group had become a conservative bete noire because of allegations of voter fraud.
But O’Keefe was criticized for deceptively editing the videos. Most notably, he filmed himself walking into the offices while wearing a ’70s-style pimp outfit, but actually met with ACORN employees while wearing a suit and tie.
The settlement was first reported by Wonkette.This article is over 1 year old
State-owned media reports missile was brought down north of King Khaled airport near Riyadh
Saudi Arabia intercepted and destroyed a “ballistic missile” north-east of the capital, Riyadh, on Saturday after it was launched from Yemen, Saudi state media reported. “Saudi air defence intercepts ballistic missile northeast of Riyadh,” it said.
State-run news channel Al-Ekhbariya said the missile “was of limited size (and) no injuries or damage” was reported. The missile was destroyed near Riyadh’s King Khaled international airport, which was functioning normally, it added.
Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels claimed they had fired the missile, targeting the airport, the Houthi Al-Masirah television said.
Close schools and send our children to war, urges Yemeni minister Read more
Saudi Arabia’s southern neighbour, Yemen, has been torn apart by a war between the Saudi-backed government of President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi and Houthi rebels backed by Iran. A Saudi-led coalition intervened in 2015 to prop up Hadi’s government after the Shia Houthi rebels seized the capital Sana’a. The rebels continue to hold much of the country.
United Nations-backed talks have failed to broker a political settlement to end the fighting, which has left more than 8,600 people dead since the coalition intervened. A cholera outbreak has claimed more than 2,100 lives in Yemen since April as hospitals struggle to secure supplies amid a coalition air and sea blockade. The UN has warned Yemen now stands on the brink of famine.I may be biased, but I think bloggers are a very brave lot. Knowing that anyone in the world with an Internet connection could potentially be watching as they share everything imaginable. Their political leanings, life philosophies, deepest depressions, and their intimate moments from sex to childbirth to mortality.
If you don't know what blogging ("web log") is all about, this one written by Darren Rowse, founder of the famed ProBlogger.com sums it up. While ProBlogger is a highly successful blog, you might wonder which is the most popular blog. As of this writing, Technorati currently calculates Huffington Post as #1 news blog. China's Han Han is often considered the most read individual blogger in the world1, and certainly one of the most controversial.
So why do we publish our thoughts for all to see? Why not just keep a diary under the mattress? Most of us don't start a blog thinking we can compete with the likes of Huffington Post, TMZ, or Perez Hilton.
I posed that question to prolific blogger and 13 time best-selling author Seth Godin. He has been dubbed "America's Greatest Marketer" so he certainly knows what makes a blog tick: "I blog because I don't really have a. The ideas in me insist on being shared, and this is the least painful way I can find to do it!"
He taps into a simple truth behind the very origins of blogging. Most people blog simply because they have something to say. And they make it public because there's some part of them that wants to be heard. On some level we all want to be heard- it's a basic human need. Whether or not a blog eventually returns financial gain, in most cases its primary function is to provide fulfillment for the blogger.
As readers, if we're not seeing honesty or passion in their writing, we're not going to stick around. A blog, by its very nature, ought to contain at least some of the following: a 1st person perspective, a bold assertion or opinion, a fresh take on an old idea, a personal connction with the reader, a colloqial tone, and a take away for its readership. By definition, a "blog" that only contains the cold dissertation of information or possesses no opinion or 1st person connection, is not a blog-- it's an article. At least that's my opinion.
Neil Pasricha writes the award-winning blog 1000 Awesome Things that has been around since 2008 and is still going strong. His blog has earned two Webby awards-- the top honor in the blogging world. 1000 Awesome Things succeeds because it contains all of the blog compontents I mentioned above. Pasricha's impetus for starting his blog stemmed from overwhelming stresses swirling around him. He explained to me in an earlier interview:
2" "Every time I opened a newspaper it was about melting ice caps, pirates in the ocean, and an economy about to blow up. And on top of that, I was in a marriage heading the wrong direction and my best was in a major depression. Before long, my wife came home from work and told me she didn't me anymore...and my best friend very sadly took his own life. With a black cloud over my head I just felt like I needed something positive in my life. Some way to remind myself of the good things, which seemed like they were hidden behind some heavy velvet curtain.
Pasricha never imagined his blog would garner 30 million hits—a result many bloggers dream about but very rarely attain. In 2010, BlogPulse estimated the blogosphere to contain 152 million blogs3. While most of those bloggers do not become rich and famous, millions of blogs do provide profit for their owners. and affiliate marketing are sources of income for blogs with even modest amounts of traffic, and it's another top reason that bloggers blog. There is still a lot of money to be made for writers providing quality content.
Having been a blogger for several years, I can relate to both Pasricha and Godin. Fame and rich financial gain were not my to start blogging. Good thing because I've attained neither! I blog to share information and challenge the status quo. It's a way I can connect with a global audience that I would otherwise never get to reach. But I also blog for the creative outlet. I've opened up about my relationship, explored heated political topics, and even come out to my readers.
I've learned not to rant in my blogs because I've learned -- the hard way -- that rants are just one-sided agitatations that do little to further quality dialogue. I still find many blogs attempting to use the force of shock/ / rather than the power of and the carefully crafted word. Yet my blogs certainly do challenge popular opinion. My piece on mindfulness generated some disagreement, and my blog about living off-the-grid was picked up by a large and controversial conservative outlet. Now that was unexpected!
Public blogging can be very -provoking at first -- and also exhilerating -- but when we do dare to express our honest opinion in a blog, I think we can be quite surprised at just how many like-minded or open-minded readers are glad that we did. With millions of blogs out there, people want that emotional connection.
I like to think we bloggers can change the world. But, in the end, like Seth Godin, I end up blogging so that my thoughts will leave me alone.
Here are some other reasons why people blog, can you think of more?
To maintain a routine- motivation and accountability
To hone the craft of writing
To air new and provocative ideas
To spread -edge information or timely opinion
To connect with a like-minded community
To forward the tradition of storytelling
To build resume or clout
To express
To find catharsis after a event
To attract web traffic to another endevour
To tap into the potential for money and/or fame
To rant or vent
To see our names in print - ego motivation
To change the world
What are your reasons for blogging? Join the conversation below.
Sources
1 http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/blogger-han-han-controversy-on-democracy-in-china/
2 http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/design-your-path/201104/1000-awesome-things-how-neil-pasricha-wrote-the-book-everyday-awesome
3 http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/01/12/internet-2010-in-numbers/First of all I want to say that I'm really happy with the gifts I received!
I was talking to my mom when I saw the mailman drive away and I said, 'I think the mails here' which to my mom replied 'No that can't be, I got the mail earlier. Maybe there is someone who has a package.' And I was like... 'Then why is he stopping at each house and not getting out of his car?' Mom: 'Ow, maybe that was the mail from yesterday I got earlier..' Me: 'Fine, I'll go look.' I wasn't that exited to go because I never get mail and my Secret Santa said to me that the package would arrive the 29th so I wasn't expecting my gift today either.
I went to the mailbox, opened the door and saw a small box with my name on it!!!! The words!SECRET SANTA! were shouting in my head! I ran back inside straight to the kitchen to find something sharp to open my gift. Shouted through the house, 'The neighbors didn't get a gift, but I did!'
Fortunately I remembered that I needed to take pictures while unpacking, so I ran upstairs and took pictures while further unwrapping my gift.
I got a Yankee candle and let me tell you, these are awesome candles! This small candle can burn for 15 hours! And I love the smell!
Also I got silver snowflakes earrings. I love the winter and I love earrings, so perfect combo!
Thank you so much Secret Santa! I'm really happy with the gifts you got me. I hope that the presents you received from your Santa are as nice as you gave me.Cubs scout Keith Lockhart can breathe a sigh of relief.
After six surgeries, his 15-year-old son, Jason, has been awakened from life support, which he had been on since June 24 after a baseball injury. Jason's sister, Sydney, posted the good news Wednesday on Facebook.
"Jason came back from surgery with a great report from the doctor," Sydney wrote. "They are confident that this resolved the bleeding problem. He is awake and still in recovery. We are bedside and helping keep him comfortable during the transition without his breathing tube. Thank you so much for all your prayers. Keep them coming as he begins his recovery."
Jason has been staying at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta at Scottish Rite Hospital. He was originally injured June 17, according to the family's updates on social media, while in South Carolina for a baseball tournament.
As Jason crossed the plate during a game, the catcher hit him in the face with a baseball while trying to throw it back to the pitcher.
After initially receiving stitches and being diagnosed with a fractured nose, Jason went in for an X-ray two days later when his nose started bleeding. The fracture had cut an artery, and doctors put Jason in a medically induced coma June 24 as they tried to stop the blood flow.
According to another of Sydney's Facebook posts, doctors didn't locate an active bleed until Tuesday's surgery.
Wednesday's surgery was to ensure the artery was self-clotting. Jason was successfully awakened that evening.
"You can see the family-like atmosphere from all the prayers and support that people from our school, and from our community, have really poured into the Lockhart family," Jason's high school baseball coach, Ben Drust, told the Gwinnett Daily Post. "Jason is an awesome kid and I hate seeing him go through this."
Jason is a rising sophomore at Hebron Christian Academy in Dacula, Ga. He played shortstop, second base and outfield as a freshman.
His father was a major-league infielder for 10 seasons (1994-2003) with the Padres, Royals and Braves. He has worked as a scout for the Cubs since 2011.
Jason's older brother, Daniel, was a 10th-round draft pick by the Cubs in 2011 and played in their minor-league system through 2016. He's currently with Class A Visalia in the Diamondbacks organization.
"I first met (Jason) last year right after he graduated eighth grade and he was going to be a freshman," Drust said. "He played on our summer team and he was quiet and he kept to himself. I've noticed he's very mature for his age. He wanted to ask questions, he wanted to learn and he wanted to get better."
twaack@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @terrinvictoriaBassim* and Ali were two very close brothers. At the end of September 2013, during the Sacrifice Feast (known as Eid al-Adha), Ali decided to postpone his wedding which was already booked for November. The idea was to find a lucky fiancée for Bassim, so both could get married on the same day in April 2014, the new date set for a special and unforgettable day for the whole family. The dream was a challenge for all the family but the wish was attractive and realizable. Bassim was such a special person and loved brother that every effort would be worth it.
At that point, the family had not the slightest idea that one month later the entire dream would collapse in just one second as a bullet hit Bassim in the chest.
Bassim was 23 years old and the fourth in a family of eight siblings living in Hebron city. The two brothers used to travel weekly to manage the family’s shops, located in different cities around the West Bank. They needed to cross Israeli checkpoints constantly. This had never been a big fear for them despite all the time spent and the persistent annoyance caused by the soldiers with their inspections each time Bassim and Ali crossed the checkpoints.
Bassim was a dreamer and had a tremendously important role for his family. Full of innovative ideas and good ambitions, he was the manager of the family's trade and responsible for looking after their income. That was not all; he also was the funniest son, and the family comedian. Always attentive, gentle and caring, it was he who used to take the younger siblings out at the weekends. Bassim was also the one "lifting the mood" when some of children were sad or worried, with his famous jokes and his hilarious noises.
But on a Thursday in November of 2013, this young man overflowing with love, hopes and dreams had his life brutally interrupted. As usual, he and Ali were going back home after spending part of the working week at the family's shops in Jericho and Jenin. Bassim was really exhausted due to a sorrowful start to the week. Three days earlier, all the family had buried his cousin who had died suddenly of an unexpected health problem. The already painful week was also marked by a lack of sleep and more trips around the West Bank than usual.
Bassim was sleeping so deeply in the passenger seat, with his feet up on the dashboard, that he could not even hear his phone ringing several times in his pocket while Ali was driving with the sound of Bassim’s snoring. When the car reached the checkpoint container the car passed over a bump, Bassim woke up quite confused. Then, the car stopped at the checkpoint and, still extremely sleepy, he opened the door and got out of the car to stretch his body. Unbelievably, this simple innocent gesture was enough for a soldier to shoot the unfortunate bullet that made his strong young body topple to the ground. He died instantly.
From that moment, and for many months, his family struggled to come to terms with it, but their nightmare continued. The family had yet to deal with the father’s heart attack, followed by delicate and complex heart surgery, just a few months after the incident. Added to that, the sequence of events caused their financial situation to change drastically in a short time, since none of them were in a condition to think about the family business.
After almost one year, the family started to recover slowly with the help of their friends, extended family and the support of MSF, which is providing them with individual psychotherapy. Just recently, during the last Sacrifice Feast at the beginning of October 2014, they were able, for the first time, to enjoy the family gathering and have a little short-lived pleasure in their lives.
However, this brave family has more distress to bear ahead. After all that had happened to them, they also lost their permission to move from the West Bank to Israel. So they are not able to cross the checkpoint as before. Apart from all the disturbances that this can cause, they were also separated from part of their extended family without any reasonable justification. In two weeks, a relative who lives on the Israeli side is having a wedding party. However, until now, they have no idea if they will be able to go.
*The name has been changed to protect the privacy of the patient.Families of two victims in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting have filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the town of Newtown, Conn., and its board of education, alleging security measures at the school weren't adequate.
The two families' motivation was solely to improve school security for future students in the Newtown school district, Donald Papcsy, an attorney for the families, said in a statement on Monday.
For years schools have been trying to find ways to become more safe and prevent the next shooting, but the task is easier said than done, expert say, especially in a way that doesn't scare young students or disrupt the learning environment.
In the wake of the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., districts renovating and building schools studied what they could do to make them safer, architect Irene Nigaglioni tells CNN.
Schools began to build single, prominent entryways with bare landscaping, providing fewer places to hide. They moved restrooms away from entrances, Ms. Nigaglioni says, and installed elaborate announcement systems that let police address a shooter without speaking to every classroom.
On its website, the National Association of School Psychologists offers a list of ways a school can make itself a safe learning environment, including installing an alarm system and/or closed-circuit television monitoring system, minimizing blind spots, trimming trees and shrubs to limit outside hiding places, mixing faculty and student parking, and securing fences with heavy-duty padlocks.
In Newtown, the gunman, Adam Lanza, parked his car less than 100 feet from the school entrance on Dec. 14, 2012. He entered through doors near the school's main offices, where he killed the principal and school psychologist. He then entered two classrooms and killed 20 students and six educators, before fatally shooting himself, according to state police. Before going to the school, Mr. Lanza killed his mother in their Newtown home.
According to the lawsuit, a teacher in one of the two classrooms where students were killed was a substitute, didn't have a key to the classroom door, and didn't receive training on the security protocols. The lawsuit also charges the town with negligence for not having bulletproof glass on the school's front windows, not having doors that could be locked from the inside, and not having parking lot security.
Katherine Newman, provost of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and co-author of the book "Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings," says that while quick security upgrades like bulletproof glass might help against an attack similar to the Newtown shooting – when an assailant came from outside the school – most school shootings are very different and involve students who are already past security and inside the school.
"I think it’s unfortunately not likely to make a huge difference if our efforts are all designed at a law enforcement or security response," Provost Newman says.
Newman adds that she doesn't think physical security measures, like the bulletproof glass mentioned in the lawsuit, are bad ideas, just that they don't neutralize the threat of an internal shooter, a student who would already be inside a fortified school.
"They’re not mutually exclusive. I would never say avoid bulletproof glass," says Newman, "as long as it doesn’t lull you into thinking the internal threat would be avoided because of it."
Kenneth Trump – president of National School Safety and Security Services, a school security consulting firm – wrote a blog post last week describing how technological "quick-fixes" and investments in physical security equipment wouldn't be able to solve the school safety issue.
The Sandy Hook shooting, he wrote, "sent federal, state, and local education and public safety officials scrambling to 'do something, do anything and do it fast.' "
"Once they get past the 'Wow!' factor of a few dozen new cameras in their local high school, most people are stunned to find out that many of these schools and school districts have no budget set aside for the repair and/or replacement of these cameras once they are damaged or have technical malfunctions," continued Mr. Trump.
"The result: A facade of enhanced security," he said, describing the common physical security measures as " |
on Twitter @JedKMeshew and let me know about it. Also follow MMAFighting on Instagram and add us on Snapchat at MMA-Fighting because we post dope things and you should enjoy them.Sperm grown in lab BelfastTelegraph.co.uk Infertile men have received new hope of fathering children after scientists grew mammalian sperm in a laboratory for the first time. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/health/sperm-grown-in-lab-28600284.html https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/migration_catalog/article25650853.ece/62a53/AUTOCROP/h342/sperm
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Infertile men have received new hope of fathering children after scientists grew mammalian sperm in a laboratory for the first time.
A team from Japan developed sperm from fragments of testes from mice and used them to fertilise eggs from which healthy, fertile young were born.
"I want to apply our method to other species including humans. The sperm produced in our system should be safe," said Dr Takehiko Ogawa of Yokohama City University.
The research team, reporting their results in the journal Nature, said the success of the mouse sperm held out the promise of discovering new techniques for male infertility.
Dr Allan Pacey, of the University of Sheffield, said success in mice was no guarantee it could be matched in humans but added: "This study is a small but important step in understanding how sperm are formed which may, in time, lead to us being able to routinely grow human sperm in the laboratory."
Belfast TelegraphThere is a very thoughtful, must read post by Judy Curry at Climate Etc titled
Testimony followup: Part II
I have extracted below a key set of statements from her post [boldface added]
“The actual shift within the community seems to have occurred in the context of the IPCC process. The entire framing of the IPCC was designed around identifying sufficient evidence so that the human-induced greenhouse warming could be declared unequivocal, and so providing the rationale for developing the political will to implement and enforce carbon stabilization targets in the context of the UNFCCC. National and international science programs were funded to support the IPCC objectives. Scientists involved in the IPCC advanced their careers, obtained personal publicity, and some gained a seat at the big policy tables. This career advancement of IPCC scientists was done with the complicity of the professional societies and the institutions that fund science. Eager for the publicity, high impact journals such as Nature, Science, and PNAS frequently publish sensational but dubious papers that support the climate alarm narrative…..Further, the institutions that support science use the publicity to argue for more funding to support climate research and its impacts. And the broader scientific community inadvertently becomes complicit in all this. When the IPCC consensus is attacked by deniers and the forces of “anti-science,” scientists all join in bemoaning these dark forces fighting a war against science, and support the IPCC against its critics. The media also bought into this, by eliminating balance in favor of the IPCC consensus.” “Changing the funding priorities is key. We need to reduce reliance on building ever more complex climate models for being the primary source of reducing uncertainties regarding climate change. Climate researchers need to engage with a broader range of expertise in and build strong links to disciplines experienced in complex nonlinear modeling and statistical inference, among others. We need a much better understanding of natural climatic variability. More research is needed on understanding abrupt climate change and developing a more extensive archive of paleoclimate proxies. And finally, greater resources need to be provided to accelerating the establishment of definitive climate data records.”
I have reported examples of the biases that Judy documented with respect to climate assessments and funding on my weblog; e.g.see
Protecting The IPCC Turf – There Are No Independent Climate Assessments Of The IPCC WG1 Report Funded And Sanctioned By The NSF, NASA Or The NRC – A Repost Of And Comment On A January 13 2009 post
NSF Decision On Our Request For Reconsideration Of A Rejected NSF Proposal On The Role Of Land Use Change In The Climate System
My Comments For The InterAcademy Council Review of the IPCC
Climate Assessment Oligarchy – The IPCC
See also
Pielke, R.A. Sr., 2005: Public Comment on CCSP Report “Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere: Steps for Understanding and Reconciling Differences“. 88 pp including appendices
Pielke, R.A. Sr., 2008: A Broader View of the Role of Humans in the Climate System is Required In the Assessment of Costs and Benefits of Effective Climate Policy. Written Testimony for the Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality of the Committee on Energy and Commerce Hearing “Climate Change: Costs of Inaction” – Honorable Rick Boucher, Chairman. June 26, 2008, Washington, DC., 52 pp [see the appendix which documents the exclusion in the 2007 IPCC WG1 report of peer-reviewed papers that differ from what the IPCC perspective].
I recommend everyone read Judy’s full post.A shared imitation: Cistercian convents and crusader families in thirteenth-century Champagne
Anne E. Lester (Department of History, University of Colorado at Boulder)
Journal of Medieval History: 35:4 (2009)
Abstract
This article examines the relationship between Cistercian nunneries and the crusade movement and considers the role of gender in light of the new emphasis on penitential piety and suffering prevalent during the thirteenth century. Focused on evidence from the region of Champagne in northern France, it argues that female family members of male crusaders adopted Cistercian spirituality as a means of participating in the experience of suffering and the pursuit of the imitation of Christ that had come to be associated with the act of crusading. The connection between Cistercian nuns and crusaders was further strengthened during this period as the Cistercian order expanded its liturgy to include specific rounds of prayers for success in the east and in southern France, for Jerusalem, and for the well-being of crusaders. Many crusader families in Champagne founded Cistercian nunneries to function as family necropolises, further sharpening the connections between crusaders, memory, and suffering as experienced in female Cistercian houses.
Over the past three decades medievalists have recast the history of the crusades in significant ways, asking new questions about who joined the movement, how each expedition differed, and expanding the sources for such a history. As a consequence, crusade studies have broadened our understanding of the undertaking, defining the crusades as a much larger religious movement, which extended beyond the limits of the middle ages strictly speaking and which informed conceptions of medieval Christendom both along its borders and within its bounds.1 Acknowledging the crusades as a religious movement rather than a military expedition or series of campaigns also meant compassing its reverberations and effects within Europe and specifically among the families and social networks that fostered and supported crusaders.2 Jonathan Riley-Smith, Marcus Bull and others have shown persuasively that crusaders cannot be extracted from their kin. Rather, families often promoted crusading over generations. Habits of aristocratic patronage linked crusaders with local religious houses, hospitals and family members long after their departure and return.3 Moreover, by the thirteenth century, the crusade movement became ever more entwined with contemporary notions of penitential piety and ideas of self-sacrifice and suffering that were integral to the practice of the imitatio Christi, or imitation of Christ, one of the central spiritual ideals of the high middle ages.
Click here to read this article from the Journal of Medieval History
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our weekly emailFeatured on SmashTheClub.com: http://www.smashtheclub.com/2013/06/dirty-bunch-bootleg-pack-vol1 Threw all the bootlegs from the pack into a mix with some extra goodies! Enjoy :) The Dirty Bunch Bootleg Pack Vol. 1: 1. La Miami Cthulu 2. More Koala 3. Bashin Perigo 4. Where Have Alienz Been 5. Pour Up Viking 6. Lick The Fire Razor 7. Take Over The White Church 8. Canniballs 9. Rollup Dat Ass 10. Watch Out For The Turn't Up Genie THE DIRTY BUNCH - "BOOTLEG PACK VOL. 1" FREE DOWNLOAD: GO LIKE 'THE DIRTY BUNCH' FACEBOOK PAGE!!! :) TRACK LIST: 1. The Dirty Bunch - Lick The Fire Razor (Bootleg) 2. The Dirty Bunch - More Koala (Mashup) 3. The Dirty Bunch - Pour Up Viking (Mashup) 4. BeTa - Cook (Original Mix) 5. The Dirty Bunch - Rollup Dat Ass (Mashup 82.5-108 bpm) 6. Heartbreak - Blaze Up (Original Mix) 7. The Dirty Bunch - Bashin Perigo (Mashup 108-140 bpm) 8. The Dirty Bunch - Canniballs (Bootleg) 9. Porter Robinson - LRAD x Hit It! (Private Edit) 10. The Dirty Bunch - Watch Out For The Turn't Up Genie (Bootleg) 11. Macklemore & Ryan Lewis feat. Wanz - Thrift Shop (JDG Remix) 12. The Dirty Bunch - Where Have Alienz Been (Bootleg) 13. The Dirty Bunch - La Miami Cthulu (Bootleg) 14. Alvaro & MOTi - NaNaNa (Original Mix) 15. The Dirty Bunch - Take Over The White Church (Bootleg) www.soundcloud.com/thedirtybunch www.facebook.com/thedirtybunch www.twitter.com/thedirtybunch
Genre The Dirty BunchCheck out these cheerful candy-colored buildings! Murals are a fantastic way to sugar-coat concrete and brighten up otherwise drab buildings. Artists Haas and Hahn have adorned several concrete landscapes in Brazil with their colorful paintings, and now they’ve taken on the transformation of a blighted favela neighborhood. The area, Santa Marta, is one of Brazil’s notorious favelas, or shantytowns. They call this urban explosion of color Favela Painting, and it has become a local source of pride.
There are hundreds of favelas in Brazil, a casualty of the country’s extreme economic inequality. Favelas aren’t built to any kind of code or safety standards — they’re simply a means for the poorest populations to house themselves. To cover the blighted buildings in swaths of color, Favela Painting employs local residents, training them in professional painting techniques and safety. The powerful stripes cover only a portion of the larger hillside neighborhood; the artists hope to continue the artwork over the entire favela. Remarkably, the whole thing is funded by individual and private donations — as if the candy stripes weren’t enough to make you smile already.
+ Favela Painting
Via The CoolistUNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Armed groups in central Africa are using powerful weapons, some of which may be left over from the civil war in Libya, to kill elephants for their ivory, the United Nations said on Monday.
The carcasses of some of the 22 elephant slaughtered in a helicopter-bourne attack lie on the ground in the Democratic Republic of Congo's Garamba National Park, in this undated handout picture released by the DRC Military. REUTERS/DRC Military/Handout
In a report to the U.N. Security Council, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said elephant poaching was a growing security concern, particularly in Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad and Gabon.
Ban said the illegal trade in ivory may be an important source of funding for armed groups, including warlord fugitive Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).
“Also of concern is that poachers are using more and more sophisticated and powerful weapons, some of which, it is believed, might be originating from the fallout in Libya,” his report said.
Ban said that in Minkebe Park in northeastern Gabon, more than 11,000 elephants had been slaughtered between 2004 and 2013, while in Chad in March, poachers killed 86 elephants - including 33 pregnant females - within a week. In Cameroon’s Bouba Ndjida National Park, more than 300 elephants were killed during the last two months of last year.
“The situation has become so serious that national authorities in some countries, such as Cameroon, have decided to use the national army, in addition to law and order enforcement agencies to hunt down poachers,” Ban said.
United Nations officials say growing Asian demand for ivory is helping to drive a poaching boom.
The U.N. Security Council’s Group of Experts, who monitor an arms embargo imposed on Libya at the start of an uprising in 2011 that overthrew Muammar Gaddafi, said last month that the North African state had become a key source of weapons in the region as its nascent government struggles to exert authority.
The experts said weapons were spreading from Libya at an “alarming rate,” fueling conflicts in Mali, Syria and elsewhere and boosting the arsenals of extremists and criminals in the region.
Ban’s report singled out the LRA and Kony, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. He and his commanders are accused of abducting thousands of children to use as fighters in a rebel army that earned a reputation for chopping off limbs as a form of discipline.
LRA fighters fought the Ugandan government for nearly two decades before being ejected from their strongholds in the north of the country in 2005, forcing them to establish bases in the jungles of other countries in the region.I realize that there are no shortage of reviews of last night’s premiere of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (including one by my good friend Mike Brotherton), but I did have a few thoughts of my own. First and foremost, I loved this show. It was beautiful and poetic, thoughtful and insightful, and firmly made the case that science is the only way to really understand the world and universe we live in. Will I love it as much as Carl Sagan’s original? Maybe, maybe not, and truthfully, I’m ok with either outcome.
Although Sagan is no longer with us, having his protege Neil deGrasse Tyson at the helm of the new Ship of the Imagination is a fitting passing of the torch. And what better way to begin the new voyage than with an homage to Sagan. I couldn’t imagine a more fitting kickoff to this series than to literally begin at the same location Carl did 34 years ago.
But in that time a new audience has grown up that is inundated with even more television channels and production values that far surpass anything Hollywood was capable of producing in 1980. Make no mistake, the production values of the original Cosmos were, in my opinion, absolutely incredible. I truly felt like I was flying through the universe with Carl on his ship. Even though there is no way they could possibly do a poor job with this new production, I was wondering if the new series might go overboard with the use of visual effects, or use them in a way that has, quite frankly, been done to death in other science programs. The answer, to be honest, was a bit of a mixed bag for me.
Cosmos sets out to orient the viewer in much the same way as it originally started out – by describing our place in both in space and in time. The space bit had Tyson and his ship zipping through the Solar System, which was fine until…
To be fair, they didn’t show the Ship zigzaging around the asteroids in hairpin tuns a-la the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back; This shot was much more graceful than that, suggesting perhaps a little bit more space between the asteroids. But the truth is that asteroids are already very, very far apart from one another. I personally would have much preferred a setup where the audience thinks they’re about to play cosmic dodge ball, only to discover that the asteroid belt is wide open with nothing in sight, and Tyson actually having to set course to fly by an asteroid in order to glimpse one up close. That might not have been as visually stunning, so it looks like they went for the cool shot instead, but they also reinforced a very common misconception.
Things get much more interesting – and pretty accurate – when passing through the Jupiter system. The sequence of flying through the Great Red Spot absolutely blew me away.
Of course, you can’t do a Saturn flyby without going through the rings. I’ve heard some complaints that they didn’t get the scale right here, but the thickness of Saturn’s rings vary from as thin as 10 meters to as thick as 1 kilometer.
All things being equal, this was just too cool a shot to pass up, so I’m good with it.
Next was an all-too brief mention of the ice giants Uranus and Neptune. I know it’s an ambitious first episode show and there’s only so much time to devote to such things but I feel bad for those two worlds. To their credit, they took a moment to describe Trans-Neptunian Objects and the icy worlds of the Kuiper Belt, but once again they overcrowded the scene.
It seems that in this new sequence, we are dodging space rocks a-la the Millennium Falcon, which is unfortunate. In reality, there’s even more space between Kuiper Belt objects than there are between asteroids by virtue of the fact that the Kuiper Belt extends so much farther from the Sun than the asteroid belt. Alas, the cool shot wins out and a misconception is reinforced. Bummer.
Interestingly, as Tyson leaves the Solar System, he looks back on the Oort Cloud and notes that the objects there are as far apart from one another as Earth is from Saturn. I guess that’s why he didn’t have to dodge them on the way out. My only observation here, as with any depiction of the Oort Cloud, is that at this imagined distance, the icy comets that populate the cloud are much too small to be seen; The Oort Cloud would be no more noticeable from outside the solar system than it is from our vantage point well within it. And yet there needs to be a way to visually communicate to the viewer that they’re there, so we get a delicate sphere around the Sun.
Jumping forward in the sequence, Tyson continues to define our cosmic address through our diminishing place in the Virgo Supercluster of galaxies. Whenever I see shots like this, I get goosebumps, despite having been familiar with the scale of the observable universe for most of my life. However, I’ll just note that if we really were as far out in between galaxies as depicted in the sequence, we wouldn’t be able to discern each individual galaxy with our own eyes. Remember, each galaxy in an image like the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field is the result of 2 million seconds of exposure time – nothing our eye would ever be able to register in a glimpse, even if we were looking through the Hubble Space Telescope itself. Still…goosebumps!
It’s when we zoom out to the large scale structure of the observable universe that we finally complete our cosmic address.
I’m not sure why they chose to represent this as purple in color, but my guess is that it was inspired by the Millennium Simulation Project, an ambitious model of the gravitational interaction of a whopping 10 billion galaxies. Here is a small piece of their result:
To tell the truth, I wish they had used this image instead of the one they created. Not only is it more realistic, but it makes the observable universe seem larger than it appeared in Cosmos.
When describing the history of the universe, we are (re)introduced to the analogy of an earth calendar. I always thought this was the best way to convey the 13.8 billion-year history of the universe, and the comparatively negligible length of time humans have been around to notice it, to a lay audience. Naturally, this has to start with the Big Bang which, unfortunately, cannot really be properly described even with the most sophisticated of visual effects.
Don’t get me wrong, it was a cool sequence. The problem is that you cannot really depict spacetime expanding into itself, which is what really happened (and is continuing to happen). That’s because there is no outside for the universe to expand into. Perhaps the most accurate way to depict a Big Bang is to show nothing on screen, then show “fire” everywhere. There was a 1991 documentary called The Astronomers that depicted the Big Bang exactly this way. But it’s hard to convey the idea of a massive explosion without showing something…well…exploding. Hmm…
Truth be told, I’d be ok with this had Tyson not made the statement that in the beginning the entire universe was compressed down to the size of an atom. If he had instead said it was the observable universe that was so compressed, it would have made all of the difference. Here’s why:
Most cosmologists generally believe that the universe is infinite. By that definition, it extends farther beyond the farthest points in space we can see. These farthest points define the observable universe, and Tyson makes a point of distinguishing the observable universe from the entire universe, which is infinite.
But here’s the catch – if the entire universe is infinite today, then it must have been infinite in the beginning as well. But how can something be both infinite and compressed down to the size of an atom? It can’t, but the part that defines today’s observable universe can, with all of the points of the infinite universe beyond compressed next to it, and so on. Here’s an illustration from Edward Wright’s excellent cosmology FAQ:
The green circle represents our observable universe, with the galaxies (dots) much closer together a billion years after the Big Bang than they are today. If we run the clock back further to the beginning, our green observable universe would be infinitesimally small, but the dots (representing the galaxies we will never see) will still go on forever.
Alas, by stating that the entire universe was compressed to the size of an atom, I think Tyson may have reinforced a major misconception.
Again, none of this is to take away from what I thought was an amazing production. And truth be told, we need Cosmos on our screens now more than ever. Carl Sagan presented Cosmos at a time of both great exploration of our solar system and of grave danger to our home planet and to humanity’s own existence. Sagan understood that our very survival depends on humankind’s knowledge of the cosmos, and of our place in it.
Today, we find ourselves once again in peril – perhaps not from nuclear annihilation but certainly from a rapidly warming planet – but now amid an ever-increasing wave of science denial. Denial of global warming, modern medicine, biotechnology, and of investments in research. If there was ever a time when we need to present Cosmos to a new generation, it’s now.
You can view the entire episode here. Enjoy the journey.Workers repair part of a damaged wall on a tower following an earthquake that shook buildings in Taipei on April 20, 2015 (AFP Photo/Sam Yeh)
One man died and another was hospitalised Monday after a fire caused by a powerful quake off Taiwan that set buildings shaking in the capital Taipei and sparked a short-lived tsunami warning in far southwestern Japan.
Japanese forecasters had warned the 6.6 magnitude earthquake could cause a tsunami as high as one metre (three feet) affecting several islands in the Okinawa chain. But they lifted the alert around an hour later, with no abnormal waves recorded.
No damage was reported in Japan, but a four-storey apartment building in New Taipei City caught fire after an electrical box outside the block exploded in the quake.
A 65-year-old man who lived in the building "showed no signs of life" at the scene, the fire service said.
Another 18-year-old resident remains in hospital with smoke inhalation but is not in a serious condition, the fire service said.
Residents and office workers were evacuated from a building in central Taipei because of a feared gas leak and vehicles in a nearby multi-storey carpark were overturned, but no one was injured.
Three more quakes rocked the island in the evening. The Seismology Center said one with a magnitude of 5.8 and another at 5.7 -- both considered to be aftershocks -- shook buildings in Taipei.
Another quake with a magnitude of 5.5, with its epicenter 42 km (27 miles) east of the eastern city of Hualien, also jolted the island. This was not seen as an aftershock.
There were no immediate reports of damage.
In Japan, local authorities urged people to move away from the coast and seek higher ground, in a drill that has become fairly regular in a country prone to powerful earthquakes and occasional devastating tsunamis.
"We are issuing warnings via the radio," Satoshi Shimoji of the Miyako City government told NHK. "We want residents to get as far as possible from the sea."
Boats were seen sailing out to sea -- common practice when a tsunami warning is issued because away from the coast a tsunami is little different from a swell.
However, an hour after the quake, the Japan Meteorological Agency cancelled the warning.
The US Geological Survey said the 6.6 magnitude quake, which Japanese authorities had originally put at 6.8, struck 71 kilometres (44 miles) east of Hualien at 0143 GMT.
In Tokyo, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told reporters officials were still collecting information, but that the quake did not appear to have done serious damage.
Japan sits at the confluence of four of the earth's tectonic plates and records more than 20 percent of the planet's most powerful earthquakes every year.
Strict building codes and a long familiarity with the dangers mean quakes that might cause devastation in other parts of the world are frequently uneventful in Japan.
However, more than 18,000 people were killed by a huge tsunami that smashed into the northeast coast in 2011 after a huge 9.0 magnitude earthquake.
Kuo Kai-wen, chief of Taiwan's Seismology Centre, warned there could be more quakes on the island.
"This was the third quake measuring more than 6.0 magnitude in Taiwan so far this year -- we would not rule out the likelihood that there might be more strong quakes of this scale."Making the wakes of ocean ships brighter could cool the Earth by 0.5°C and help combat global warming, according to a new modeling study. Other geoengineering studies have examined how greenhouse gas warming could be counteracted by making Earth’s atmosphere more reflective. But this is one of the first to look at using the bright, bubbly wakes of cargo ships as they crisscross the world’s oceans. Natural foaming agents in the sea—chemicals often derived from phytoplankton—help create bright, white microbubbles in ship wakes that persist for about 10 minutes. Now, climate scientists say that designer foaming agents could create even brighter wakes that last much longer. If these supercharged wakes were 10 times brighter and lasted 10 days instead of 10 minutes, they would cover 5.5% of the world’s oceans and cool the planet by 0.5°C by the year 2069, the researchers write in a 28 January publication of the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres. That’s enough to partially restore Arctic ice loss and offset the 2°C warming that could occur by then. Because most ship traffic is in the Northern Hemisphere, most of the cooling would be felt there, where it would be accompanied by a drop in precipitation. But the researchers acknowledge many uncertainties in the scheme. The foaming agent could interfere with ocean ecologies or inhibit the uptake of carbon dioxide by the ocean—effectively negating one of the major ways that the world’s oceans fight global warming naturally. But the idea is not completely crazy. The shipping industry is already experimenting with microbubbles, applied to the underside of ship hulls, to reduce friction and improve fuel efficiency. And global shipping traffic has increased fourfold since 1990—meaning that the ocean area available to reflect away heat is only expected to grow.Halliburton has reached a $1.1 billion settlement deal with plaintiffs claiming damages resulting from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010, the Houston-based energy company announced on Tuesday.
The company will pay $1.1 billion into a trust in three installments, which will be used to pay off damage claims from property holders and commercial fisheries along the gulf coast.
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The deal removes a measure of uncertainty that has lingered over the company’s legal reserves over the past four years. Halliburton has set aside a $1.3 billion litigation fund for costs related to the spill. While the settlement resolves claims from individual plaintiffs, Halliburton still faces lawsuits from several coastal states.
Halliburton has traded blame with British Petroleum (BP) over the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which unleashed nearly 5 million barrels of crude into the Gulf over several weeks in 2010, one of the largest offshore oil spills in U.S. history.
BP, the owner of the well, blamed Halliburton for faulty construction work while Halliburton said BP’s faulty management was responsible. Both companies, along with the owner of the rig, Transocean Ltd., have paid out billions in settlement deals.
Contact us at editors@time.com.A few years ago, SpaceX challenged the world’s engineers with Hyperloop, an ambitious competition to build a high-speed transportation system capable of propelling pods great speeds over long distances. Thousands of teams answered the call; one standout among 29 finalists was rLoop, a crowdsourced cadre of more than 140 designers, engineers, and technology enthusiasts from around the world who relied on unconventional web-based tools like Reddit to collaboratively imagine and build their Hyperloop pod. Members convened in the summer of 2016 to manufacture the pod at TE Connectivity’s facility in Silicon Valley. In addition to a work space, TE provided the team with connectors, sensors, contactors, relays, and wire, as well as engineering support through onsite and virtual advisers.
Guiding this international team of skilled makers has been rLoop engineering lead Tom Lambot and project manager Brent Lessard. Now that the Hyperloop competition has ended, netting rLoop the SpaceX Innovation Award, the team is starting to look to the future. We caught up with Lambot and Lessard to learn about rLoop’s journey and the origins of its award-winning high-speed transpo project.
WIRED BRAND LAB: You both have a background in engineering with experience in propulsion and transportation projects. What was it about Hyperloop that attracted you?
Tom Lambot: The challenge. The project was getting a lot of attention, and there was a lot to be done—big challenges, and a multitude of them. The experience matched the expectation.
Brent Lessard: For me, it was being able to participate in a large-scale, potentially world-changing project. When a chance to join rLoop arose, I jumped on it. The nature of the way we collaborate and how rLoop formed was entirely new to me. It really taught us a lot about how we can work together, how we can connect minds all over the world.
WBL: And there’s also the newness of it all. What’s been the hardest thing to crack on the engineering side?
TL: I’m an aerospace engineer, so it was like working on a mix of an aircraft and a spacecraft. You have to make sure that all these things talk to each other, work with each other. You can think of a train or a plane—and we’re using some technology from both of those—but it forces you to go beyond, which also means that you have the freedom to be inventive.
The hardest part is going from paper to reality, the fact that nothing has really been tested before. We went to the competition based on our best guess and models; there’s a huge gap between rudiments and an actual environment. So many systems need to work together, plus the thermal management of the whole.
BL: You’re facing a system where you’re thinking about a lot of things. About what you can and cannot do. It was complex. There were so many different systems with top-notch technology you have to pack together. And with the whole thing being a tube moving at a very high speed, you’re pretty close to the walls. If something goes wrong, it can go catastrophically wrong. You have to be very precise.
WBL: What has set your testing apart from the other teams? Are you, say, including anything special to ensure rider comfort?
BL: We’re the only team that has a pressure vessel. It was designed by a guy who works on custom aircraft to FAA regulations. We packed a lot of TE Connectivity sensors in there, so we’re expecting to get a lot of data in terms of what the experience would be like for a passenger.
TL: This is a technology that can be scaled down and then adapted. We always had that in a corner of our minds.
WBL: From rLoop’s perspective, how did the competition ultimately go?
BL: The competition was intense. We had rLoopers working around the clock, 16- to 20-hour shifts, sleeping for a few hours and then getting right back to it. The rPod is a very complex system, and we always approached the design as a scalable Hyperloop pod. I believe our pod most reflected a scalable solution. After almost two years of work, we were recognized by SpaceX with the Innovation Award, and the team really deserved it.
WBL: Now that the rPod has faced competitors, what’s been the biggest takeaway from the contest?
TL: Robust design pays. A design that is crafted for performance but that can also be de-scoped or handle harsh conditions will perform better overall. This was a philosophy we tried to apply throughout the project, and it was confirmed to be the right way.
WBL: So, what’s next for team rLoop?
BL: Immediately? Sleep and family time. My daughter was born two months before we started rLoop, and my wife has been incredibly supportive throughout the journey. Once we debrief from the competition weekend we’re going to refocus on our Hyperloop prototype pod, implement the full functionality we designed, and test and demonstrate our scalable solution. We’ve also created a lot of value in terms of organization and processes to facilitate global collaboration. We would like to see the rLoop model applied to other large-scale “moonshot” projects.
WBL: What is the team most excited about doing in the future?
BL: The competition showed that the engineering behind the Hyperloop concept is feasible. There were so many interesting and unique designs—all the teams put in a lot of effort and came up with creative solutions. The future for the technology is exciting, and rLoop is at the forefront.
Our crowdsourced engineering model exceeded our wildest expectations. To see dozens of members from all over the world working together tirelessly was incredibly inspiring. Now we want to see the full functionality of our pod implemented and tested before moving on to version 2. Also, looking to apply our crowdsourced engineering model to other projects with potential to change the world!
TL: The first thing I am the most excited about is that in this competition there were a lot of very good designs. Imagine five years down the road, the tremendous leap in transport technologies based on all this work.
The second thing is that crowdsourced engineering works. We showed that a bunch of strangers with different ethnicities, languages, and backgrounds can unite behind a crazy idea and make it work in real life.
Visit TE.com/rLoop to learn more about the technology of the Hyperloop and watch the Project Fifth Mode documentary series on the team.It seems like most things come in threes: celebrity deaths, game console makers and, well, apparently privatized space-faring companies too. On that note, FireFly Space Systems (which includes former SpaceX and Virgin Galactic employees) has recently shown off its first rocket, appropriately dubbed "Alpha," and the outfit claims it's a bit different from the likes of what we've seen before. FireFly says that its vessel uses an engine that's more aerodynamic and thus more efficient than a traditional rocket's bell-shaped blasters. Another differentiator is the type of fuel is uses -- methane. This serves a few purposes. Namely, it reduces weight because the fuel itself is used to pressurize the engine as opposed to the typical helium, and it apparently simplifies design as well. Moreover, methane is relatively inexpensive; it's the same stuff used to heat houses after all. According to NewScientist, the goal is to provide a low-cost platform for launching clusters of small satellites used for, among other things, providing broadband internet.An American paramedic working with a security watchdog in eastern Ukraine has been killed after the vehicle he was in drove over a mine.
The US citizen, who has not been named, was part of a patrol involved in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's (OSCE) Special Monitoring mission in the country.
Two other monitors, a German and a Czech, were injured in the blast, near Luhansk. It has led US officials to call for a 'full, transparent investigation'.
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The vehicle destroyed by the mine that killed an American paramedic and injured two other people
The OSCE said the killing was the first death of one of its members while on patrol in Ukraine, where more than 700 international observers help report on a simmering conflict that has deeply strained relations between Russia and the West.
US State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the killing underscored the increasingly dangerous conditions under which the OSCE mission operated, including grappling with 'access restrictions, threats, and harassment'.
He added: 'The United States urges Russia to use its influence with the separatists to allow the OSCE to conduct a full, transparent, and timely investigation.'
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson also spoke about the incident on Sunday with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who offered his condolences.
A 2015 ceasefire between Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists in the eastern part of the country is regularly violated, and Washington cites the conflict as a key obstacle to improved relations between Russia and the United States.
'This tragic incident makes clear the need for all sides - and particularly the Russian-led separatist forces - to implement their commitments under the Minsk agreements immediately,' Toner said.
The car is pictured at a gas station after being removed from the scene. The US has called for a 'full, transparent investigation' into the blast in eastern Ukraine
The Minsk peace agreement, brokered by France and Germany and signed by Russia and Ukraine in February 2015, calls for a ceasefire, the withdrawal of heavy weapons from the front line and constitutional reform to give eastern Ukraine more autonomy.
But since signing deal the sides appear stuck in a stalemate |
yle seat for Sinn Fein in Thursday’s election, said thousands of men from across Ireland fought and died at the Battle of Messines.
"The First World War is part of our shared history and it is important to recognise its significance and remember those who were killed,” she said.
"Tomorrow, alongside former Speaker of the Assembly Michel McLaughlin and Martina Anderson MEP, I will attend a memorial event in the Diamond in Derry to remember all of those from across the island of Ireland killed at Messines.
"I previously attended this memorial as mayor, also alongside Mitchel McLaughlin, and tomorrow I will attend it as MP for everyone in the city.
"While, as Irish republicans we regard the First World War as an imperialist conflict which led to the slaughter of millions of people, it is important to remember its importance in our history, particularly to the unionist community.
"Everyone has a right to remember their dead in a dignified and respectful manner."The Supreme Court told the Centre on Monday that if Genetically Modified (GM) mustard crop has an adverse impact on the other crops, it would injunct its commercial release till it decides the petition seeking a moratorium on growing the crop.
“You should undertake that you won’t plant it, rather than this court giving an order,” a bench headed by Chief Justice JS Khehar told additional solicitor general Tushar Mehta who said he would file a detailed affidavit to clear the apprehensions aired by the judges.
“We want to know everything about it (GM mustard). Why it is that Europe doesn’t accept it at all,” the court asked the law officer, who promised to file documents by Friday. The court said it will hear the matter again on July 31.
The bench is hearing activist Aruna Rodrigues’s petition asking for a stay on the commercial release of GM mustard crop, which was cleared by regulator GEAC. Mustard is one of India’s most important winter crops, which is sown between mid-October and late November.
Her counsel, advocate Prashant Bhushan pointed to the top court-appointed expert committee’s report and said the panel had held against cultivation of crop engineered to tolerate Herbicide, including HT Mustard and its parent lines. The Technical Expert Committee (TEC) had also said no GM seed should be allowed for which India is Centre of origin or centre of biodiversity.
Thirdly, Bhushan argued, the regulatory body is riddled with conflict of interest. Therefore, he questioned the permission granted to the commercial release of GM Mustard.
Although Mehta tried to convince the court that the government was still considering the commercial release of the crop and had not taken any final decision, the court asked him to supply scientific data to support the regulator’s approval.
“What he (Bhushan) is saying is that he is also supported by our panel’s report. Your regulator might have said yes but the committee appointed by us doesn’t approve it,” the CJI told Mehta.
First Published: Jul 24, 2017 23:25 ISTAn ambitious and controversial plan to handle the large number of Syrian refugees looking for new, safer homes away from the civil war raging in their home country would look to invest in refugees rather than simply gathering humanitarian aid for the group. The money would be raised on financial markets and would be focused on countries like Jordan and Lebanon, the two countries with the highest populations of Syrian refugees.
Humanitarian aid groups are pushing for provisions in the plan, which has been dubbed the “Mideast Marshall Plan,” that would require those two countries to legally allow Syrians to work, according to an Associated Press report published Monday. The idea is that if Syrians are allowed to work, they will be better integrated into the host community and form stronger bonds within their new communities.
“We need to be ambitious,” Ferid Belhaj, the regional chief of the World bank, said. “Development is key.”
The work provisions for the Syrian refugees are particularly controversial because Jordan and Lebanon both have high levels of domestic unemployment. Putting a quickly growing population fueled by refugee movement to work would strain an already struggling system. Still, the investments have been touted as a way to improve the lives of both the refugees and the host populations in the two countries.
The Syrian refugee crisis has come under increased scrutiny in the days since the Friday night Paris terror attacks in which 129 people were killed in coordinated shootings and bombings throughout France’s capital city. A Syrian passport was found near the body of a bomber who blew himself up near the Stade de France, where the French national soccer team was playing Germany. Ahmad al-Mohammad, 25, who owned the passport, reportedly entered Europe by travelling along a refugee route through the Balkans before being registered in Greece. Some leaders in the continent linked the attacks to the crisis.
Meanwhile borders had already been tightened along eurozone countries, including in Belgium, Italy and France. That tightening was done at least in part to locate attackers who might be on the loose. Other countries, including Poland, Latvia, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, have all explicitly blamed the crisis for the attacks, according to Time.The run-up to a big makeover in the city of Los Angeles' trash-hauling policy is leaving some customers in the lurch.
In July, the 144 private companies that currently haul garbage from commercial clients in Los Angeles will be slashed to just seven companies, each awarded an exclusive territory to serve.
But the transition is not going smoothly for everyone.
In a few cases, trash from businesses, apartments and condos in the San Fernando Valley went uncollected for days or weeks when one of the city's biggest haulers – one that did not win a lucrative city franchise – saw its drivers hired away by a competitor that did win a franchise.
It wasn't clear exactly how many trash customers have been stranded in the transition from open market to a franchise system, but L.A. Sanitation's Citywide Recycling Division Manager Karen Coka said the 3-1-1 telephone helpline received 128 complaint calls in the past two weeks.
She said businesses whose pickups are delayed or ignored can call 3-1-1 for help. If a private hauler cannot be contracted quickly to remove the garbage, the city will pick it up, Coca said.
Councilman Mitchell Englander cautioned that the number was likely to rise the closer the city gets to the big switchover from a patchwork of hauling companies to the franchise system.
"A lot of these small haulers are just closing their doors, without any notice and leaving their accounts abandoned, nobody to pick up their trash," Englander said.
Last year, the City Council divided Los Angeles into 11 zones and awarded seven companies exclusive franchises for commercial trash pickup in those areas. The seven companies take over trash service citywide on July 1, transitioning customers onto their service through the end of the year.
About 15 percent of the city’s businesses and multi-family dwellings use one of the haulers who are being forced out of the city when the franchise deal begins. Other businesses that are served by one of the franchise winners will also have to switch venders if a different company was chosen to serve their territory.
The seven franchise holders have been busy in recent months, buying new equipment and arranging to take over customer accounts from other franchisees and the non-franchise companies that will lose their customers.
For example, Athens Services clients in the San Fernando Valley will be switched over to Waste Management, which won the franchise for that area, and Waste Management will transfer its clients in Athens’ new territory to that company.
But while that activity is happening in the background, other companies that did not win franchises are grappling with the need to shut down their services.
One such company is Recology, a Northern California-based company that served some businesses and apartments in the San Fernando Valley.
Recology service was interrupted in late April after 15 of its drivers were hired away to a competitor company that had won a city franchise and was staffing up, said Recology spokesman Eric Potashner.
Recology had begun the process of bidding for a franchise, but withdrew from contention months ago because it would not have been a profitable business for the company to meet the city's requirements for low-emission trucks and improved waste handling buildings, Potashner said.
The company has sold its client accounts to franchise winner Athens Services. Recology, one of the largest trash haulers in Los Angeles, will halt its garbage collection service but keep its composting business in Kern County, he said. Food waste collected by Los Angeles franchise winning haulers could be disposed of and composted in Kern County, he said.
Waste Management was awarded two of the eleven franchise zones, covering the west and southeast San Fernando Valley, encompassing more than 15,500 commercial customers. The company is investing about $70 million in new equipment and recycling processes including a new trash handling site in Sun Valley, said Dough Corcoran, director for public sector sales.
The number of abandoned customers forced to switch haulers before the July 1 franchise agreement requires the transition seems to be small so far, he said.
The City Council approved the franchise deal last year, expecting several benefits. Some 144 commercial waste haulers who could collect garbage anywhere in the city meant that garbage trucks from competing companies would roll through alleys and city streets several times a day and week.
With a single company assigned to a service area, the thinking was, pickups would be fewer and better coordinated, with less truck pollution. The companies winning the franchises were to pay higher wages, and impose stricter conditions on recycling and waste processing.Former governor William Weld credited Gary Johnson with ensuring his nod as vice presidential nominee.
A day after eking out the nomination to be the Libertarian Party’s vice presidential candidate, William F. Weld was feeling a bit giddy.
“It was a landslide,” the former Massachusetts governor joked in a telephone interview on Monday afternoon as he boarded a plane in Orlando, where the long-struggling party held its political convention over the weekend.
Weld prevailed with little over 50 percent of the vote on the second ballot. On the first ballot, he led a field of five candidates but failed to capture a majority. The former Republican was booed and accused by one opponent of having “sold his soul to the GOP.”
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Weld’s bruising victory came after he was compelled to pledge lifelong allegiance to his new party — twice — and with heavy lobbying by Gary Johnson, the former Republican governor of New Mexico, who won the Libertarian nomination as the presidential candidate for a second time on Sunday.
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“Gary pulled me through,” Weld said Monday. “I would have never made it otherwise. I understand people’s reticence.”
Asked why he became a Libertarian, a decision he made only a few days before the convention, Weld said: “I think we represent a third way. We’re different than the other two parties. We’re fiscally the most conservative, and we’re socially inclusive and tolerant, which is not really the platform of the Republican Party.”
In past elections, the Libertarian Party has held little sway over the national electorate. Johnson, who ran for president as the Libertarian candidate in 2012, garnered about just 1 percent of the vote.
But with many Republicans uncomfortable with Donald Trump as their standard-bearer, Weld and others hope they will look to the Libertarians as an alternative.
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Weld cited recent polls suggesting that his new party may do better this November. A Fox News poll this month, for example, found Johnson would win 10 percent of the national vote in a three-way race between Trump and Hillary Clinton, who’s leading the race to be the Democratic Party’s nominee.
“We believe in ourselves, and we believe our mix of policy positions appeals to about half the country,” he said.
“But if we can’t get into the presidential debates, it would be extraordinarily difficult to win.”
Weld, 70, was a former federal prosecutor who served as governor from 1991 to 1997. He resigned after President Clinton nominated him to be ambassador to Mexico, but his nomination was blocked by then Republican Senator Jesse Helms, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Weld endorsed Barack Obama for president in 2008 and had alienated Libertarians in New York in 2006, when he considered running for governor there. He had accepted the Libertarian endorsement and then dropped out of the race after losing the nomination for the Republican Party.
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Weld, who most recently worked as a lobbyist and government affairs adviser at Mintz Levin in Boston, said the Libertarians’ key to winning the election was polling well enough to be allowed into the debates.
The Commission on President Debates, a private firm, requires candidates to garner at least 15 percent support in an average of five selected national polls.
Weld called that threshold a Catch-22.
“That’s fine, if the pollsters put us in the polls,” he said.
Kevin Kolczynski/Reuters Libertarian Party members handed out voting cards to the delegates at its convention in Orlando, Fla., Sunday.
Weld said he and Johnson plan to campaign heavily in western and northeastern states, such as New Mexico and New Hampshire, both of which are swing states.
He declined to comment further on the party’s strategy, though he said: “Being a spoiler is not a strategy.”
Steve Koczela, president of MassINC Polling Group in Boston, said it wouldn’t take much for the Libertarians to have a significant impact on the election.
“If they get what they’re polling now, they would certainly have an impact,” he said.
However, it remains unclear whether the Johnson-Weld ticket would benefit Republicans or Democrats. Koczela cited a recent poll he took in New Hampshire that found a third of the electorate firmly for Trump, a third strongly for Clinton, and a third who said they would prefer another candidate.
“Because both candidates are historically unpopular, there’s a lot of space for a third party candidate that’s never been there before,” Koczela said.
But he said he expects the Libertarians would do more damage to Trump, as they would provide a slate for those Republicans who have been turned off by Trump’s demagoguery.
Weld already has lobbed criticism at Trump, comparing his proposal to deport some 11 million undocumented immigrants to Nazi tactics.
Weld already has lobbed criticism at Trump, comparing his proposal to deport some 11 million undocumented immigrants to Nazi tactics. In a Globe interview earlier this month, he likened it to Kristallnacht, the 1938 pogrom against Jews.
Over the weekend, Trump dismissed the dig with one of his own directed at Weld.
“I don’t talk about his alcoholism, so why would he talk about my foolishly perceived fascism?” he told the Times through a spokeswoman.
Asked by CNN on Monday to respond to Trump’s statement, Weld said: “I’m just going to let that ride.”
Before leaving Orlando, Weld said he expects the Libertarians’ polling to increase. “I’d be surprised if we didn’t get to 15 percent,” he said.
Weld also reflected on the zaniness at the weekend convention, which included a large bearded man taking the stage to perform a striptease.
“I didn’t think he had much style,” he said. “I’ve seen better at [Harvard’s] Hasty Pud-ding.”
David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @davabelRAFAH, Gaza Strip — Dozens of high school students scrambled among the sand dunes here in recent days, learning how to shoot AK-47 rifles, crawl under barbed wire and jump over burning tires. Their bearded commanders barked at those who were too slow in hoisting iron bars overhead or those who hesitated around the thick flames.
Having seen two major Israeli military operations in Gaza in their short lives, many of the teenagers came to this boot camp, which is run by Hamas, the Islamic militant group that has led Gaza since 2007, to prepare for what they see as the inevitable next round.
“By then, I should be ready and know how to deal with the Israeli soldier’s gun when I pick it up from the ground,” said Mohammed Ghanem, 15. If the Israelis do not make another incursion into Gaza, he said, “we will go to fight them on the border.”
The six-day program, Futuwwa, enrolled about 13,000 boys at nearly a dozen sites across the Gaza Strip over the past week, with trainers from the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. It was the first time the program had taken place during a school break, and it grew out of an elective that has been offered in Gaza’s high schools since 2012 that consists mainly of lectures about weapons, street-fighting techniques, fitness and Israel’s recruitment of spies.NOT everyone is keen to brave the freezing temperatures of Norway to see the Northern Lights, but surfer Mick Fanning has taken the journey one step further — by surfing under them.
The three time ASP world champion braved the sub zero temperatures to surf the waves under the aurora borealis at Lofoten, and the two Norwegian photographers who convinced him to do so just weeks before, worked to capture some stunning photos.
media_camera Mick Fanning under the bright lights of Norway. Photo: Emil Sollie and Mats Grimsæth
For two years the photographers Emil Sollie and Mats Grimsæth tried to figure out how they could pull off photographing someone surfing under the northern lights.
“To shoot a picture of surfing under the Northern Lights, there are so many elements that have to come together at the same time,” Mr Sollie said.
media_camera Mick Fanning enjoying the Norwegian set-up. Photo: Mats Grimsæth
“Technically, this is one of the hardest pictures to capture.”
On the third day in their trip at midnight, Mr Fanning donned the wetsuit and slipped into the waves.
“You can imagine,” Mr Fanning said.
media_camera Mick Fanning surfing in Norway. Photo: Mats Grimsæth
“Half asleep, jumping in a wetsuit, and then just being wowed by all this stuff.
“It’s something I’ll remember forever.”
Mr Grimsæth said he could never have imagined doing this project with Mick Fanning.
“Suddenly, I’m going to Lofoten with a world champion,” he said.
Originally published as Fanning’s epic surf under Northern LightsTwo of the experts on the trail of Hunted’s fugitives – 2nd in command Peter Bleksley, a former undercover police officer and ace investigator, and cyber security specialist Paul Vlissidis, technical director of global information security firm NCC Group – help us come up with a list of dos and don’ts for those who want to vanish.
Bleksley and Vlissidis agreed the number one thing to do is ditch your mobile phone. Around 70 per cent us in the UK have a smartphone, most of which transmit a GPS signal of our current location, or apps that do so.
“As soon as you make a digital connection with your phone,” says Vlissidis, the apps are up and running and giving info away about you. People often give these apps permission to geographically locate them without realising it.”
“Basically a mobile phone is akin to having a tracking device on you,” says Bleksley. “Even if location services are disabled the state has the means to track you.”
Timescale: minutes. “There has to be some communication between the mobile phone company and law enforcement,” says Bleksley. “But in a mission critical situation – life or death – the red tape is cut through and police are given that info in as close to real time as possible. “
Don’t: use bank cards
“You wouldn’t want to be using any kind of cards.” says Vlissidis. “Or your ApplyPay device unless you really want to get picked up quickly,” “If you have time to plan, gather quantities of cash.
Timescale: minutes. “If a bank card or account is flagged by us that account is monitored 24/7” says Bleksley. “The minute there is any activity the information is quickly passed to the police,” says Bleksley. “Systems have been honed over the years to ensure that information comes almost instantly. From there it’s a just question of how quickly officers on the ground can move.”
Do: torch your tablet, lay waste to your laptop, pulverise your PC
“Before you run try and eliminate your digital footprint, which is difficult,” says Vlissidis. “We can gain an extraordinary amount of information from accessing accounts, social media etc. If you planned your escape, it will be in your search engine history.” If you asked questions online, there will be a record. “Anyone who thinks that private chats on social networks are actually private is an idiot. Even if you deactivate your account, it disappears from public view but all the information is still there and generally the state has the ability to access it.”
Don’t: phone home
With police monitoring your family and friends, this is an instant giveaway. 93 percent of police requests to access phone calls or emails are granted. Last year they peaked at just below 250,000.
“This would be the most difficult thing for me,” says Bleksley, who himself spent two years in witness protection after a contract was put out on him. “Fugitives find it incredibly difficult to cut themselves off from friends, family, loved ones. The lure is incredibly strong.”
Don’t: check your emails
“Email is tremendously useful, says Vlissidis. “We can monitor accounts and the second you log on it will be flagged and we can tell immediately where you’re coming from by reversing the IP address.
Timescale: It’s only a matter of minutes generally speaking. If you’re using a wireless system it might take a little longer – but not much. You can use systems like Tor that’s designed to anonymise you but the truth is, if we’re sitting on your email and we see you log in, and you’re using, say, a mobile phone for access then there are ways for us to track it.”
Do: worry about CCTV
Britain has one CCTV camera for every 11 people. It is estimated that the average city dweller is caught on CCTV 70 times a day.
“The majority of city centre CCTV systems are owned by local authorities and operated by police employees,” says Bleksley. “The systems are very, very extensive. In some you can track people from the moment they enter a city.”
Timescale: “It’s simply a question of how quickly a human can impart that information to officers on the ground.” Although the likelihood of being identified by CCTV alone is small unless operators already know you are in the area, once your presence is flagged by other sources CCTV is the No 1 means for tracking you.
Don’t: worry about facial recognition technology
“It is one area of forensic science which is in its infancy,” says Bleksley, “but I’m sure in the years to come it will become prevalent.”
Do: travel by bus or train
As they take cash, but avoid station CCTV.
Don’t: use motorways
The Highways Agency operates an Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) camera system with around 8,000 cameras. On the major road networks you are never more than 15 miles away from an ANPR camera.
Timescale: “It’s a nationwide police resource and operates instantly,” says Bleksley. “There are also many private APNR systems, say, in supermarket car parks. In those the process can be a little lengthier because providers have to be brought on board.”
Do: disguise your physical appearance
“After technology, our best weapon is 100,000 pairs of eyes and ears on the ground – policemen plus the public who often are an enormous help. There’s also the massive media machine that the police are able to call upon.” So, delete any online photos. The less recognisable you are the better.
Do: plan ahead
Accumulate as much cash as you can in the weeks, preferably months, running up to departure. Plan your escape offline as much as possible. Prepare disguises, alternative identities. Share your plans with no one, unless it is to arrange communication channels. “The longer you’ve got before you run the better chance you have,” says Vlissidis. But stay away from tech. Roll the clocks back 15 years and pretend the internet doesn’t exist. If you have to devise a strategy for communicating with loved ones keep it old school – intermediaries, dead letter drops, proper spooks stuff.”
Don’t: assume rural is remote
You’ll stand out like a sore thumb in small communities, and sleeping rough/living wild is hard to keep up for any amount of time even if you’re trained. “I don’t think staying off grid necessarily means the back of beyond,” says Vlissidis. “That would be difficult for an extended period of time. I’d probably look at lower grade accommodation, things like hostels, B&B’s that take cash – old school basically.
Do: be strong
We all lay down patterns that can expose us, but the sheer psychological slog of keeping up the mask is tough. Maintaining an assumed identity can mess with your head too. “Living the adopted life of a completely different person in a strange environment, dreading leaving my front door, having to layer lie upon lie upon lie,” as Bleksley describes it. Longer term, this is the thing that will get you caught.
It's fair to say I'd last about ten mins. I'd be so excited about getting away from my kids I wouldn't make it further than the pub #Hunted — Katy Brent (@Littlemisskatyb) September 10, 2015
Don’t: whatever you do, challenge people to find you
In 2009 Wired magazine offered a bounty of $5,000 to anyone who could locate journalist Evan Ratiff during his attempt to vanish for 28 days. The internet community’s response was extraordinary, as was his story – a cautionary tale for any wannabe fugitive.Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, who during Yom Kippur War feared the "destruction of the temple," suggested the use of a nuclear option in a dramatic meeting on second day of war. This came to light in archived interviews carried out by Israeli nuclear researcher Professor Avner Cohen, Yedioth Ahronoth has revealed.
Avner Cohen's research reveals that Dayan pressed to have Israel's nuclear forces prepare for a nuclear power "demonstration," but Prime Minister Golda Meir and others at the Defense Ministry meeting in Tel Aviv rejected the idea, and no such action was taken. However, research shows that minor actions were taken relating to Israeli nuclear weapons in that war.
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According to the testimony of Arnon 'Sini' Azaryahu, then a close adviser to Minister Yisrael Galili – one of the four who were present at that meeting – he waited for his boss outside the office of Meir on the morning or afternoon of October 7. Azaryahu, who gave testimony in a video interview to Avner Cohen, said that after the meeting Galili told him about the dramatic moments.
Galili said then to Sini that just before the end of the meeting, which dealt with the progress of the Syrian forces in the Golan Heights and the dispatch of the former Chief of Staff Haim Bar-Lev to examine the northern front – and after several senior participants had left the room, including former Chief of Staff David Elazar – Dayan turned to Golda Meir.
He asked her if she would agree allow the head of Israel's nuclear agency, Shalheveth Freier, to join the gathering of minds, which included Meir and three other ministers – Dayan, Galili and Yigal Alon. This was in order to discuss “displays of power” – a showing of the nuclear capabilities of Israel. Research says that it is not clear if the presentation was intended for the Americans, the Soviets or the Arabs.
According to Galili, who shared this with Azaryahu, Dayan did not ask this inner cabinet to approve the "displays of power.” However, he did ask Meir to authorize that nuclear agency head Freier could carry out necessary preparations for such a display, should it be needed, in order to shorten the timeframe from hours to minutes. In the end, the idea was rejected.
The full story will appear on Friday in Yedioth Ahronoth
Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and TwitterQuarterback Michael O’Connor of Ottawa was scheduled to start classes on the first day of the winter semester at Penn State University on Monday.
That’s news of a moderate degree at home, but news of apparently gigantic importance for committed followers of the Penn State Nittany Lions football team.
O’Connor, who attended Ashbury College before spending what amounted to about a year and a half at U.S. prep schools in Tennessee and Florida, had been tagged a “four-star recruit” and had been considered a plum pickup by the Nittany Lions program that has been rebuilding ever since the explosive sexual abuse scandal involving former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky.
However, the head coach who had begun that rebuilding process, Bill O’Brien, left recently and took the head coach’s position with the National Football League’s Houston Texans. On top of that, O’Brien had also been the offensive co-ordinator, and the quarterback coach had left in December.
Reports suggested that O’Connor might be re-thinking commitment to enroll at Penn State, but his father, John, said Michael was just in a holding pattern until the Nittany Lions had hired a new head coach.
While in Florida for a high school football all-star game in early January, Michael O’Connor told a reporter for a U.S.-based sports website that he hoped Penn State would look at Vanderbilt head coach James Franklin, with whom he had a good recruiting meeting sometime during the initial recruiting process.
Franklin got the job on Jan. 11, and one day later O’Connor made one of his relatively rare appearances on Twitter: “100% committed to PSU!! Wouldn’t wanna be anywhere else in the country, feels good to be done with recruiting. Start college classes tmrw.”
In enrolling at Penn State, O’Connor became the second quarterback on scholarship on the Nittany Lions’ roster, the other being Christian Hackenberg, who had a very good first season.
Three other new recruits, like O’Connor, also sped up their high school studies so they could graduate earlier than usual and, thus, enroll early at Penn State. They’ll supposedly join the football team’s winter strength and conditioning program and participate in spring practice, which concludes with an intrasquad game on April 12.
The Nittany Lions, with seven returning starters on offence and 15 overall, play their first game of the 2014 season against the University of Central Florida at Dublin, Ireland, on Aug. 30.
Nice road trip.STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The search continues for a Dongan Hills man who vanished four days before the Super Bowl -- and now police sources tell the Advance that investigators are looking into whether his disappearance is connected to a high-stakes betting pool he ran.
John Kambakakis had run a Super Bowl pool for many years, and may have been carrying a "large amount of money" at the time of his disappearance, sources said.
Kambahakis, a father of two, was seen around 8 a.m. Wednesday outside of the 7-Eleven on Seaview Avenue and Hylan Boulevard, not far from his home on Cromwell Avenue, and then again at 10 a.m. at Mike Hinsch's diner at 8518 5th Ave. in Brooklyn, his daughter, Kristina, told the Advance.
Kambakakis was friends with the diner's owner, spoke with the owner's son, and he was shown on surveillance footage from the restaurant at that time, she said. He was wearing a black Carhartt hooded jacket.
No one has seen him since, his daughter said said.
Kambakakis' disappearance has sparked several days of searches by family members, friends and members of the Port Richmond Community Emergency Response Team.
A Facebook page has been created to help organize the grassroots effort to locate him.
One person who emailed the Advance and requested anonymity and SILive.com commenters who claimed to have knowledge of the pool estimated it was for $20,000-$25,000 and included many employees of Staten Island University Hospital in Ocean Breeze, where Kambakakis was a popular employee until retiring last year.
Another person, a former co-worker, feared that his traditional pool could have possibly made him a target.
"It's a shame, he's a good guy but he always carried a lot of money on him and people knew it, so we're thinking the worst," the former co-worker said.
His daughter Kristina said she was unaware of the pool and the possibility he was carrying a lot of money on him as a result.
"I don't think so, but people are saying that," she said. "I don't know. There's a lot of things going around, different stories, some of them are ridiculous so I really can't listen to them."
-- John Annese, Maura Grunlund and Kristen Dalton contributed to this report.The last year has been a year for the record books. With the US credit crisis dominating headlines for nearly 24 months straight, a global slowdown has caused a whole slew of smaller disasters from crumbling currencies to governmental bailouts. As we end the year chock full of pessimistic memories, investors can only hope that 2009 will be a deserved rest from a tumultuous 2008.
1. Iceland Economic Failure
A model example for historians and economists for years to come, the economy of Iceland fell into economic depression as a result of financial sector failure. As a result, the local currency, the krona, collapsed by almost 40 percent as traders sold the currency against the euro over the span of a few days. The instability led UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown in threatening legal action against the country’s banks as their actions were deemed “totally unacceptable and illegal”.
Economic failure of Iceland left the world stunned. How did Iceland fail?:
BusinessWeek starts by blaming the banks and mounting international debt
One economist blames poor economic policies and bad inflation targets was a start
Wall Street Journal sees Iceland as having taken too much risk for such a small nation
NY Times tries to figure out how a country like Iceland can go bankrupt
2. Citigroup Shares Pummeled
In 2008, financial shares were completely beaten down by the market as risk remained too high to hold these stocks. One unlucky firm was Citigroup, the bank lost almost 80 percent of its price in a matter of weeks. With no short term recovery in site, the government had no choice but to step in and save the failing bank to the tune of a $306 billion guarantee.
What do people think of the Citi bailout?
New Yorkers are furious about the bailout and find it to be wasteful
President Bush says that there will be as many bailouts as it takes
Christian Science Monitor says the Citigroup bailout isn’t enough
3. Crumbling Ruble
A flight to safety helped the US dollar gain against the Russian ruble, bringing the currency down to approximately 11 percent from its summer high. With all the hoopla surrounding risky assets, investors sought safe haven greenbacks as the revisit of the 1998 devaluation loomed heavy.
Follow the fallout:
November: Russia’s inability to stop a freefall is becoming more apparant
December: Ruble is at a record low against the Euro
January: Russia’s neighbors are under pressure from the devaluation of the ruble
4. Global Interest Rate Cut
On October 8th, in a move to stem the global contagion of the US credit crisis, central banks in multiple G-10 countries coordinated efforts to lower interest rates. Among them were notable economies including the US, Europe, UK, Canada and Switzerland. Unfortunately, the FX markets only found temporary support before moving lower again.
International rate cuts:
5. Sinking South Korean Won
The South Korean Won became one of the worst performing currencies for the year as traders sided with the safe haven character of the US greenback. However, making things worse were local exporters. Businesses worried about higher costs of a lower currency hoarded the US dollar while simultaneously kicking the won to the curb.
Timeline of the South Korean Won Performance:
May: South Korean Won falls to a two year low in its worst performing day in nearly ten years
October: South Korean Won at the lowest level in a decade
November: Investors continue to dump South Korean Won
January: South Korean Won down 3%
6. January Surprise – Fed Cuts Rates On Jan 21st.
On January 21st, the Fed surprised markets by cutting interest rates by 75 basis points in order to stem further volatility and loss. The decision followed a tumultuous session in the global markets as major indices around the world experienced an average decline of 7.2 percent.
Speculation on what January 21, 2008 interest rate cut means for the US economy:
Fortune magazine wonders if the cure is worse than the disease. They may have been right
Business reporters consider how this is going to effect the economy long term.
7. Global Market Downturn
When it was all said and done, global stock market losses were in double digits as traders unloaded risky assets en masse. Major stock indices continued to flash red as the Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500, Xetra Dax, FTSE 100 and Nikkei were now an average 41 percent lower than the beginning of the year. The same could be said of the carry trade crosses. Once a highly touted investment, the GBPJPY currency pair was now sitting below 135.00 compared to aspirations of 250.00 just months ago.
How did global stock markets fair in 2008?
Nikkei ended 2008 down 42% for the worst year on record
FTSE 100 has worst year since inception in 1984
Globally, there are record stock market falls with Dow Jones losing 34% of its value
8. Lehman Failure
The biggest failure of an investment bank since the days of Drexel Burnham Lambert, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers spelled disaster for the US financial sector as it showed no bank or firm was resilient to market and financial forces. The ultimate result showed one of the world’s most revered financial institutions being split apart as the stock price plunged to mere cents on the dollar.
How could Lehman go bankrupt?:
Lehman Brothers becomes the largest causality of the credit crisis
BBC tries to make sense of the Lehman bankruptcy and partially blames the panic of worried investors
Wall Street Journal blames Paulson for letting Lehman Brothers fall
9. Bear Stearns Bailout
One of the first big headlines to hit the ticker in the beginning of the year, Bear Stearns was being bailed out by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and competitor JP Morgan Chase. The resolution came after the investment bank reported two of its hedge funds sustained heavy |
".
In a blistering submission to a Senate inquiry examining the controversy, former solicitor-general Gavan Griffith, QC, said the change brought to mind "the image of a dog on a lead".Three men aged 19 and 20, and an 18-year-old woman, were arrested after the collision in Sherman, New York state, when several containers of alcohol were found in their buggy. The legal drinking age in New York is 21.
The Amish are a Christian community known for their simple lifestyle, shunning modern technology and retaining 18th century forms of dress.
Their way of life was made famous by the film Witness, in which a police officer played by Harrison Ford moves in with an Amish family in order to protect a little boy who is the only witness to a murder.
The four youngsters are alleged to have been at an under age drinking party on a back road near the state border with Pennsylvania, where most Amish families live, when they set out for a drive in two carriages.
As the buggies allegedly wove across a public road, one, driven by Marty Troyer, 20, with Marianne Troyer, 18, and Marvin Byler, 19, as passengers, collided with a Chautauqua County Sheriff's Department patrol car which was on its way to investigate reports of illegal drinking.
The buggy flipped over, trapping Byler's leg and leading a horse to become lose. Twenty-year-old Leroy Troyer, who was driving the second buggy, was also arrested.
A number of other horse-drawn carriages with young people in them are said to have fled the scene.
The three Troyers are related but do not live in the same house. Byler was not seriously injured in the collision.
All four are due to appear in Sherman Town Court at a later date.Advertisement Shark bite victim: 'I'm not going to stop surfing' Tristen Durham, 14, shares story after bite at New Smyrna Beach Share Shares Copy Link Copy
A teen talked Thursday about the moment when a shark clamped down on his foot while surfing in Volusia County.Tristen Durham, 14, said he was bitten while surfing near the jetty at New Smyrna Beach.Just hours after surgery, Tristen said he remembers the moment the shark sank its teeth into his leg."I was blown away. I didn't think I would be bit. I didn't even believe it at first," Tristen said.Tristen was surfing with his friends Wednesday and had been in the water for about an hour when the shark bit his right foot."I started ripping my foot away from it, and it wouldn't let go, so I just had to rip it out of its mouth," Tristen said.According to beach officials, it's the fifth shark bite in Volusia County in 2014. All of the bites happened in the same area at a beach dubbed the shark bite capital of the world."At first, when I got bit, it didn't hurt as bad. I was all adrenaline, so when I was paddling in, I didn't even feel it. (I) just looked at my foot, and I (saw) it, and I felt really weird. I didn't want to look at it again. I was going to pass out," Tristen said.Tristen was taken to Halifax Health Medical Center in Daytona Beach and had two tendons repaired during surgery."Worst phone call of my life. Honestly, you just never want your kids to be hurt," mother Angela Golden said.Golden said she couldn't believe it happened."We're thankful to the Lord that he's here with us right now, and it was just a bit and nothing worse," Golden said.Tristen has been surfing since he was 3 years old. He said he can't wait to get out of his hospital bed and back on his surfboard."I'll be out there when it heals," Tristen said. "I'm not going to stop surfing because of one shark."Doctors said Tristen should recover in about six weeks.Please enable Javascript to watch this video
WASHINGTON -- Senator Chris Murphy took to the Senate floor Wednesday morning to demand action on gun violence in the wake of the Orlando nightclub attack.
I'm speaking on the Senate floor to honor the victims of the Orlando attack & demand the Senate address gun violence. #Enough — Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) June 15, 2016
"I'm speaking on the Senate floor to honor the victims of the Orlando attack & demand the Senate address gun violence. #Enough," Sen. Murphy tweeted.
But this is no brief statement.
"I am prepared to stand on the Senate floor and talk about the need to prevent gun violence for as long as I can. I've had #Enough," he tweeted just after 11:30 a.m.
I am prepared to stand on the Senate floor and talk about the need to prevent gun violence for as long as I can. I've had #Enough — Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) June 15, 2016
Murphy concluded his statement just after 2 a.m. Thursday.
Sen. Murphy and Sen. Richard Blumenthal worked a "back and forth" style to continue holding the senate floor. More than three dozen other lawmakers took part as well, including two Republicans.
My colleagues & I are holding the Senate floor to call for action to address #GunViolence in America. Watch: https://t.co/1kZaVnuUBZ #ENOUGH — Richard Blumenthal (@SenBlumenthal) June 15, 2016
You can watch them here.
Sen. Murphy is calling for gun control reform to expand background checks and close the terror gap, to prevent people on the FBI's Terrorist Watch List from buying guns.
"If Senator Murphy and his allies can pass a bill that deals with the terrorists and can get a vote on the senate floor on a bill that deals with the gun show loophole, those two things in and of themselves would be more progress than anyone has foreseen and has seen in decades on Capitol Hill," Political analyst Bill Curry said. "I think they’re actually gonna get a bill out of this and no one saw that coming."
Curry said filibusters are rare, but this one was also unexpected.
"If anyone had said a year ago or a week ago that there would have been one bipartisan bill that would make it through this deeply divided congress in an election year, nobody would have said it would have ever been about gun safety," he said.
On Tuesday, Congressman Jim Himes protested in favor of stiffer gun control laws by walking out of the House chamber during a moment of silence for the victims of the nightclub shooting.
Click here for complete coverage of the Orlando terror attack.
38.907192 -77.036871I made a prediction about a year ago that if there was to be poll rigging by the media and polling outfits, this would be the year they’d try to get away with it. Why? Because Trump is THAT BIG A THREAT to the existing globalist order.
Mostly people scoffed and said “nah that’s just your confirmation bias” or somesuch shitlib fallacy du jour explanation. OH RILLY?
Here’s objective, hard proof that the polls are rigged, by way of examination of the most recent NBC/WSJ poll which claims to have found an 11-point lead for thecunt.
Besides the blatantly flawed methodology (oversampling Dems, undersampling Independents), the Hillary campaign’s super-PAC “Priorities USA” PAID OFF the NBC/WSJ pollsters to the tune of $220,500 in the month of September!
*drop the skype*
The leftoid media hivemind and their hired polling outfits are THROWING AWAY the last vestiges of their credibility in a final, desperate Pickett’s Charge to thwart Donald Trump’s bid for the presidency. Their strategy is DEMORALIZE THE ENEMY 101. Push fake phony fraudulent polls that make Trump look set for a guaranteed loss, and his supporters will become disheartened and sit home on election day.
The media is lying through their teeth and rigging polls to change the outcome of a Presidential election.
This is new.
This is dangerous.
This is how civil wars start and countries tear apart.
The leftoid hate machine has been warned. I predict they will double down. And it won’t end well.In July, 2005, I asked a member of a Baghdad-based military bomb squad about the radio-frequency jammers his team was using to cut off signals to Iraq's remotely detonated explosives. His response: "I can't even begin to say the first fucking thing about 'em." A few days later, one of those jammers seemed to save me and him from getting blown up. Months after that, David Axe was thrown out of Iraq by the U.S. military, for a blog post which mentioned the Warlock family of jammers.
So I was more than a little surprised, when I saw that Wikileaks* *had posted a classified report, outlining how the Warlock Red and Warlock Green jammers work with — and interfere with — military communications systems. The report, dated 2004, gives specific information about how the jammers function, their radiated power and which frequencies they stop. That Baghdad bomb tech would've put his fist through a wall, if he saw it out in public.
Today, the leak isn't quite so serious. Those Warlock Green and Warlock Red jammers have been largely — but not completely — superseded by newer models. And those newer models have largely wiped out the remotely detonated bomb threat in Iraq.
But still, the leaked report raises important questions about what information — if any — is too sensitive to disclose.
Steven Aftergood, the Federation of American Scientists' longtime advocate for open government, believes the site has gone too far. "Wikileaks says that it publishes restricted documents that are 'of substantial political, diplomatic or ethical significance.' Its publication makes sense only from the perspective that all secrecy is wrong and should be resisted. It's not a perspective that I share."
Wikileaks* co-founder Julian Assange, not surprisingly, has a completely different take. "Wikileaks *represents whistleblowers in the way that lawyers represent their clients — fairly and impartially. Our 'job'
is to safely and impartially conduct the whistleblower's message to the public, not to inject our own nationality or beliefs," he tells Danger Room.
It's not the first time the site has posted secret material. And, as he makes clear, it won't be the last.
All disclosures come from a source with access and motivation, which won't go away if we didn't publish.... When disclosures are driven underground, affected parties have no right of reply or ability to defend themselves... As for this document, U.S. Soldiers are not happy that literally billions have gone on these jammers, with apparently little thought going into how soldiers are going to communicate, after they have been turned on.
So who's right: Aftergood or Assange? Are there limits to what should be published? Or should all information be free, no matter what? Sound off in the comments.
Photo: WikimediaThe Finnish news site Helsingin Sanomat, one of that country’s major subscription papers and news outlet, is quoting an anonymous Nokia employee that the company is looking into what happened with the botched ad for the Lumia 920.
As the fallout continues from the misleading video ad for the Lumia 920 ’s OIS camera, Nokia is evidently conducting and internal investigation on the matter.
An inside source says Nokia is trying to get to the bottom of the ad fiasco
Evidently, the methodology to simulate the 920’s video camera was not known to executives within the company as the ad was commissioned by an external ad agency. Although Nokia is ultimately responsible for whatever video they put out with their name, it is becoming evident that this was something not planned nor known by those in the Finnish company.
It is not uncommon that simulations in ads are used to demonstrate unreleased or unfinished products—after all, it can take weeks for post-production and planning. However, such ads usually have a disclaimer. But since these were web-viral videos, they do not conform to traditional advertising standards.
Recently, footage demonstrating the 920’s ability to take low-light shots has begun to steer the conversation back to the technology at hand—something that Nokia and its employees are eager to do as they are quite proud of their achievement. Since Nokia has already apologized for the error, we can only hope the tech world will now move on.
Source: Hs.fi; Thanks, KP, for the link and translationWith a $29 million funding gap, Las Vegas works to pull together Major League Soccer bid
Courtesy
Developers proposing a $201 million Major League Soccer stadium must first plug a $29 million funding gap and reduce the taxpayers' share of the project's costs, according to city officials and records obtained by the Las Vegas Sun.
The records show that the city of Las Vegas is proposing picking up 74 percent of the stadium's total cost. The developers would be on the hook for the remaining 26 percent. The city would own the land and stadium. The developers would pay the city rent to use it.
But Bill Arent, the city's economic and urban development director, cautioned that the two-page "city funding model" document dated July 22 is still under negotiation. Two key points: the funding gap and splitting the stadium construction cost.
On the funding gap, Arent said they will search for ways to reduce the construction costs and the developers will explore other revenue sources.
On who pays for the stadium, Arent said he expected the city's final share would be closer to a 50-50 split with the developer by the time the negotiations are finished.
A 50-50 split would be roughly in line with recent MLS stadium construction projects. Forbes reported that team owners provided 46 percent of the stadium financing for 11 stadiums built between 1999 and 2013.
Justin Findlay, who represents Las Vegas developer Findlay Sports and Entertainment, said in a text message that he is "still in negotiations with the city, and any comment at this time would be premature."
Findlay is also partnering with the Cordish Cos. of Baltimore, a powerhouse developer of sports and entertainment districts around the country.
Even if the City Council endorses the proposal, the MLS bid must clear other hurdles before the stadium would ever be built.
Findlay's team must win a competition to land Major League Soccer's last expansion team before 2020. If they do, the Findlay group must pay the league's franchise fee that has fluctuated between $40 million and $100 million in the last four years.
Led by former Mayor Oscar Goodman, Las Vegas has been lobbying for a pro sports franchise for more than a decade. Current Mayor Carolyn Goodman, Oscar's wife, shares her husband's vision.
The MLS bid comes at time when one Las Vegas arena is already under construction and a second is in the works. MGM Resorts' arena broke ground in May and UNLV is proposing a football stadium that would also be partly funded by Clark County taxpayers.
Under Las Vegas's current MLS proposal, the stadium would cost $201 million and the city has identified $172 million in funding.
The developers share would be $44 million.
The city's share would be $128 million and would be covered by:
• $99 million by general obligation bonds. The annual $8 million debt payment on that bond would be repaid through rent the developers pay to the city, revenue generated by non-soccer events at the stadium and hotel room taxes.
• Another $15 million in bonds would be repaid by sales taxes generated near the stadium.
• And $14 million in cash would come from a city fund that pays for development costs.
The city records also indicate that Las Vegas will seek a commitment from the developers to build out land around the stadium. The area, known as Symphony Park, is a 61-acre lot east of Interstate 15 and west of the Fremont Street Experience. The deal would be modeled after one used in Detroit for a hockey arena for the Red Wings.
But the city has lots of details yet to sort out, including the terms of the developers' stadium lease.
Neil deMause, a skeptic of publicly financed sports stadiums and the author of "Field of Schemes," said the lease will detail the city's risk and long-term cost.
“Who gets the naming rights money? Who is getting luxury suite money? Money from ad boards? From parking?” deMause asked. “The team? The city?”
Stadium public meetings Aug. 4: Doolittle Community Center, 1950 N. J St., at 6 p.m. Aug. 7: City Council chambers, 495 S. Main St., at 5:30 p.m.
It's not clear yet if Findlay's group has the political support to get the bid through the City Council. Council members have expressed concern about taxpayers helping foot the bill for a privately operated sports stadium.
City leaders are scheduled to review the funding proposal with downtown casino executives on Thursday.
The public will get a chance to weigh in on the proposal during two public hearings next week. The city is also collecting public comment online until Aug. 11. The City Council is expected to take its first vote Aug. 20.Dec 6, 2013 - DeeJ
This week at Bungie, we’re taking our time to get it right.
New looks at long-planned user interfaces came to life, both in the game proper and within a frontline experience we’ve yet dared to put on full display. You’ll wait to experience some of these touches right up until the moment you come face to face with your first Guardian. Others will lead you into the action and reveal where your greatest threats might lie.
A brave actor walked into the Spandex Palace wearing a pair of badass boots that you might step into someday. Another member of our community joined the team to help run Destiny through a gauntlet of pre-launch challenges. Unseen highways were laid to drive you toward public spaces, where Fallen Captains still surprise us with the fantastic ways in which they die as we overrun their defenses.
A small, but important portion of our beloved mascot was returned to its rightful place. Fragments of fiction were scattered throughout the solar system for you to discover. And these are just the small bits and pieces of development we can share with you this week.
There is more work to be done, but each and every time we describe our weekly progress in this space, we get more and more excited about what you’ll see and say when you finally get your hands on the game.
This week, we set that date in stone: September 9th, 2014
In an interview with the community back in 2001, Jason Jones once lamented the inexorable tick of the clock. More recently, he reminded our studio just how valuable the coming months will be, and challenged the team to make every second of Destiny development count. It’s an exciting time to be at Bungie. The stage is set, and we’re going to make these moments matter. We believe Destiny will be worth the wait, and we’re anxious for the chance to prove it to you.
An Informant in Our Midst
Many of you already saw much more of Destiny earlier this week. The visitors we’d been hinting at weren’t mere house guests. Game Informer brought notepads, cameras, and an insatiable curiosity for all things Destiny. They spent a two full days playing and asking pointed, detailed questions.
For the first time, we opened our playtest lab and gave a few outsiders a proper initiation to the world of Destiny. We tried our best to gauge their reactions. Their faces were stone, hard and emotionless. Like you, we waited for the coverage to hit. Unlike you, we waited with bated breath.
Destiny is on the cover of their January issue. If you’re a subscriber, you can read their initial coverage right now, and check out their ongoing digital coverage
Destiny is on the cover of their January issue. If you’re a subscriber, you can read their initial coverage right now, and check out their ongoing digital coverage here. It already includes multiple, in-depth interviews from the team at Bungie covering some of the meaty details you’ve been waiting for.
They’ll have even more coverage as December rolls on.
If you don’t subscribe, Game Informer is in the process of felling trees, turning the chemically treated pulp into sheets of paper, and printing physical issues. We hear they should be arriving on shelves at your local GameStop next week. If you’re planning on picking up a copy, ring them up in advance to make sure your trip is fruitful.
The Ombudsman Is In
So, you’ve got questions this week – hard-hitting, direct, and uncompromising questions. You always do. Before we dig deep into the Sack, we’ll do our best to forecast and address your inquiries. Here’s two we’re pretty sure might be tumbling around in your noggin after today’s announcement.
I already pre-ordered! What do I do?
First of all, we want to take a moment to say thanks. You’re the best. You are a classy and intelligent person with loads of charisma and charm.
You don’t need to do anything to keep your preorder intact. In this wonderful age of technological advancement and innovation, your retailer of choice has everything they need to ensure that your reservation is rightly honored.
What about my beta reservation?
Assuming you pre-ordered at a participating retailer, you should have been given a code to reserve your spot. That reservation is still valid. You can register by completing the registration process here
The beta will be scheduled for summer 2014. As soon as we have a more concrete date, we’ll make the requisite announcement.
Self Defeat How many focuses will there be for each class?
Whoa! Look at you, knowing about stuff. The real question on our minds is how to best pluralize “focus.” “Focuses,” as you’ve elected to use, feels nice and casual to us, but is it as accurate as “foci?” And though “foci” is clearly technically correct, doesn’t it come with an air of pretention that could make it off-putting for a lot of fans?
We’ll have to get back to you on this one. We hear Game Informer might have an interview in the pipe with Tyson Green that goes into more detail on this topic.
Charlemagne Can you go into some of the backstory for Destiny? What can we know that happened before the game?
Admittedly, we’re being uncharacteristically protective of Destiny’s detailed backstory. You already know the big, broad strokes, but that’s not what you’re asking for. Unfortunately for you, wrenching the specifics free from Jones and the writing team’s hands has proven to be a fruitless endeavor on our part.
It’s all for good reason, however. There are a number of mind-blowing revelations we want you to experience firsthand. That’s not to say you won’t be getting more details about the backstory before launch – you undoubtedly will – it just means you won’t be getting them today, or any time soon.
For the time being, you’ll have to setting for the few pages of destination and enemy combatant lore packed into the Game Informer coverage. The details there are more telling than you might imagine.
EvilDoctorPhil Does Bungie still seek world domination?
Step 7 isn’t something to be sought after like a wandering mendicant. Do we seek it? No. We have meticulous plans.
Ponthegan Of all the sounds created for Destiny so far, what Foley effect has been the most unique/weirdest/most memorable to create; how was that sound produced by your Foley artists?
For a sound answer to this question, we defer to Foley Auteur Stephen Hodde:
A friend of ours was nice enough to invite me to his garage to record things like welding torches, grinders, and drills. Perhaps the most magical recording I have ever captured was his flaming bunghole. You see, he ages locally distilled white dog into whiskey. Part of that process involves charring the barrel’s innards. Lighting the inside of the cask from a hole on the top causes fumes to ignite and shoot fire out the bunghole. A pressure vacuum results inside the cask, which sucks air back in, and then immediately shoots out more flame.
This is the result.
Will you be able to find that in the game?
Silent Guardian Are we there yet?
No, not yet. Soon.
Some rituals will never die, it would seem. Fortunately, the Bungie Weekly Update is one of them. It’s part of the cycle.In late 2010, on the eve of the Arab Spring uprisings, a Tunisian blogger asked Egyptian activist Alaa Abdel Fattah what democratic nations should do to help cyberactivists in the Middle East. Abdel Fattah, who had spent time in jail under Hosni Mubarak’s regime, argued that if Western democracies wanted to support the region’s Internet activists, they should put their own houses in order. He called on the world’s democracies to “fight the troubling trends emerging in your own backyards” that “give our own regimes great excuses for their own actions.”
The ominous developments that Abdel Fattah warned about are on display in Washington today in the battle over two anti-piracy bills. This fight is just the latest example of how difficult it is for even an established democracy to protect both intellectual property and intellectual freedom on the Internet — all while keeping people safe, too. It is a challenge that Congress has historically failed to meet.
But Washington is waking up to the new reality: Politics as usual is not compatible with the Internet age, especially when it comes to laws and regulations governing the Web. And the Internet’s key players — along with millions of passionate users who have tended to view Washington as disconnected from their lives — are realizing that they can’t ignore what happens on Capitol Hill. Both sides must now face the long-simmering culture clash between Washington and the Internet, with implications that go far beyond a temporary Wikipedia blackout.
Washington targets isolated, static problems.
On the Web, everything is connected and changing quickly.
Politicians started fighting over Internet policy in earnest in the mid-1990s, when the Web emerged as a serious platform for commerce as well as activities from pornography and crime to artistic expression and political activism. The first battles illustrated the perpetual problem with Internet laws: In seeking to protect people, they tend to be shortsighted and overly broad. To most critics, those were the main problems with the Senate anti-piracy bill known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA), which has been delayed pending changes, and the House measure, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which has been put on indefinite hold in the wake of a massive public outcry. Similar problems of scope and consequences trace back to the early days of Internet regulation.
Take the bruising political battles over online pornography and indecency. In 1996, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act, making it a crime to “transmit” indecent material to minors over the Internet. In 1997, the Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional. According to Justice John Paul Stevens, the law threatened to “torch a large segment of the Internet community” because its language was too vague and would infringe on the free speech rights of adults.
In 1998, Congress tried again with the Child Online Protection Act, requiring all operators of commercial Internet services to restrict access by minors if their sites contained “material harmful to minors” as defined by “contemporary community standards.” The authors of the bill argued that the same legal logic that works in the physical world should work in the digital world and that protecting minors wouldn’t limit adults’ free expression.
A decade-long legal battle ensued. The law was never enforced because the Supreme Court found that its definitions and remedies were too broad to avoid stifling protected speech among adults on the Internet.
The cost of getting the law wrong and failing to keep up with technological change is high. In 1986, at the dawn of the e-mail era and several years before the World Wide Web as we know it was invented, Congress passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which allows law enforcement authorities to request the contents of anybody’s e-mail without any court order or warrant if the data is stored on the servers of a commercial third-party service for longer than 180 days. Why? Because back in 1986, long before the advent of Gmail, Hotmail and other Web-based services, let alone cloud computing, nobody imagined that people would want or need to store confidential information on remote servers for longer than that. Thus anything older than 180 days was considered abandoned.
In an effort to update the law, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, AT&T and a number of other companies have teamed up with civil liberties groups to lobby Congress. They have been stymied by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who are concerned about the political consequences of appearing soft on crime.
Lobbyists exert huge influence in Washington.
Major Internet players were late to the game.
The fight this past week is a prime example of lobbying in action. According to the campaign finance research company MapLight, during the 2010 election cycle the 32 congressional sponsors of SOPA received nearly $2 million in campaign contributions from the movie, music and TV entertainment industries, which support the bill, compared with slightly more than $500,000 in donations from the software and Internet industries, which oppose it.
The Internet industry — with its large percentage of start-ups and young businesses — has been slow to lobby, but the big players, led by Google, are scrambling to catch up. Google spent nearly $6 million on lobbying in 2011, according to Opensecrets.org. It threw a lavish holiday party for congressional staffers in December. Facebook has beefed up its Washington office from next to nothing in 2010. And Twitter hired a former congressional staffer to set up the company’s office here this past year.
But as Alexis Ohanian of Reddit said this past week: “We spend our money innovating, not lobbying.”
That hands-off attitude is partly responsible for SOPA and PIPA. For years, members of Congress have heard from constituents who want them to protect the nation from crime, terrorism and intellectual property violation. They have not faced equally robust demands that online rights and freedoms be preserved. Congress may not get the Internet, but the Internet doesn’t get Congress, either.
More than a decade ago, Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig wrote a book about how computer code acts as a kind of law, in that it shapes what people can and cannot do in their digital lives. And, as our digital lives become increasingly intertwined with the physical, it shapes our freedoms as well.
The faith that brilliant and fast-moving feats of engineering and computer code will ultimately triumph over Washington’s legal code is one of many reasons most people in Silicon Valley have been inclined to focus on technical solutions to problems, rather than spending their time and money on politics.
Internet companies created the social-media tools that fueled the tea party and Occupy Wall Street insurgencies, and that have helped political candidates rally grass-roots support. Yet before this past week, those companies had not really tapped the power of their own tools to lobby against legislation that runs counter to their interests. Wednesday’s Internet “strike” changed that, allowing Web firms to show political muscle in ways that the entertainment industry cannot easily duplicate.
To stay safe in real life, we give up some liberty.
Online, we’re not ready to sacrifice freedoms.
In 1996, Grateful Dead lyricist and Internet activist John Perry Barlow wrote “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace,” he wrote. “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”
In the 16 years since, the government has certainly not left cyberspace alone — because many of “us” have sought its protection from the criminals, pedophiles, bullies, industrial spies, racists, terrorists and others who have invaded the Internet.
Most of us do want the government, which shapes legal code, and the companies, which shape computer code, to defend us against attack and theft: We pay them to do so by giving up a little of our freedom and giving them our taxes, subscription dollars and mouse clicks.
However, the lawmaking norm leans more toward eliminating rather than managing threats online, be they cyber-attacks or intellectual property theft. It has somehow become acceptable to pass laws that presume Internet users are guilty until proven innocent. The Patriot Act and other legislation enable government agents to access a vast range of U.S. citizens’ private digital communications without a warrant — or even a suspicion that a specific individual may be involved in a crime, as the law requires for most physical searches.
SOPA also erred on the side of eliminating threats. To protect intellectual property, the law sought to make Web sites liable for their users’ activities. This would mean sites would have to monitor all users and block any transmissions or postings that could possibly result in a copyright violation charge.
Washington is driven by geography.
The Internet is global.
Cyberspace, as Justice Stevens pointed out in his 1997 opinion striking down the Communications Decency Act, is a “unique medium... located in no particular geographical location but available to anyone, anywhere in the world, with access to the Internet.”
Thus a congressman from Iowa can vote “yea” on a bill that ends up affecting Internet users in Bahrain, who have no way of holding him accountable. That is in part because many globally popular online platforms are headquartered in the United States. Moreover, Web services based outside the country that want to be accessible to American users must also comply with U.S. legislation, affecting their users everywhere else.
In addition, governments around the world tend to copy regulations and laws enacted in North America and Europe, particularly when they provide an opportunity to exercise government power through the Internet. In Tunisia, where a new democracy is striving to take root after toppling a dictator one year ago, Islamists and other conservatives point to laws recently passed or proposed in Western democratic countries as evidence that they are in the global mainstream as they seek to reinstate censorship.
For these reasons, activists around the world had good reason to worry that an anti-piracy bill such as SOPA would force overseas Web sites, if they want American audiences, to set up monitoring and censorship mechanisms. Once in place, these would give governments a new set of excuses to demand user information and removal of content.
For neither the first time nor the last time, Washington is trying to wield power over the Internet in a manner that many Americans believe lacks the consent of the governed, let alone the consent of the networked. After Wednesday’s protests, the anti-piracy bills are effectively dead or indefinitely delayed. But that doesn’t mean the revolution has succeeded.
The computer coding pros — and the millions who depend on their products — have said “no” to legal code they hate. But killing a bad bill is only the first step. The next and more vital step is political innovation. Without a major upgrade, this political system will keep on producing legal code that is Internet-incompatible.
Rebecca MacKinnon is the author of the forthcoming “Consent of the Networked:The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom” and a Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation. Follow her on Twitter @rmack.
Read more from Outlook, friend us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter.Google does weird things. Assistant for example has different capabilities if you use it on Google Home, in Google Allo, on the Google Pixel, or on Android Wear 2.0. Why? It's hard to explain and even harder to remember what is possible where, and more importantly, what is not possible.
For example, you could control your compatible smart home gadgets from Assistant on Google Home, but the functionality wasn't available on the Pixel. Last December, a small workaround showed up: if you already enabled Nest control on Google Home, you could issue the command on your Pixel and it would be interpreted correctly, but if you didn't have a Home already, Google would reply that it doesn't know how to do that yet.
Now, it looks like the functionality is finally showing up on the Pixel, no Home necessary (hah!). In the Assistant settings on Pixel phones, a new Home control section is starting to show up.
Inside, users can add devices like Nest, Hue, SmartThings, Honeywell, and WeMo, create rooms, and assign a device to each room. Then, issuing commands for these devices through Assistant on the Pixel works, just like it does on Home.
One tipster is seeing it on his Google Pixel running the Android 7.1.2 beta, with the Google app 6.12.19 and Play Services 10.2.98. Another user has corroborated but it doesn't look like everyone has the option yet. Maybe it depends on a specific Google app or Play Services version, maybe it also depends on the Android version, though that second explanation is a little far-fetched. If you don't own a Google Home, check out the settings on your Pixel phone and let us know if you see it or not and what versions you're on.The program at Purdue University shows those with mobility problems about career possibilities in aviation.
Deirdre Dacey performs a pre-flight inspection of a Sky Arrow 600 Sport airplane Monday, June 17, 2013, at Purdue University Airport. In the background is Dennis Akins of Weatherford, Texas. (Photo11: John Terhune, Journal and Courier, Lafayette, Ind.) Story Highlights Participants in Able Flight's program at Purdue University can earn a sport pilot certificate
The aircraft used in training are outfitted with controls for those unable to use their legs
Donations to the non-profit finance scholarships for those eligible
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Hours before takeoff, Deirdre Dacey approached a small white plane parked outside a Purdue University Airport hangar to complete a preflight inspection.
Dacey's hands brushed over the red-striped, two-seat Sky Arrow 600 Sport aircraft, checking components from the tightness of bolts to levels of gas and coolant fluids.
STORY: Airline tells man he is too disabled to fly
BLOG: Delta gets big fine on treatment of disabled
Marking boxes on the detailed inspection checklist had become a welcome routine for the Dedham, Mass., development professional — a signal it was almost time to fly.
Less than a month ago, that notion was merely a dream that she never believed was possible. Dacey, who now uses a wheelchair, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis by her 16th birthday.
"It was always an interest," Dacey said. "I got struck by the Top Gun bug, and then it went on the back burner. But it started to come back, the desire.... It was the chance to be able to control something again. It's amazing and liberating."
By the end of June, Dacey and four others from across the USA will be equipped with a sport pilot's certificate because of a flight and ground training program called Able Flight, a not-for |
’s when you have a player on a regular team and also on your Razzball team, which rewards overall crappiness. “I’m fingercuffed to Michael Bourn.”
FIPlash Link – The feeling you get when one of your pitchers puts up a line that statheads love — high Ks, low BBs and HRs — but still abuses your ratios by giving up a ton of hits. (full credit to Dingbat)
Flat-Billed Pitchypus Link – Rare species of pitcher whose hat brim is perfectly flat and either covers their full forehead – exposing only glaring eyes – or is tilted to the side. This species is prone to early success and a quick fade once the shock has worn off. See Dontrelle Willis, Chad Cordero, Shawn Chacon.
FMFBBL Link – A fantasy baseball acronym for FML. (Full credit to Razzball commenter, Awesomus Maximus)
Foreclosed Link – When a closer is ready to enter the 9th with a 3 run or less lead, but his offense overextends the lead and defaults on any chance at a save. (Full credit to Bosmosis)
Forget Me Lot Link – A player who you own that you forget about because you have so many more pressing concerns. (full credit, Shin-Soo Choo Choo)
Forsters Link – Any portly pitcher. Renowned for being surprisingly athletic given their weight – despite the fact they are indeed athletes and, thus, by definition should be athletic. Seem more likely to be lefty than righty. See Terry Forster (infamous as being called by Letterman a ‘tub of goo’), LaMarr Hoyt, David Wells, CC Sabathia, Rich Garces.
Forty Twenties Link – Boring hitters that give two hits in four at-bats and no other stats. Sometimes can be written 4020, as in their box score. Example, “James Loney is such a forty twenty.” (full credit OaktownSteve)
Free Room At The W Link – A pitcher whose offense has given him lots of room for a Win. Sometimes leads to a pitcher lounging and putting up stats best observed through extremely dim lighting. See also Ivictory Coast.
Fresh Off The Bloat Link – The empty stats one gets after the fullness of an Asian pitcher’s initial success has faded. See Byung-Hyun Kim, Kazuhisa Ishii, Hideki Okajima.
Fumethrower Link – One-time flamethrowing reliever that continue to pitch after they can no longer throw the gas. Some have been known to coast downhill for years. See Trevor Hoffman, Troy Percival, Jose Mesa. (assist to Razzball commenter Get Figgy With It)
Futility Player Link – Someone eligible for multiple positions but doesn’t warrant a starting position in any – e.g., Marlon Anderson, Brendan Ryan, Marco Scutaro, Ramon Vazquez etc. Tony LaRussa hearts these players.
Glovechild Link – A weak hitting player, likely a middle infielder, but not necessarily, who is in the major leagues because of defensive abilities. “Brendan Ryan hit two doubles the other day and drove in three, but I wouldn’t expect this to continue as he’s the Glovechild of Joey Cora and Mark Lemke.” Mark Lemke should, but doesn’t need to be worked into every entry. (Full credit to InternetGuy)
Goldplatement Player Link – When a rich team like the Yankees replaces an open slot in their lineup or bench with a player above replacement level. (assist to Oaktown Steve)
Goddoumit Link – An exclamation when your catcher gets hurt and you’re forced to hit up the waiver wire for scraps. “Montero’s out for how long? Goddoumit!” (Full credit to commenter, Danielpwnz)
Hackspanic Link – A Latin ballplayer in the mold of Roberto Clemente and Vlad Guerrero who swings, and hits everything.
Heebee-BBs Link – When a player is scared to take a walk. “Delmon Young has a bad case of the heebee-BBs.” (full credit to Razzball commenter, Mike)
Herbathrowdite Link – (her-bat-throw-dite; sounds like hermaphrodite) A player that has both hitter and pitcher tools yet isn’t very attractive for either job. “Brian Anderson wasn’t a good hitter, but as a herbathrowdite he’s just weird.”
Hodgepadre Link – Random Padres pitcher. “San Diego is home for a whole week. Time to pick up a hodgepadre or two for my fantasy staff.”
Holy sit! Link – When a team puts up a huge offensive day, but your player was benched by the team just for a rest day. “Rockies are scoring at will and CarGo’s resting today. Holy sit!” (Full credit to commenter, phizzics)
Homeschooling Link – Hitter or pitcher who is comfortable at home, but is a mess on the road. See also Road Scholar.
Hot schmotato Link – A hot hitter who is usually a schmohawk. You should pick him up while he’s hitting even though you know it won’t last. (Full credit to commenter, BigRedLatrine)
Hubert H. Homerfree Retrodome Link – An alternate name for cavernous Target Field.
Hypegondria Link – The fear of adding a one-hyped prospect to one’s roster. Happens often with post-hype prospects.
Hypster Glasses Link – Someone who overvalues and keeps prospects over better players just because they’re rookies. (credit to Cram It)
Ipso Drafto Link – For a guy whose narrative makes a ton of sense. Example, “(Player Name) has never been good before, but is moving to Coors and will have a good lineup around him. He’s also fully healthy and the team wants to bat him leadoff. All factors have converged so this guy can’t miss. Ipso Drafto.” (full credit to Rufus T. Firefly)
Ivictory Coast Link – When a pitcher coasts to victory thanks to his team’s offense elephant-stomping on the other pitcher. Opposite of Sierra Loseone. “The Rangers scored seven in the first, giving Matt Harrison the Ivictory Coast.” See also Free Room At The W.
Jockstuffers Link – Players who have flaccid seasons and then pad them at the end of the year when no one’s looking. Also see Septaculars. (co-credit OaktownSteve)
Jockular Sphincteritis Link – Any injury from sack to back that initiates laughing and wincing at the same time. See Chris Snyder’s testicular fracture, Kaz Matsui’s anal fissures, Carlos Guillen’s raging hemorrhoids, Felix Pie’s testicular torsion. (assist to KarlJ)
Jokey Smurf’d Link – When you receive a gift-wrapped package in a trade only for it explode in your face because of injury or a player’s poor performance. See video for further explanation (as if any is necessary). Example: He gift-wrapped Aaron Harang to me for two crappy players but it looks like I got Jokey Smurf’d. (assist to mikeisalegend)
Jolly Bencher Link – The sweet goodness of leaving a terrible start on your bench. See also bench tits, embenchgo.
KaBoB Link – A starting pitcher with strong K/BB but still gets skewered with too many meat pitches in the zone.
Kama Schmotra Link – A schmohawk that seduces you because they are available to play in several positions.
Kazaam! Link – Situations where closers are brought into a non-save situation and have no idea how to act. The results aren’t pretty.
KazIwadome Link – Any Japanese player.
K-Fed Link – A pitcher whose strikeout potential attracts you during a period of bad decision making that eventually leads you to divorce them and their bloated ERA/WHIP.
K-Put Link – A pitcher who can’t go deep in the game due to too many Ks. See also TK’do. (full credit to MattTruss)
Krispie Young Link – Phonetic pronunciation of Chris B. Young to help avoid confusion with the tall pitcher.
Krispie Young Sr. Link – Mike Cameron
Latin (Fill in Age) Link – Whatever the age, add 3-4 years. In honor of the many Latin players who have lied about their age and got caught (Alfonso Soriano) as well as the many players who sure look older than they claim (Renteria, Ortiz, Pujols).
Leftosaurus Link – A lefty pitcher over 40 years old that gets by on craftiness and 8 variations of changeup. Prone to the homer ball and hitting the showers before the 7th inning. See Jamie Moyer, Tom Glavine. (assist to Razzball commenter pork burn)
Limposter Link – A player who plays at 50% through an injury, and looks like a bad imitation of themselves. (full credit to Marc R from Syosset, NY)
Llamas Link – Hitters that excel against lefties. Loves Lefties As Much As Sex. (full credit to chicken dinner)
Loserville Slugger Link – Best hitter on a bad hitting team. (full credit to LG Baseball)
LUZR Link – A player whose defensive value (aka UZR) is so low that he’s limited to DHing or a team so desperate to suffer the defensive consequences (see Jack Cust, Brad Hawpe, Travis Hafner). (assist to Razzball commenter misterflak)
Maas Appeal Link – When a player with mediocre minor league numbers makes a huge splash in the majors only to eventually fade into oblivion. (full credit to bigbear)
Marginer Link – Any mediocre pitcher on the Mariners that’s worth owning when they start in Seattle. Similar to Hodgepadre. Most Marginers are Homeschoolers. Not to be confused with ex-Mariner closer Mike Schooler.
Marla Gibbs Line Link –.227
Marmol Link – An ugly converted save where the reliever gives up two runs. Usually accompanied by 5 or more baserunners. “Should I really be holding Axford? He has 4 blown saves and 3 Marmols.”
MediOAKer Link – Any mediocre pitcher on the A’s that’s worth owning when they start in Oakland. Similar to Hodgepadre and Marginer. (full credit to Razzball commenter, supra)
Mercurio Link – Any Latin player that, like mercury, rises when it gets hotter out and falls when it’s cold.
Metco Link – An alternate name for cavernous Citi Field. “That ball would have been out of most parks, except maybe Yellowstone and Metco.” (full credit to Paper Tiger)
Middling Infielder Link – Middle infielder that puts up okay stats across the board, but gets people irrationally exuberant come draft time. Usually once had speed or hinted at 20 HR power – see Edgar Renteria, Orlando Cabrera.
Minayal Link – Denial of the truth by a GM – either disingenuously to the press or, even sadder, they believe the lie. Includes denial of player injuries, trade rumors, manager firings, etc. Example: If it weren’t for the Mets being in such minayal, Reyes would be on the DL and I could have an empty bench spot on my team! Related adjective is Riccardulous.
Most Fallible Player Link – Worst player on a good team. (full credit to nick the smooth dick)
MR. B (Middle Reliever Believer) Link – A fantasy baseball player that loves middle relievers to a borderline unhealthy degree for speculative saves and ERA/WHIP help. “Hey Mr. B – how long you going to waste bench spots on Maness and Cecil?” (full credit to Razzball commenter IowaCubs)
Nadir Bupkus Link – The worst player in baseball. Sometimes used in reference to the best player in the Padres farm system.
New Whirled Order Link– A lineup change that hurts a player’s value, but remains due to team success. Sometimes abbreviated NWO.
NyQuility Start Link – A Quality Start that is a snooze. “Roberto Hernandez threw 7 IP, 3 ER with 2 Ks and 10 baserunners for the NyQuility Start.” (Full credit to JeF With 1 F)
Pedroia Paranoia Link – Fear that a middle infielder coming off a great year is bound to regress horribly. This regression is known as the Bret Boone Swoon or Carlos BuyerBewarega.
Peg Boy Link – Historical definition: A peg boy was a position in the Greek and later the British Navy. He was the boy available for the after-hours pleasure of the sailors on those long nights at sea. He would sit on a peg during the day to keep his anus loose for penetration by the other sailors. Razzball definition: A pitcher brought up by the big league club just to fill in for a short period of time and is expected to get hit hard. “Jo-Jo Reyes was used as a peg boy by the Braves for a few years.” (Co-credit to B. Inge Drinking and microwave donut)
Pitchslapped Link – When the opposing pitcher hits a home run off your pitcher. “Damn! Carlos Zambrano pitchslapped another one of my starters!” “I can’t believe Brett Myers gave up a homer to the other pitcher. Though, if anyone deserved to be pitchslapped, it’s him.”
Premature Extrabasulation Link – When a speedster gets too excited and bursts towards second to stretch out a single into a double vs. waiting to steal the base. More common among players who don’t get to first base very often.
Premature Extrapolation Link – The process of taking a very small sample size and extrapolating it over a very large sample size. “Mark Trumbo is hitting.375 thru three games, could he hit.300 this season? Or is that premature extrapolation?” (Full credit to trick dad)
Pretendonitis Link – An injury that mysteriously appears out of nowhere to sideline a player when it’s convenient to a team, due to service time or wanting to limit a pitcher’s innings. See also Achin’ Venient Injury. (full credit to David M Silver)
Pronk’d Link – You think you’re drafting an All-Star and you get an All-Suck. “I drafted Hafner and Rich Hill. Damn, I was Pronk’d!” (full credit to Razzball commenter, BaronVonVulturewins)
Prospblock Link – An older player who’s blocking a younger player. “Seems like everywhere he goes Gregg Zaun is a total prospblock.”
Pulling a Kotchman Link – When someone’s on the DL for longer than expected. Origin, Casey Kotchman was out with mono for a year and a half.
Pwnson’d Link – When a pitcher gets hit so bad, it makes you go a little batty. In honor of Sidney Ponson. “Ian Snell gave up 7 runs in a third of an inning. I’ve been Pwnson’d!”
Razztastic Link – A supremely crappy performance. “Seven earned runs in a third of an inning for Washburn. Now that’s Razztastic.”
Razzterful Link – See Razztastic.
Remarkbuehrle Link– A pretty unremarkable start by an ace. “Cliff Lee looked remarkbuehrle today.”
Revenge Pluck Link – A waiver wire move made out of spite when you miss out on a hot pick-up. “Just missed out on Wil Myers, so I grabbed Jeff Francoeur for the revenge pluck.” (full credit to Capital Offense)
Rice-ja-broni Link – Any mediocre pitcher on the Giants that’s worth owning when they start in San Francisco. Similar to Hodgepadre, MediOAKer and Marginer. (co-credit curiousgeorgespringer, b the esq., Cram It)
Ricky from My So Called Life Link – Carlos Beltran. See resemblance.
Road Scholar Link – Hitter or pitcher who is brilliant on the road, but is a moron at home.
Roofie Link – A rookie pitcher who fails to deliver on their tremendous K potential and, instead, abuses your trust and violates your ERA and WHIP.
ROS-Colored Glasses Link – When you look at early season numbers and hold onto a player longer than you should because you see his previous years’ stats. “I should have dropped Dunn earlier in 2011, but I had on my ROS-colored glasses.” (full credit to Swat290)
Routhenasia Link – When a manager feels mercy for the pain their team in inflicting on an opponent and unplugs a good hitter from the lineup.
Rumpelpitchskins Link – Can spin gold from the hill when healthy; injuries always bite them in the rump. Once enough people start buzzing about the production of Rumpelpitchskins (and add to their squad), *POOF* they’re injured and they vanish to the Disabled List. (full credit to Jason Bradley Miller)
Run shy Link – A player that has blazing speed, but for some reason doesn’t run. “Austin Jackson could run into your room, mess up your hair and back out before you even knew he was there, but he doesn’t steal bases. Why is he so run shy?” (full credit to Berk)
SAGNOF Link – Steals/Saves Ain’t Got No Face
Saberhagenmetrics Link – The analysis of baseball through subjective evidence that players are overhyped after a good year and underhyped after a bad year. Seems to work best for injury-prone players and hitters who HR and K a lot. Named after Bret Saberhagen who won 2 Cy Youngs and averaged over 20 wins in 1985, 1987, and 1989 but averaged around 10 wins in 1986 and 1988.
Saved Ace Link – When a starter gets rocked in the 1st inning, but then shuts down the other team for another six to eight innings. (full credit to Chicken Dinner)
Schmohawk Link – Any less than desirable player. “I can’t pick up Jones. I already got three schmohawks on my bench.”
Schmodenfreude Link – That warm feeling you get when someone in your league reaches to draft a Schmohawk. (full credit to El Famous Burrito)
Scoreshadowing Link – When you’re watching a game and it’s on a few-second time delay, but you also have your fantasy team window open and you already see what the player has done before it happens. (full credit to Lessnaur)
Scott Downs’ Syndrome Link – Successful late inning reliever whose progress is retarded by other bullpen mates. After Scott Downs who has had a sub 2.00 ERA for the Jays from 2007-2008. (full credit to Denys)
Sciosciapath Link – When a manager makes a lineup decision that exhibits antisocial behavior to team fans and fantasy baseballers that lacks a sense of moral responsibility or conscience – e.g., Mike Scioscia’s love of all things non-Napoli. (full credit to GregG)
Scrubstitute Link – When a team’s depth charts are challenged by an injury and his replacement isn’t worth owning in fantasy, his replacement is a scrubstitute. (assist to Bill Lumbergh)
; (Semicolon) Link – Bartolo Colon. A punctuation mark signifiying a pregnant pause – one that should be taken literally and figuratively before starting this former Cy Young Award winner who is clearly half the pitcher he once was (talent-wise, anyway). (full credit to BaronVonVulturewins)
Septaculars Link – Opposite of Septumblers. Players that light up the world in September and end up overrated in the following year’s draft. (full credit to Diamondoug)
Septumblers Link – Players who hit fine all year and then take a tumble once September starts.
SerendiPPDy Link – When an early postponement causes you to play someone that would have otherwise been on your bench and they have a good day. Alternate meaning: when a pitcher is getting hit hard early on, but then the game is called for rain. “Ervin Santana gave up six earned in the first two innings, but then the skies opened up and…Sweet serendiPPDy.” (full credit to JakeB)
Shizz Link – Shit.
Short Eyes Link – Nickname for the guy in your league that can’t help himself when it comes to the Minors. He usually wears a trench coat and thick-lensed glasses. Sometimes his taste for the inexperienced can get him in serious trouble.
Silver Nining Link – The only good part about your closer blowing a save is that it took a win away from your opponent’s starter. (Full credit to Punk)
Slam & Legs Link – When a player gets a steal and a homer in the same game.
Sloppy Joses Link – When you make a sloppy comparison between two Cuban players.
Slumberjack Link – When a player has a hitless day going, then suddenly wakes up in the ninth with a homer. (full credit to JeF With 1 F)
Smugshot Link – The grinning picture posted on a baseball site that drives you nuts when the player’s underperforming. “Why the f*** are you grinning like that Jar-Jar – you just gave up a 8 spot to the Padres! The real crime isn’t that you’re killing my team, it’s that your damn smugshot rubs it in my face.”
Snafu Larry Link – The head of fantasy at ESPN. (full credit to Sky)
SnGs Link – A player you snag from waivers for S’s and G’s rather than checking Stream-o-Nator or Hitter-Tron. (full credit Frank Grimes)
Sonavabench! Link – Exclamation when one sees that a player on their bench has had a monster day. Can also be used as a noun or adjective. “David Murphy just hit 2 HR but I didn’t start him today – sonavabench!” “It doesn’t matter what I do – my team is a spiteful sonavabench”. “Shoot me now – my fantasy team just had a killer sonavabench day.” (assist to Razzball commenter pOrk burn)
Sparkakis Link – When Nick Markakis hits a home run.
Sparky Anklebiter Link – A vertically challenged player that wins the adoration of teammates and irrational hometown fans with his scrappy play and spunky attitude while simultaneously irritating everybody else. Often lauded for their ‘hard work ethic’, ‘passion for the game’, ‘playing the game the right way’, and ‘110% effort’. See David Eckstein, Dustin Pedroia (assist to Razzball commenter nmdunkel) (Video courtesy of commenter, English Mets Fan).
Speedy Gone-K-Less Link – A starter that throws an above-average fastball and gets no strikeouts. See Nate Eovaldi, Wily Peralta. Alternative to velocitease. (full credit to WanchopeOrTwo?)
Sphinctory Link – When a closer stinks enough to blow a save but manages to squeeze out a victory.
Spitey Sense Link – When a player takes revenge on his old team.
Stablemate Stalemate Link – Two guys on your fantasy team start against each other and neither gets a win. (Full credit to OaktownSteve)
Staff Inflection Link – When your fantasy baseball team is on the verge of a good overall pitching day then the last guy to pitch screws everything up. “I had a manageable 3.50 ERA and 1.20 WHIP day going until C.J. Wilson’s staff inflection.” (full credit to CT Old School)
Star Mitzvah Link – When a baseball bubala realizes his potential and becomes a man in the eyes of fantasy baseball players drafting in the first three rounds. Example: Carlos Gonzalez had his Star Mitzvah in mid-July 2010….mazel tov!). (full credit to Razzball commenter misterflak)
Stevabermetrics Link – Named after Razzball’s Murphy’s Law-esque commenter who seems to have the kiss of death for all waiver wire acquisitions. Past good performance does not portend good future performance. It actually means the opposite. (full credit to Razzball commenter Steve)
Streamboat Link – When you fall in love with a pitcher that you streamed and they become a big crush on your pitching staff.
Strong Bean Link – A skinny player that has surprising power. “Dexter Fowler hit another jack? What a strong bean!” (full credit to Razzball commenter Brain Dead Hurler)
Sweatshop Foreman Link – Manager who laughs at suggest ‘pitch count’ labor laws and squeezes what he can out of his pitchers. See Dusty Baker, John Gibbons. “Billy Martin was such a Sweatshop Foreman that his pitchers made custom cleats for Rickey.”
Taipei Slinklo Link – Joe Nathan’s nickname. It is significant only in its randomness. For someone who is as vanilla as Joe Nathan, he needs some random ethnicity. “Hey, Taipei Slinklo, you gonna save this game?” “Pho sho!”
Tater Tots Link – A young prospect who projects to hit for power in the majors. “Matt Wieters is struggling in his major league debut. But don’t worry, he’s a tater tot.” (full credit to Paper Tiger)
Teabagger Link – A catcher who hits a triple. “Joe Girardi’s teabagger in Game 6 of the Yanks-Braves series led to a 3-run rally.” or “Alyssa Milano cheered as Russ Martin delivered a teabagger in front of a raucous crowd.” Full credit goes to commenter, IowaCubs.
Ticker Shock Link – The opposite of Ticker Tease. When one of your pitchers is going and the score appears like the pitcher got rocked, only to find out later that it was the bullpen that gave up the runs or they were unearned. “I saw the Cards lost 10-2 and I had Wainwright going. I nearly cried until I saw they were 9 unearned runs. Phew, just a case of Ticker Shock.” Alternate to box scare. (full credit to Grimlock)
Ticker Tease Link – The excitement you feel when you watch Sportscenter and see along the bottom that one of your big fantasy teams has put up a huge number. Only to find out later your guy went 0-for-5 in a 9-0 win. “Why is Dan Uggla such a ticker tease?!” (full credit to knighttown)
Tied To The WHIPping Post Link – When a pitcher’s defense tortures him with errors leading to a final stat line that’s ok on ERA but horrid on WHIP – e.g., “Man! Ponson tied me to the WHIPping post last night. 1.50 ERA but 2.50 WHIP! Why is Jeter still playing shortstop?” (co-credits to Denys and Hebrew Hammer)
TK’do Link – A pitcher who strikes out so many hitters it forces him out of the game early. See also K-Put. (assist to Greg)
Tokyo Roses Link – Players who bloomed after spending time in Japan. See Colby Lewis, Casey McGehee.
The Town that Bobby Grich Built Link – Anaheim; sometimes referred to as Bobby Grichville.
Trade Sourer Link– A trade sourer is a useless player that gets tossed in to look like a sweetener, but ultimately breaks the deal. “Last year some guy kept sending me trade offers that included Ryan Theriot for no reason. Finally got to the point that he could have offered me Greinke and Theriot for Nick Punto and I still would have rejected it. Theriot was a trade sourer, and he didn’t even know it.” (full credit to pjd178)
Unremarkbuehrle Link – A dazzling start by a non-ace. “Marco Estrada looked unremarkbuehrle!”
Velocitease Link – A starter that throws an above-average fastball and gets no strikeouts. See Nate Eovaldi, Wily Peralta. Alternative to Speedy Gone-K-Less. (full credit to Alcibiades Escobar)
Vetard Strength Link– A vet with surprising displays of power though their average is impaired.
Vulture Shock Link – That panic that washes over you when your closer doesn’t come in for the save, only to realize he had gone three days in a row. (full credit to Strolg)
Wackhorse Link – A below-average starter that is an innings eater. (assist to Chicken Dinner)
Waiveredlust Link – The unrealistic desire to own a player just because you once owned them. (full credit to Stantonovation)
Week Whacker Link – A pitcher’s start that is so terrible it destroys your entire H2H pitching week. (Full credit to Mose)
Weepstakes Link – Any popular waivers pick up that doesn’t live up to expectations and leaves you regretting the wasted top waiver pick. Example: I won the Eugenio Velez weepstakes. Netted me a.125 average and.5 steals. Fun times! (full credit to Denys)
Whipper Crapper Link – A young spark plug of a pitcher who holds a ton of promise but has a precociously high WHIP – usually to being overly wild. See Sanchez, Jonathan.
Wickmen Link – Joe Borowski, Todd Jones, etc. In honor of Bob Wickman.
Windoh! Link – When a pitcher is staked to a huge early lead, but can’t make it to five innings for the win. “He had a 7-run lead and he can’t make it through four innings? Windoh!” See also break win’d.
Yawnstipate Link – A portmanteau of yawn and constipate. It’s the act of feeling like you’re going to yawn from someone’s stats but not quite there. “Polanco yawnstipates me.”
Zimmermania Link – The futile enthusiasm shown by Jewish fans for a player that has a Jewish-sounding name, but turns out to be not Jewish at all (e.g. – Lance Berkman, Ryan Zimmerman, Jordan Zimmermann, Max Scherzer). “My friend got so geeked out when the D-Backs called up Paul Goldschmidt. Turns out, he fell victim to Zimmermania.” (full credit to commenter, Compsella)
Ziplock Link – When your weekly lineup locks with a newly-DL’d player and you get zip from him.
Zombino Link – A great hitter whose fantasy baseball relevance was thought to be dead but returns with a vengeance. (co-credit to KeeblerMN and L-Boogie)
Pronunciation Key courtesy of Elika WalterJust like AT&T Goal of the Week, the latest Save of the Week race has a deep field of top-notch candidates across MLS.
D.C. United goalkeeper Bill Hamid gets it started with his excellent stop in United's narrow 2-1 loss to Montreal on Saturday, while his opposite number at the rival New York Red Bulls, Luis Robles, is also in the running for a quality block in RBNY's 0-0 draw with Philadelphia.
Colorado Rapids netminder Clint Irwin has earned yet another SOTW nod in Week 25, as has Real Salt Lake defender Chris Wingert, who denied Landon Donovan with an amazing goal-line block in the LA Galaxy's 4-2 defeat of RSL. And Sporting Kansas City's veteran shot-stopper Jimmy Nielsen rounds out the list thanks to his fine work against the San Jose Earthquakes on Sunday night.
Cast your vote in the poll at right. Voting runs until 11:59 pm PT on Thursday.
Check out complete Save of the Week coverage — including a full archive of 2013 winners.Then there's the Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff, who accuses America of running a six-decade-long Ponzi scheme, suspending fiscal rectification. With the interest bill on America's $US13 trillion-plus ($14.5 trillion-plus) national debt the equivalent of 14 per cent of its gross domestic product, Kotlikoff prophesies inevitable long-term pain. "The first possibility is massive benefit cuts visited on the baby boomers in retirement. The second is astronomical tax increases that leave the young with little incentive to work and save. And the third is the government simply printing vast quantities of money to cover its bills," Kotlikoff wrote for the news agency Bloomberg. "Most likely we will see a combination of all three responses … This is an awful, downhill road to follow, but it's the one we are on. And bond traders will kick us miles down our road once they wake up and realise the US is in worse fiscal shape than Greece." Even the so-called "perma-bears" are getting a gallop again in the media; this week The New York Times profiled the London-based Albert Edwards, of Societe Generale, who forecasts a "bloody, deep recession" - a collapse in stock prices of 60 per cent followed by years of 20 to 30 per cent inflation as central banks seek to douse the flames with a flood of money.
How credible are the extremists' views? While plenty of commentators see an upside, this week's modest market intervention by the US Federal Reserve, and what it signalled, tested the resolve of many a sunny theorist. The Fed's decision to use the proceeds from mortgage-backed securities to buy US Treasury debt, dubbed QE2 (quantitative easing, mark two) because the move effectively put more money into the hands of lending banks, it also signalled its concern over the economic outlook, playing further on fears of a double-dip recession. At best, the US recovery looks to be in slow motion. A downward revision of second quarter GDP to 2.4 per cent (annualised) from an expected 4 per cent, a widening trade gap and higher-than-expected jobless claims - the highest since February - all pointed to a stalling recovery, prompting a sharemarket rout that pushed share price movements into the red for this year. Some analysts described the pullback as a response to the market having over-reached in recent weeks after surprisingly good corporate earnings, rather than any change in sentiment.
Some described the sell-off as knee-jerk. "I don't know that we learnt a lot new," said James Paulsen, the chief investment strategist at Wells Capital Management, in an interview screened on Bloomberg TV. "Is it really surprising that the Fed said the recovery had stalled? I just don't think it's a shock … "It's not what the Fed is thinking, it's more about what the main street data is going to suggest in the months ahead. I think it might be starting to get a little better." Even so, underlying economic fundamentals are suddenly under renewed, intense scrutiny: that the present recovery is lagging the sort of trajectory typical of previous post-recession rebounds is defined strikingly by statistics on growth and jobs. Had it matched those previous recoveries, the US economy would now be 7.7 per cent larger than it was when the recession hit in late 2007, points out Josh Bivens, of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. Instead, the economy is 1.1 per cent smaller. "In short, we have a long way to go before the economy can be declared truly healthy," says Bivens, who notes that the deceleration is occurring even as the last of the federal government's $US800 billion stimulus is percolating through the economy.
"By the last quarter of 2010, the Recovery Act will no longer provide a boost to growth. What will emerge to take up the slack of fading Recovery Act spending is a troubling open question about the economy going forward." At the same time, the recovery's impact on job creation has been minimal, suggesting the stimulus simply wasn't big enough to counter the severity of the downturn and that the path to recovery will be long and arduous - and slow. Similarly, the Hamilton Project, a program run by the Brookings Institution and headed by the former White House economist Michael Greenstone, studied job losses and job creation in previous recessions to gauge the progress of the current rebound. The comparison is grim, revealing that the drop in employment and the number of people seeking jobs is already far more severe than in any previous recession of the past 50 years - in fact, 50 per cent greater than the next biggest decline, which was recorded during the 1981 and 1982 recessions. "Just as troubling as the depth of the decline in employment is the duration of the decline - more than 24 months," the study notes. "In many earlier recessions, employment resumed steady growth within two years of the start of the recession."
An exception followed the 2001 recession, the weakest rebound in payroll since 1948. In fact, job growth in the US had not fully recovered ahead of the current downturn. "These factors imply that restoring employment to pre-recession levels will require far stronger job gains than we experienced during the last recovery," the authors note. The data suggests that with the central bank apparently with little opportunity left to influence markets - banks, cashed up with as much as $US1 trillion, remain as reluctant to write loans as borrowers are to take on more debt - pressure will intensify on Congress to return to the well of fiscal stimulus. This week members of the House of Representatives interrupted their long summer break to pass a $US26 billion emergency aid package to stave off massive teacher lay-offs and planned cuts to Medicaid (the health insurance program for the poor) in states struggling to manage budgets perished by a collapse in property revenues and other tax shortfalls. But Republicans - and some conservative Democrats - have pledged to fight any other spending proposals ahead of November's midterm Congressional elections, which are expected to seriously dent Democrat numbers in both houses of Congress, possibly even returning control to the Republicans.
Among the policy dilemmas facing the President, Barack Obama, is a pending decision on whether or not to extend generous tax cuts for the wealthy that were introduced by his predecessor, George Bush, in 2001 and 2003, but which are due to expire at the end of the year. Republicans, generally, back an extension, despite an apparent contradiction given their opposition to new spending measures. But to do so would add an estimated $US700 billion over 10 years to the national debt, which is why Obama favours extending the tax break for the middle classes only - for individuals earning up to $US200,000 a year and couples making $US250,000, about 98 per cent of American households. (Huge regional discrepancies account for the seemingly generous ceilings: $US |
and Zoe has turned out great," he says.
"She studies hard, knows what she has got to do and seems to have good staying power for the things she starts."
This is not a motormouth playboy talking, just a proud dad.
Irvine brings his experience home with new race school
By Steven Beacom
Formula One legend Eddie Irvine recently completed his purchase of motoring business Race School Ireland and added to a portfolio of sports venues owned by his company.
Eddie Irvine Sports was founded in 2003 and since it launched has come to acquire indoor go-karting, paintball, laser combat, six 3G football pitches, a Room2Race simulator centre and a snooker hall.
The racer can personally attest to the effect of Race School Ireland, having completed his own racing license with the company. Not long afterwards in 1987 he went on to win the F1600 Esso, RAC British Championships and the coveted Formula Ford Festival.
For years the driver has had a close business relationship with Race School Ireland, making the purchase more of a personal match.
In a statement Eddie Irvine Sports said: "This business amalgamation is evidence that we are continuing to rapidly push forward as Ireland's leading motor sports and corporate entertainment provider. This also allows the history of Eddie Irvine's career to be showcased in a real, educational and fitting environment, allowing every motor enthusiast the opportunity to be a racing driver for a day."
Race School Ireland has as its home the famous Kirkistown Circuit, a 1.53mile race track that is the only one certified by the Motor Sports Association in Ireland. It is located on the Ards Peninsula.
Irvine makes island dreams a reality
Have you ever fancied buying an island in the beautiful Bahamas?
Yeah, me too. We can dream. For Eddie Irvine, however, it's reality and now he is developing it into a stunning resort.
It's just one of many business ventures Conlig's most famous son is involved in.
Eddie revealed: "I'm developing an island in the Bahamas which I bought a few years ago. It is a virgin island and private island where they filmed Pirates of the Caribbean and the plan is to develop it into a beautiful resort. At the moment I have three houses on it... three octagons and probably another five to go. That will be about it. It's going to be very low impact."
He earned millions as a Formula One driver and has been earning even more since leaving the sport, having invested in various types of property – his love for cutting a deal began when he first left Northern Ireland to become a racing driver.
"I've always been interested in property. When I moved to England the first thing I did was buy a house," says Irvine.
"It's a good way of doing something that can make you money as opposed to costing you money.
"Leaving Formula One wasn't a problem for me because I had so many other interests. I build my houses in Miami and I love the houses that I build. The houses make money but I don't build them to try and make money... I build them to make them look amazing.
"Hopefully people will come along and think the same way about the houses, buy them and give me a nice profit.
"I want to keep building. The recession was an opportunity for me to buy good properties at good prices which should be good going forward."
Irvine's business brain is clearly working. On the 2013 Sunday Times Rich List his fortune was said to be a staggering £83m making him the seventh richest sportsman in Britain.
Questions for Eddie
Steven Beacom: Sebastian Vettel is now a four-time World champion, but is he in the same league as fellow German and your old Ferrari team-mate Michael Schumacher, who won seven titles?
Eddie Irvine: Vettel's record is amazing, though he has kept the best car pretty much every year which Michael didn't have. The one thing about Michael was when he won his first two championships he felt 'this is boring, I'm going to go to Ferrari and re-build Ferrari' and that was very admirable. He struggled there for four years before he won another championship. Vettel just staying at Red Bull winning trophies is boring. I don't see what he's trying to prove. Okay, he's going to collect a lot of championships, but you know what, who cares?
SB: What's your thoughts on Lewis Hamilton?
EI: I think Lewis lost the plot a little bit because he went too showbiz. His entry into Formula One was fantastic and his talent was amazing. Then he wanted to be a movie star or a rapper or something else. People want their sports stars to be 100% committed to being sports stars. I think he is coming back from that now and it would be nice if he could challenge Vettel. Lewis and Fernando Alonso are the two guys capable of taking Vettel on if their cars are up to it. Unfortunately, they aren't at the moment.
SB: Who do you admire in sport?
EI: Not really anyone. All people in sport are doing it for themselves and good luck to them. I don't watch sport really because I have too much going on myself. I prefer watching the Discovery Channel. I do think, though, that sport is very important for kids because it shows them you have to work hard to be good at it and succeed.
SB: Do you keep in touch with anyone from Formula One?
EI: Not really. I pretty much do my own thing. I don't really keep in touch with anyone. Kimi Raikkonen rings me the odd time when he's drunk!
Belfast TelegraphImage copyright PA Image caption Listening figures for Evans (left) are down while Grimshaw's see an increase
Chris Evans's BBC Radio 2 breakfast show lost almost half a million listeners in the past year, figures show.
It comes just weeks after he was named as the BBC's highest paid star.
The DJ drew 9.01m listeners a week between April and June 2017, down from 9.47m over the same period in 2016, according to figures by audience research body Rajar.
He was paid between £2.2m and £2.25m during that same year.
The figures show Evans lost 370,000 listeners between the first and second quarter of this year - before his salary was published.
It's better news for Nick Grimshaw - whose breakfast show on Radio 1 saw its weekly audience rise by 350,000 listeners on the previous quarter to reach 5.5m.
It is also an increase on the 5.43m listeners who tuned in during the same period in 2016.
Image copyright Bauer Media Image caption Rickie, Melvin and Charlie co-host the Kiss breakfast show
Radio 1 as a whole saw its audience jump by nearly half a million between April 3 and July 25 - with 9.6m listeners compared with 9.1m in the first three months of 2017.
The figures show Radio 4's Today programme has increased its weekly listeners to reach a record high - with 7.66m tuning in during the second quarter, compared to 7.13m three months earlier.
Radio 4 itself also reached its biggest audience since records began in 1999 - with 11.55m listeners every week.
Bob Shennan, director of BBC radio and music, said Radio 4 was "as vital as ever as it approaches its 50th anniversary".
The BBC's figures overall were "fantastic news for radio, illustrating its enduring appeal in a crowded digital marketplace", he added.
Image caption The Today programme attracted its biggest ever audience
LBC's audience also increased, with 2m listeners a week between April and June 2017, compared to 1.7m over the same period in 2016.
The station's parent company Global said it was an all-time high for LBC, with presenters Nick Ferrari and James O'Brien both reaching record audiences.
Radio X, which was rebranded from XFM in 2015, also reached its best weekly audience yet with 1.4 million.
Alan Brazil's breakfast show on talkSPORT lost about 400,000 listeners, with 1.6m a week in the 2016 period down to 1.2m in 2017.
The figures show the morning slot on Kiss saw its weekly audience drop slightly to 2m in the last quarter from 2.1m.
But the programme, hosted by Rickie, Melvin and Charlie, remains the most popular commercial breakfast show in the UK.
Classic FM's symphonies struck the right chords as its weekly audience increased by over 200,000.
And Heart 80s - a new station that launched in March and plays exclusively eighties music - attracted 850,000 listeners in its first Rajar quarter.
Get news from the BBC in your inbox, each weekday morning
Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.Canada has failed to monitor and gather data on 50 per cent of all managed salmon populations on B.C.’s north and central coasts, according to a study released Monday in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences.
Researchers from Simon Fraser University found the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) is monitoring fewer streams now than before the introduction of a wild salmon policy in 2005 that was designed to assess the health of wild salmon populations and aid those deemed at risk.
“Our knowledge of salmon populations in B.C. is eroding,” study co-author and Simon Fraser University researcher Michael Price told DeSmog Canada. “And it’s really frustrating.”
A number of salmon fisheries, including the Fraser and Skeena River sockeye fisheries, closed due to low salmon runs this summer.
Price and co-researcher John Reynolds found that since the 1980s, annual counts of spawning streams have declined by 70 per cent.
“You can’t manage salmon populations if you don’t know how they’re doing,” Reynolds said.
The study, conducted in partnership with Raincoast Conservation Foundation biologists Misty MacDuffee and Andy Rosenberger, found 42 per cent of salmon populations considered threatened would have improved had commercial fisheries been strategically reduced, study co-author and Simon Fraser University researcher Michael Price told DeSmog Canada.
Budget cuts to DFO, especially during the years of the Harper government, have played a role in poor management, Price said, but added it’s about more than just money.
“They are not taking a strategic approach to salmon management. You can’t just blame budget cuts.”
Price said there was hope after the adoption of the wild salmon policy that things would be different.
“So I was surprised to see now how bad things have gotten particularly in terms of visits to spawning streams and just gathering basic information,” he said.
Without new federal support, historical salmon population data is at risk of becoming irrelevant, Price added.
Salmon Fisheries Closed Across B.C.
The report comes at a time that several salmon fisheries have been closed due to low returns. Salmon fishing contributes about $500 million and roughly 4000 full-time jobs to the B.C. economy.
In previous years, an estimated 4.5 million sockeye have returned to the Fraser watershed during spawning season. This year only about one-third of that is expected.
Price said some test are performed to gauge the general size of returning salmon populations based on a daily catch plugged into a population formula.
This year those tests were used to hit pause on a few major commercial fisheries, which Price said will provide some relief to populations.
But much more detailed and consistent information is needed on specific “conservation units,” which Price said can be made up of anywhere between one and 200 salmon populations.
“We show that 10 of 24 Conservation Units assessed as Red (Poor) would have improved in status had Canadian fisheries been reduced over the last decade,” Price and Reynolds wrote in their study.
A more cautious approach to fisheries, which targets abundant populations while allowing vulnerable populations to recover, would help maintain commercial fisheries while protecting threatened fish, the study suggests.
“We need to assess the health of populations and act on those considered red, poor or threatened,” Price said.
Price emphasized the answer doesn’t necessarily lie in ending commercial or recreational fishing, but in targeting healthy populations while giving unhealthy populations time to rebound.
Climate Change ‘Greatest Threat’ to Future of Wild Salmon
Climate change is “arguably the greatest threat to the future of wild salmon,” the study states.
Price said warmer temperatures translate into earlier spring melts, longer ice-free periods on lakes, low water flow in rivers, high stream temperatures, disease and plankton blooms can all affect wild salmon health.
A second study, also released Monday by researchers at the University of British Columbia, found warmer, less-oxygenated waters are expected to dramatically shrink the size of fish.
“Fish, as cold-blooded animals, cannot regulate their own body temperatures,” explains William Cheung, co-author of the study and associate professor at the Institute for Ocean and Fisheries and director of science for the Nippon Foundation-UBC Nereus Program.
“There is a point where the gills cannot supply enough oxygen for a larger body, so the fish just stops growing larger.”
Cheung and study lead author Daniel Pauly estimate fish will shrink 20 to 30 per cent if ocean temperatures continue to climb due to climate change.
Price said broad-reaching salmon conservation is the best insurance against climate change and the affects it will have on populations.
“With climate change we don’t know exactly what affects it will have on what populations, so the best insurance is in diversity and abundance. Some of those smaller populations today that we might deem insignificant may hold the genetic key that we’ll rely on in the future.”
Lack of Salmon Data ‘Problematic’ for Major Project Approvals
A lack of adequate baseline data is “problematic” when it comes to assessing the impact of major projects such as pipelines, salmon farms and LNG projects, Price said.
“How are we going to know whether a project is going to impact a given population if we don’t have basic information on how well that population is doing before a project came online?” he said.
Greg Knox, executive director at SkeenaWild Conservation Trust, said the federal government has put a lot of resources into supporting mining and oil and gas projects.
“It’s obvious they’re putting more effort into moving large scale development forward than assessing the impacts of development on wild salmon,” Knox said.
“Maybe it’s just easier not to know. But it does pose the question whether they do have any interest in protecting salmon and salmon habitat over large-scale projects.”
B.C. saw more progress on wild salmon policy implementation under the Harper government than so far under Trudeau, Knox said. “Under the Trudeau Liberals we’ve see a continuation of cuts for science and stock assessment and no resources towards implementing the wild salmon policy.”
He added much of the work of conservation groups, local communities and First Nations goes ignored by the federal government. “There is a lot of data out there they don’t incorporate and there is a lot of capacity in First Nations communities and citizen science that exists.”
Price said he believes local, place-based conservation and management is at the heart of effective salmon policy.
“It may seem daunting when you think of monitoring the nearly 3,000 spawning populations in B.C. and all of these streams,” he said.
DFO could partner with more with non-profits, local First Nations and academics and engage more in citizen science, Price said. We’ve had this paternal relationship with DFO for a long time now and it’s time for that to switch,” he said. “A more inclusive process would be a more healthy process for all.”
*Article updated August 23, 2017 at 10:37am PST to include mention of Raincoast Conservation Foundation’s partnership in the study.
Adams River sockeye. Photo: A.S. WrightWhat are Odds?
Simply speaking, “odds” is the term used to describe the chances a person placing a bet has of winning. In gambling: Odds are the chances of winning
Odds are always against the person placing the bet
The “house” always has the edge In every betting game, the odds are against the player. That means that the “house” (the casino, bingo hall, racetrack, lottery commission etc.), is absolutely guaranteed, mathematically, to “win” over time. For every millionaire that is created from lottery winnings, there are millions of others who have lost their money! The longer you gamble; the more likely it is you will lose. Many people who develop problems associated with their gambling have the false belief that they will be able to 'beat the system', while others may not understand that the odds are against them and that over time, they will lose money. Comparing the Odds The odds of winning the Lotto 6/49 are approximately 1 in 14 million. A person has a 1 in 3 million chance of sighting an UFO. That's almost 5 times more likely than winning the jackpot.
You are more likely to die of a flesh eating disease (1 in 1 million) than winning the lottery. That's 14 times more likely than winning the jackpot.
You are more likely to be killed by lightening (1 in 56,439) than win the lottery. That's almost 250 times more likely than winning the jackpot.
You are more likely to be killed in a traffic accident driving 16 km to purchase a ticket than winning the jackpot.
Imagine you are standing blindfolded on a football field holding a pin. A friend has released an ant on the field. Your chance of piercing that ant with your pin is about one in 14 million, the same odds of winning the Lotto 6/49 jackpot.
The odds of winning the top prize at maximum coin play on the slot machines ranges from 1 in 4,096 to 1 in 33,554,000. Another way to look at the odds of winning the lottery jackpot Mrs. Jane Doe lives somewhere in Ontario. Try reaching her by randomly dialing one of 12.5 million Ontario phone numbers. Your odds of calling Mrs. Doe on the first try are better than winning the lottery.A U.S. Customs and Border Protection official working within the Office of International Trade in the United States has issued a stunning rebuke to U.S. President Barack Obama and his trade official Michael Froman by insisting that the United Kingdom is not too small to have free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States.
In recent weeks and months, President Obama and his staff have issued statements urging Britain to stay in the European Union (EU) insisting that they will only form a free trade agreement with a large bloc like the European Union.
But Breitbart London can reveal exclusively an e-mail from the body that implements America’s free trade deals with the world: the Office of International Trade, which states:
“This is the first time I’ve heard of the assertion that the UK is too small to have an FTA with the US… clearly the UK is not too small to have an FTA with the US if we have one with Oman.”
The official stressed: “Do be advised that FTAs are negotiated by the Executive Branch of the U.S., specifically by the United States Trade Representative (USTR) at the behest of the President”.
The e-mail therefore reveals that while Britain is not too small to have a free trade agreement with the United States, the policy of failing to want to implement one if Britain were to leave the European Union may be more of an ideological point impressed by President Obama.
Today Mr. Obama came under pressure from British journalists who asked whether or not a trade deal with the UK could happen. Mr. Obama softened his position, stating that Britain would be at the “back of the queue” as regards trade deals.
In October last year Mr. Froman said: “I think it’s absolutely clear that Britain has a greater voice at the trade table being part of the EU, being part of a larger economic entity… We’re not particularly in the market for FTAs with individual countries. We’re building platforms … that other countries can join over time.”
It was later revealed that Mr. Froman had himself worked for the European Commission.PLEASE NOTE: This mod adds a pre-decorated interior cell player home to the Somerville Place settlement:
Requirements:
There will not be a non-DLC version, so please don’t ask.
Mod release video:
Mod description:
The Better Homes and Bunkers Player Home Mod Series Volume 5: The Somerville Place Trailer Player Home
EXTERIOR/GAMEPLAY:
You will not be able to use the exterior lights, bathroom and trash compactor until you control the settlement and open the trailer door for the first time. AFTER you enter the trailer for the first time, you will be able to use these features.
INTERIOR:
Custom collectible magazine:
VERY IMPORTANT INFO THAT I’M SURE SOME PEOPLE WON’T READ:
MUST ACTIVATE THE LOAD DOOR TWICE
Using with other Somerville Place settlement mods:
Using this mod in an existing Somerville Place settlement build:
Info for FROST players:
NOTES ON INTERACTIVE FEATURES:
About the Better Homes and Bunkers Player Home Mod Series:
Show If you’re not into settlement building and just want a place to sleep and store your stuff, the Better Homes and Bunkers Player Homes might be just what you’ve been looking for. And if you already have a settlement and just want a place to get away from whining settlers and rad storms, then these homes might be perfect for you as well. Each mod in the series will add an interior cell player home to a selected settlement. Some homes will have only the bare essentials, while others will be on par with post-apocalyptic five-star hotels. Most will fall somewhere in between. All will feature functional interactive features, and each will be crafted with a unique theme and decor relevant to the settlement and location that it is part of.
If you still want to build a settlement, or want to use one of the player homes with your existing settlement, not to worry.
The player homes of this series are all interior cells and the load doors and access points will be designed to not interfere with settlement building.
Load doors to interior cells will be placed in innocuous locations of existing settlement structures, or in some cases, totally outside the settlement build zone but still adjacent to it.
In all cases, there will be NO workshop mode inside the player home. But, all interior workbenches will be linked to the settlement workshop to share resources for crafting.
To gain access to one of these player homes, you must first gain control of the settlement in which it is located. Until you do so, the door to the interior cell will remain locked and inaccessible.
PLEASE NOTE: that there will be NO settlement workshop in the player home interior cells! Most items are static, but there are several lootable containers. Spoiler:
F.A.Q.:
Installation:
PERFORMANCE AND OPTIMIZATION:
For you FO4Edit aficionados:
Any cell edits for surrounding cells you see ARE NOT stray edits! They are a result of regenerating the precombined/previs data
Credits and Special Thanks:
Other Notes:
YouTubers:
You are welcome to use/showcase my mods in your reviews, mod showcases, and Let's Play videos.
But, you ARE NOT under any circumstances allowed to upload, share or otherwise distribute this mod or any of its files to any mod “sharing” service such as ModDrop.
Licensing/Legal:
Do not redistribute or alter this work or any of the files contained therein without explicit written consent from the original author (RedRocketTV). This applies to translations uploaded to websites other than nexusmods.com without the explicit written consent from the mod author (RedRocketTV).
This mod will not be uploaded to Bethesda.net or any other site. If you find it anywhere but on the Fallout 4 Nexus, it has been stolen. Please report it as such.
Commercial use strictly prohibited.
Translations:
I am open to having my mods translated to other languages provided you contact me and ASK PERMISSION FIRST! It’s a simple courtesy, and chances are I will be cool about it provided you agree to a few simple rules.
- There is NO workshop mode in the interior cell!- You can not assign settlers to the interior cell!- You can not dismiss companions to the interior cell!- This mod was made for my own game the way I wanted it, and I will not be making changes or taking “requests.”Most items are static, but there are a several lootable items and containers.Far Harbor (DLCCoast)Nuka World (DLCNukaWorld)This mod adds a furnished and functional trailer player home adjacent to the Somerville Place settlement. The trailer is placed just outside of the settlement build zone so it will not interfere with settlement building.To gain access to this player home, you must first be in control of the Somerville Place settlement. If you are not in control of the settlement, the door to the player home remains locked. Most of the exterior features are also not accessible until you control the settlement.The exterior of the trailer fratures a large wooden deck with functioning lights, a power armor station, cooking grill, seating, a radio, a functional Nuka Cola vending machine, and a house for Dogmeat that can be changed to a couch and back again. There is also a bathroom attached to the deck with a functioning shower that when used gives a +2 Charisma boost for eight hours.The interior cell player home is a small, quaint, highly detailed and decorated space with many scripted interactive features, armor and weapons workbenches, a chemistry station, a cooking station and much more. It’s the perfect place to relax and get away from all those whining settlers.I see this home as more of a way station to be used during missions to the Glowing Sea and southern regions of the map, rather than a permanent main base. With this in mind, coupled with the limited interior space, the trailer does not have all the bells and whistles found in other homes in this mod series.The mod features:- Discoverable map marker- You can fast travel from the interior cell- Custom loading screen- Functioning exterior lighting- Power armor station (linked to settlement workshop)- Cooking grill (linked to settlement workshop)- Trash Compactor unit that breaks junk items into their base components and transfers them to the settlement workshop- Working shower gives +2 Charisma boost for eight hours- Working Nuka Cola Vending Machine (make purchases with Pre-War Money)- Dog house for Dogmeat – Can be changed to a couch with an activator button- A radio receiver that plays Diamond City Radio- Furniture for you and your companions to sit and relax- All containers are flagged to not respawn- Deck is navmeshed for companions with many idle markers- Custom collectible magazine that adds a random component shipment to your inventory- Custom design chemistry, armor, weapon and cooking workbenches- Two inventory sorting systems: one container-based, the other terminal based- All workbenches are linked to settlement workshop- Functioning light switches for main lights, desk lamp, workbench and stove lamps- My First Infirmary unit: restores health, removes Rads- Bed that is personalized with player’s name and gives the Well Rested and Lover’s Embrace Bonuses.- Terminal is personalized with player’s name- Working refrigerator with custom Nuka Cola textures: Insert any Nuka Cola, Vim or Gwinnett beer variant and it will be come Ice Cold with the associated buff in six hours- Interactive storage units: Weapons storage, ammo shelf, liquor and food shelves will display clutter when items of each category are added. Clutter will deactivate when container is emptied- LOTS of storage! All containers are flagged to not respawn- Fully navmeshed for companions with idle markersLike the previous mod in this series, Better Homes and Bunkers Volume 5 includes a brand new custom magazine to add you your collection. The magazine is located on the kitchen counter and adds a random component shipment to your inventory when you pick it up. Note that Wood is NOT one of the components that you will get. There is more than enough wood at Somerville Place you can get from scrapping trees, so it seemed silly to add it to the leveled lists that spawns the component shipment.Once you have control of the settlement (when you get a notification that you can use the workshop), go to the red workshop workbench and activate it by using the key you have bound to interact/activate objects. Then exit workshop mode and go to the trailer door.Youto unlock it. The first time triggers the door lock script and it runs an ownership check on the workshop. If you own the settlement, the script removes the lock. Activating the door the second time opens the door and loads you into the interior cell.Also note that the exterior light, bathroom door and trash compactor are coupled to the door unlock script, so you must first activate the unlocked load door in order to unlock these features. After you have entered the interior cell for the first time, these items will be accessible for use.Since the trailer is located completely outside of the settlement build zone, the potential for mod conflicts should be minimal. Your mileage may vary.That being said, this mod does regenerate the precombined mesh and previs data for the settlement cells. Any additional mods that modify the recombined/previs data for the same cells will conflict.As with anytime you use multiple mods that modify the same cell, there is ALWAYS a potential for conflicts. Even though the trailer is not part of the settlement build zone, there is always the chance you will run into problems using other mods that modify the Somerville Place area.I don’t use any Somerville Place settlement mods so I haven’t tested any. You’re on your own for that. I also have no intention of making compatibility patches...you’re on your own for that as well. Sorry, but I can’t get into supporting mods that I don’t use for my own game.Ideally, the mods in this series should be used in a new game but there are no real issues using them in a game with a settlement already built at the location, provided you keep a few important things in mind:1. Before installing this mod,leave the Somerville Place settlement. Fast travel someplace else, whatever, just leave Somerville Place. Once you are out of the settlement, save your game and quit.4. Install and activate the mod.5. Load the save you just made and WALK, not Fast Travel...into the Somerville Place settlement. This will (hopefully) insure the new trailer and exterior objects are properly loaded into your game.6. Activate the load door TWICE, as described above.7. Enter, and enjoy your new digs!The mod is compatible with Fallout: FROST v.41. If you use the Unofficial FROST FPS Fix mod, you are likely to have visual conflicts with the precombined/previs data generated by both mods. Adjust your load order accordingly.There is some very important information in the READ ME regarding the interactive features of the mod. I strongly suggest you read itbefore asking questions or reporting issues.The Somerville Place Trailer Player Home is the fifth in a series of player home mods that add interior cell player homes to Fallout 4 settlement locations.The Better Homes and Bunkers Player Home mod series aims to fill a void in the Fallout 4 settlement system by offering old school, pre-decorated, move-in ready player homes to existing settlement locations. All of the homes in this series will be inspired by the player homes of previous Fallout games.Click the spoiler tag to read more...A comprehensive F.A.Q. is in the READ ME. Live it, Learn it, Love it.Use the mod manager of your choice,Or to install manually:Extract the archive. It contains three files:RRTV_HomesAndBunkers_Somerville.espRRTV_HomesAndBunkers_Somerville – Main.BA2RRTV_HomesAndBunkers_Somerville – Textures.BA2Place all three files into your Data folder and activate the mod with your mod manager.The interior trailer cell is very, very small so the use of room bounds and portals was not required. Even on a low end laptop with a 4700-series i7 with a 2GB GTX860M and 16GM RAM I am able to maintain a solid 60FPS on High and Ultra settings. There are two shadowed light sources in the trailer: the main ceiling light and the “sun” light that comes in through the kitchen window. If the godrays from this light cause you FPS issues, simply close the Venetian blinds using the button on the counter beneath the window. This will help as the godrays are no longer rendered.The mod has been cleaned in FO4Edit. But if you can’t resist the urge to see for yourself, be aware that the precombined mesh and previs data for the trailer and settlement exterior cells (Farm05Ext for the settlement, and a Wilderness cell for the trailer) and many surrounding cells has been regenerated.The Creation kit regenerates previs data for ALL surrounding cells on a 3x3 grid when regenerating optimization data regardless if a mod makes changes to them or not. Unless you want to risk experiencing performance and/or graphical issues, I suggest you leave them be.bLaCkShAd0w for the footlocker texture modder’s resource used for the custom footlockersQueenLunara for the mini TV from the modder’s resource, Queenie's Resources Shoes near the Armor Locker are by MsRae from the Creative Clutter modders resource
Chucksteel for the Know your ABCs modder’s resource used for the Diner signThe playing cards are from Se7enraven FO4 Modder's Resource The scrapping script used by the Trash Compactor is based on code posted by isathar on the Bethesda CK forumsfadingsignal, for creating the Basement Living mod which gave me the idea for the Better Homes and Bunkers series. I love that mod, and thought it would be cool to have additional options for interior cell player homes at settlements.Darkfox127 and Seddon4494 for their amazing Creation Kit video tutorials which have been crucial to the success of every mod I’ve made.1. This mod is PC only. There will not be a console version, so please do not ask.2. There is no settlement workshop for the player home interior cell and one will not be added so please don’t ask.3. There will not be a non-DLC version, so you guessed it, please don’t ask.4. Based on any texture replacements you have installed in your game, the appearance of items in the mod may vary from what is shown in the screenshots and promo video. I use many texture replacements in my game and videos, and none of them are included in this mod.I use the Decent Plus ENB preset for my screenshots, videos and gameplay.5. I am creating the mods in this series to fit my own game and gameplay, and will only be doing settlements that I have an interest in. Requests will not be taken, and questions asking “Can you/will you do settlement XYZ?” will not be responded to. That being said, if you ask nicely, I will be able to tell you what settlements I intend to work on...if I can figure that out for myself.Yesterday, with the opening of the 112th Congress, Representative Peter King (R-NY) succeeded Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-MI) as the Chair of the House Homeland Security Committee.
In the past few weeks Congressman King, no stranger to exaggerated sensationalism, has attracted a great deal of media attention for labeling Wikileaks a terrorist organization (a stretch by any definition of the term) and calling for the prosecution of the New York Times under the Espionage Act.
Congressman King has said that his first order of business as Chair will be to hold hearings on Muslim-American radicalization.
This has caused more than a little concern in the Muslim community since King made headlines in 2004 by channeling Senator Joseph McCarthy in an interview with Sean Hannity in which he claimed – without any apparent factual basis whatsoever – that 85% of the mosques in America were controlled by “Islamic fundamentalists” and went on to describe the members of these mosques as “an enemy living among us.”
I suppose we shouldn’t be terribly surprised by Congressman King’s antics, as he has never been particularly good at spotting real terrorists. King was a high profile supporter of the Provisional IRA for almost twenty years telling a political meeting in Nassau County, New York, in 1982:
“We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry.”
In the course of more than three decades of violence in Northern Ireland the Provisional IRA is variously estimated to have killed between 1,700 and 1,900 people and to have injured thousands more.
These attacks included the bombing of a Remembrance Sunday (Veteran’s Day) Service in Enniskillen in which eleven members of the congregation died, the bombing of a MacDonald’s in Warrington that killed two small children, and the bombing of the London department store Harrods, which claimed six lives, including that of a United States citizen.
In addition to pursuing its armed struggle against the British government, the Provisional IRA has been involved in racketeering, extortion and drug trafficking. Former IRA members have been identified training operatives of other foreign terrorist organizations, notably the Colombian group FARC.
Congressman King finally drifted apart from the Provisional IRA, not because he had an epiphany about their use of violence or about their criminal activity, but because of the “knee-jerk anti-Americanism” demonstrated by his Irish contacts in the aftermath of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
However, Congressman King has not broken entirely with all his former friends. In 2008 he lent his support to former IRA man Pol Brennan who was seeking bail while he fought a deportation hearing in Texas.
Brennan had been sentenced to more than sixteen years in prison in 1977 after being caught in possession of explosives and firearms in Northern Ireland. Brennan escaped in 1983 and went to ground in the United States. He was ultimately deported.
I have no criticism of King’s support for a United Ireland, the political landscape in Northern Ireland is complex and all of the parties involved share some of the blame for the decades of violence that have ravaged the province. The Congressman is, of course, free to speak out in support of any political cause that takes his fancy.
However, as the survivor of an IRA bomb attack in Central London, I do have a real problem with his support for terrorism.
That problem is simple: if your test for whether or not terrorist violence is acceptable is whether or not you agree with the cause that it furthers, you will never have the moral authority to condemn such acts when they are carried out by others. The use of violence against innocents must be wrong in whatever form it takes. Take any other position and you are open, as Congressman King undoubtedly is, to charges of hypocrisy.
There is no way to varnish the fact that for twenty years Congressman King consistently supported a violent armed group that murdered men, women and children in pursuit of its political goals. It is also worth noting that those victims were citizens of America’s closest ally in the struggle against Al Qaeda.
These are not frivolous times and rabble-rousers do |
I read them all immediately with increasing dismay.
The “minor quibbles” I originally had with EA flared into major disappointment. I backtracked; I reversed; I rebelled. Now I am not going to the Meetup, I’m not advancing to Week Two in the online course, I’m tossing The Most Good You Can Do into my Kindle archive. I’m finished with EA.
Here’s the five faults I find with Effective Altruism:
1. EA’s Over-Reliance on Charity Navigator, Give Well, and other NPO Evaluators
2. EA’s Stance that “Earning High and Giving Big” is Superior
3. EA’s Too-High Consideration for Animal Rights
4. EA’s Weird, Wrong Alliance with MIRI (Machine Intelligence Research Institute)
5. There’s an Alternative to EA that’s Far Superior: I call it “DIY Philanthropy”
I need to disclose my activities now: I’m founder/director of a small nonprofit that raised $40,000 last year for orphanages, schools, and clinics in Uganda, The Philippines, and the Congo.
Let’s examine EA’s problems, one at a time:
FLAW #1: Over-Reliance on Charity Navigator, Give Well, and other NPO Evaluators
Singer and EA advise giving money only to organizations that donate 75% - 100% of their budget on services. Worthy groups - like Against Malaria Foundation - are determined by “evaluators” like Charity Navigator and GiveWell, who spend millions conducting their research.
There are two humungous flaws in this simplistic and elitist procedure:
1. The effectiveness of a charity’s service depends on more than the service percentile of its budget. If 60% of one NPO’s funds provides a greater good than 90% of another NPO’s budget that serves the same community - dollar for dollar - it’s more effective and ethical to fund the higher-quality service.
2. GiveWell and Charity Navigator both have a “Bigger is Better” bias that cripples grassroots charity startups. Well-deserving groups like mine that spend 100% of our income on services are off-the-radar of the evaluators because we’re too new and too small. Charity Navigator only recommends long-lived humanitarian behemoths that have total revenue of more than $1,000,000 annually, that have been in existence for seven years.
EA’s recommendation that philanthropists fund only the Big Old Charities cripples small newbie groups like mine. My NPO has lost several potential donors who backed out when they couldn’t find our name listed on GiveWell or Charity Navigator. What EA has done is “corporatize” the humanitarian field; they’ve provided large budget NPO’s with a massive advantage over startup charities. EA is “centralizing” the giving field, enabling a select few groups to monopolize.
Do I believe little tiny humanitarian groups provide better services than the massive bureaucracies? YES. For real “effectiveness” in altruism I suggest seeking out solitary individuals or small contingents who are trying to improve your favorite concern.
Hannah Smith, for example, is a blonde UK do-gooder who helps destitute war orphans with PTSD in the Congo via her Congo Orphans Trust. She trucks life-saving supplies into the dangerous region, to mud-and-wattle orphanages packed with hungry kids with haunted eyes.
Thousands of “DIY Humanitarians” like Hannah exist. They will answer your emails, they will thank you profusely, they will deliver 100% of whatever you give them because they do it because they care, not due to a salary. These people run small Indiegogo and GoFundMe campaigns, or maybe they just solicit their friends, communities, or churches. Peter Singer and the EA movement ignore and injure their potential to contribute by promoting Big NPOS only.
To learn more about “start-up” humanitarianism, I suggest reading A Path Appears by Nicolas Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn.
FLAW #2: EA’s Stance that “Earning High and Giving Big” is Morally Superior
EA crudely seems to regard CASH DONATED as containing the highest moral value. The EA-promoted essay “To save the world, don’t get a job at a charity; go work on Wall Street” by William MacAskill says, “while researching ethical career(s)… I concluded that it’s in fact better to earn a lot of money and donate a good chunk of it…you’ll have made a much bigger difference.” Doing good deeds in your vocation, claims MacAskill, is probably inferior: “if you decide to work in the charity sector, you’re rather limited.”
His reasoning - supported by EA - proclaims it is ethically superior, for example, to take a $200,000 annual income job on Wall Street, and donate 50% to charity, than it is to, for example, teach High School Math in the inner city for $50,000 and donate $5,000 to charity. He’s wrong in this inhumane assessment, for two reasons:
1. The happiness of the individual funder is disregarded. Of course it is wonderful that the additional $95,000 gained is perhaps curing malaria, but its callous to suggest that everyone in the developed world is ethically required to to devote themselves to high-salaried occupations, that they might hate. The giver’s life and need for happiness also contains value. Mandating that developed-world people should labor for others in occupations that might make them miserable is self-righteous and unethical.
2. EA disregards the “human value” of an occupation. The math teacher is unable to donate $95,000 annually to charitable causes, but he is, every school day, conveying information on an important topic and serving as a role model and support for young adults. He is in a position to touch, change, and improve lives. Maybe he will inspire his students to quite drugs, leave gangs, go to college. Wall Street sharks aren’t doing that; they’re usually just helping the 1% maintain their privileged status. Is the math teacher’s contribution to helping humanity less than the Wall Streeter, as MacAskill asserts? No. I believe the math teacher’s contribution is greater.
FLAW #3: EA’s Too-High Consideration for Animal Rights
Yes, I’m an omnivore, and Yes, I’m a “Speciesist.” I’m a Humanitarian not an Animalitarian. My priority is helping humans first; I think its the ethical and sensible stance. I deplore factory farming but it is below human slavery and genocide on my list of concerns.
Singer/EA, not surprisingly, puts Animal Causes on the list of most-ethical concerns. Animal Rights NPOs even have their own evaluator. I don’t support this position; I find it misguided. Hundreds of millions of dollars are already donated to beast-centric concerns that pamper orphan tigers, for example, so they can return to the wild and slay ungulates. I feel a wee bit of compassion for these creatures, but the vast majority of my empathy is reserved for homo sapiens who are hungry, diseased, and uneducated.
Truth is, I don’t think its ethical to donate thousands of dollars to furry-friendly organizations like Maddie’s Fund in San Francisco, where waiting-for-adoption felines recline on comfy furniture, licking their lips while watching song bird videos on their own television set. Meanwhile, right outside, homeless humans dig through dumpsters looking for slabs of cardboard to use as a mattress for the night.
Helping Humans First is central to my moral code. Singer elevates animals to a level that is unacceptable to me; this promotion detours money away from needy people. I find that crazy and shameful.
FLAW #4: EA’s Weird, Wrong Alliance with MIRI (Machine Intelligence Research Institute)
MIRI is a Berkeley-based research team that was previously-titled SIAI (Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence). MIRI has a history of arrogance and aggressiveness, justified in their minds, I suppose, by their opinion that the future of the world depends on their ability to help create Friendly AI. MIRI has the financial support of Peter Thiel, who is worth $2.2 billion on Forbes The Midas List. MIRI isn’t curing disease or helping the poor; it’s budget pays the salaries of its aloof, we’re-more-rational-than-you researchers. I’m dismayed that MIRI has infiltrated EA.
Two of the recommended introductory essays on the Effective Altruism organization site are written by MIRI members. Posted second, right under Singer’s preface article, is a math-wonky article by SIAI/MIRI founder Eliezar Yudkowsky. Luke Muelhauser, MIRI’s recent Executive Director (who left last month to join GiveWell), wrote a let’s-set-the-agenda article further down the list, titled “Four Focus areas of effective altruism.” He places MIRI in the third focus area.
MIRI/SIAI tried to “take over” the transhumanist group HumanityPlus 3.5 years ago, when four SIAI members ran for H+’s Board. SIAI ran a sordid, pushy, insulting campaign, bribing voters, accusing opponents of “racism”, deriding Board members as “freaky… bat-shit crazy [with] broken reasoning abilities.” MIRI failed in their attempt to colonize H+, but they’ve successfully wormed their way into the heart of EA.
A colleague of mine (who asked me not to disclose their identity) attended the 2014 EA Summit in San Francisco and afterwards was of the impression that: “MIRI and CFAR (Center for Applied Rationality) are essentially the “owners” of EA. EA as a movement has already sold itself in deals to devils.” This is surely an exaggeration in international EA, but in the SF Bay Area.. MIRI’s presence within EA is uncomfortably strong.
FLAW #5: There’s an Alternative to EA that’s Far Superior: I call it “DIY Philanthropy”
Effective Altruism provides too much advice and too many judgmental opinions on who, how, or why to fund. This renders us passive because EA insists that it’s already done the research and ethical thinking for us.
Compassionate people don’t need Big Brother informing them what right or wrong, how to help others. EA is just an obstacle in the path of a far better activity: DIY Philanthropy.
I won’t provide your with lengthy instructions detailing how to accomplish this. being a DIY Human means figuring it out yourself. My only hint is: be a Hannah Smith. She wants to help war orphans in the Congo, so she helps them.
You don’t need Peter Singer and EA telling you how to be charitable.
Let your own brain and heart be your guide.
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A Vox article that supports my POV can be found HERE
Another IEET essay on Effective Altruism can be found HERE
An essay on DIY Philanthropy can be found HEREIn the aftermath of a chaotic incident that witnesses initially believed to be a police shooting in Baltimore, CNN’s Jake Tapper spoke to Baltimore City Councilman Brandon Scott, who called out Fox News for what he described as their “irresponsible” reporting that turned out to be false.
Scott said he’s “concerned” that “we have members of the media being irresponsible,” singling out Fox News, where reporter Mike Tobin said he saw the shooting of a young black man occur. “When you do stuff like that irresponsibly,” he continued, “media is supposed to report what they know, not what they think.” He pleaded with any national media still in Baltimore to cover some “positive” things as well, saying, “There are so many great things going on with young people in our town that we do not have to continuously show the negative about Baltimore.”
“Amen to members of the media being responsible,” Tapper replied. But he did want to know why there have been “such vatstly different accounts of what happened.” The anchor reported that police are hoping to release surveillance footage to put the public’s mind at ease that no one was shot by police.
Following Fox’s initial, frenzied reporting, Shepard Smith issued an on air apology, telling viewers, “We screwed up.”
Watch video below, via CNN:
[Photo via screengrab]
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>> Follow Matt Wilstein (@TheMattWilstein) on Twitter
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.comDENVER – While you were waiting for internet sensation April to give birth in New York, the Denver Zoo quietly welcomed a baby giraffe Tuesday morning.
Five-foot-tall Dobby, a male reticulated giraffe, was born at 3 a.m. to mother Kipele.
Dobby wasn’t nursing right away so staff had to feed him, zookeepers said. He’s since begun nursing and staff said he and mom are doing well.
Zoo staff said they didn’t know until recently that Kipele was pregnant, though they had their suspicions. Zookeepers were able to confirm the pregnancy via ultrasound and predicted a due date in late February or early March.
Dobby and his mom are resting up and spending quality time together, so they’re not available for public viewing just yet.
Dobby’s birth brings the total number of giraffes at the Denver Zoo to five.
Kipele was born at the Denver Zoo in 1993 and is currently the zoo’s oldest giraffe. Dobby’s father, Dikembe, was born at Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs in 1993 and moved to Denver in 1996.
The Denver Zoo has been caring for giraffes since 1973 and since then, more than 70 giraffes have been born and raised at the zoo. Dobby is the zoo’s first birth since October 2010.
--------- Sign up for Denver7 email alerts to stay informed about breaking news and daily headlines.
Or, keep up-to-date on the latest news and weather with the Denver7 apps for iPhone/iPads, Android and Kindle.South African Kevin Pietersen remains ostracised from the England cricket team after revelations about him texting South African players about another South African player.
Whilst playing for England against South Africa, South African Pietersen is said to have been texting fellow South Africans, playing for South Africa, about South African players playing for England.
England cricket captain and native South African Andrew Strauss has gone on record saying there are issues of trust to be resolved in the England cricket set up.
While England cricket coach Andy Flower, who is from South Africa, has backed his South African captain, who plays for England.
Pietersen ignored
Pietersen, from South Africa, is believed to have referred to South African Strauss as a ‘doos’, a derogatory South African term.
To find out the exact meaning of the phrase reporters waited outside England’s cricket team training to randomly ask the England cricketer, and incidentally South African, Jonathan Trott.
“It’s a reference to the lady garden” he said, “and I don’t have the slightest inclination as to why issues of mistrust, disloyalty, lack of heart and desire should crop up in the England cricket team when playing against South Africa.”
Indeed it remains a mystery among ECB officials as to why superstar ego’s have clashed within a tangled web of multi hybrid nationalism that exists in the England dressing room. Against South Africa.Bloody, awful, messy deaths are par for the course on The Walking Dead, but thanks, in small part, to some unfortunate timing, the latest character to go carries some major cultural baggage. More on why this death will weigh heavily on The Walking Dead fandom after the spoiler warning. If you haven’t watched Season 6, Episode 14 “Twice As Far,” consider this your final warning.
A few weeks ago on the CW sci-fi drama The 100 a character named Lexa (played by Fear the Walking Dead star Alycia Debnam-Carey) died shortly after consummating her relationship with series lead Clarke (Eliza Taylor). This sparked massive outcry from the The 100 fandom who accused the show’s writers of falling back in a well-established trope known as “Bury Your Gays” or “Dead Lesbian Syndrome.” (The names are pretty self-explanatory, but you can go here for a pretty complete history of the trope in film, TV, literature, and more.) Now The Walking Dead has killed off one of their two lesbian characters, Dr. Denise Cloyd (Merritt Wever), with a nasty arrow to the eye. Another lesbian bites the dust. The timing couldn’t be worse, but the circumstances around Denise’s death only exacerbate the problem.
In the comics, it’s Abraham (Michael Cudlitz), not Denise, who dies with an arrow through his eye. The comic book version of Denise does die, yes, but a little later on down the line. And while being a lesbian doesn’t mean a character should be bulletproof—anyone and everyone should be ready to die on The Walking Dead—the writers did decide to swap the gay character in for the straight, white alpha male. They had to do a lot of plot contorting to get there, too. In the books, Denise dies while rushing to medically assist a friend from inside the walls of the compound. In the show, she dies out on a supply run trying to prove—like Eugene does elsewhere—that she can face her fears.
Related: How The Walking Dead’s Norman Reedus Celebrated Eugene’s Big Bite
Just a two episodes ago, Denise told her girlfriend Tara (Alanna Masterson) she couldn’t go with her on an extended supply run saying, “I can’t. I need to be here, I’m the only doctor now. I can’t. But I want to.” This week Denise admits to Daryl and Rosita, “I could have gone with Tara. I could have told her I loved her but I didn’t because I was scared.” And just when she achieves romantic clarity (and a can of Crush for Tara) Denise dies.
So while Denise’s death didn’t come immediately after she and Tara consummated their relationship, it did interfere with her plans to tell Tara she loved her when they saw each other again. Masterson is off the show for at least a few weeks due to a pregnancy so we may have to wait to get the full poignant fall out from the latest Walking Dead tragedy. For now, Denise’s death largely serves as a poignant reminder to Daryl that he made a serious mistake letting his crossbow go.
It’s worth noting that the character of Tara doesn’t have an exact counterpart in the comics and that Denise on the page is straight. In fact she ultimately sacrifices herself in order to save her male lover, Heath. So this entire lesbian relationship—however brief—was a show invention and part of The Walking Dead’s recent attempts to be more sexually diverse. Last season saw Aaron (Ross Marquand) and Eric (Jordan Woods-Robinson) share a controversial same-sex kiss. But while Eric and Aaron are still alive and kicking, they are very much on the back burner and neither they nor their relationship has ever seriously factored into the main plot of The Walking Dead.
That wasn’t the case with Denise and Tara. Denise’s role in the community was extremely significant—she saved Carl from his should-be-fatal eye wound just a few episodes ago. (Worth noting that Carl escaped with just an eyepatch while Denise died.) And Emmy award-winner Wever brought an extraordinary amount of pathos to Denise’s emotional struggle. And though the character’s been sidelined by Masterson’s pregnancy, Tara has been an integral member of the group and an important role model for LGBTQ Walking Dead fans since she joined the cast in Season 4.
Wever herself addressed potential backlash telling The Daily Beast:
I understand if viewers watching the show really identify with the character or like seeing themselves or some part of the world that they know is real and true and valid and prevalent represented. And then to have that taken away, I definitely see how that would be disappointing in the broader scheme of things. I’m not sure that that’s what was going on here but I understand the sentiment very well and I am familiar with the [trope of] black characters or gay characters getting killed off because [they’re considered] less human or less real or less important and people aren’t gonna care as much. From my end, it didn’t feel like that’s what was happening though. But I certainly understand the concern in the wider culture.
That disappointing tease about Daryl’s sexuality a few years ago aside, The Walking Dead continues to take some shuffling steps towards greater LGBT representation. Paul “Jesus” Monroe (Tom Payne)—a gay character in the both the comics and the show—got a splashy intro a few episodes ago and promises to have a healthy amount of screen time going forward. In creating the stereotype-defying character, Walking Dead writer Robert Kirkman said:
In my opinion there should be more awesome gay people in fiction because there are plenty of awesome gay people in real life. I want Jesus to be a character where his sexuality is as unimportant as Rick or other heterosexual characters. So we won’t focus on it constantly and it won’t be the focus of any big storylines for him... but he’ll make out with a dude every now and then... before going out and drop kicking zombies. He's one of my current favorite characters.
But as happy as we all may be that a kickass gay Jesus has arrived on the scene, lesbian characters are much rarer on TV—especially lesbian characters in happy relationships. One of the biggest critiques associated with the “Dead Lesbian Syndrome” trope is that fictional gay women in relationships are often denied the happy endings their straight counterparts enjoy. Well, one thing we know about The Walking Dead is that nobody, gay or straight, is guaranteed a happy ending. But we also know that thanks to Denise’s death, Abraham is alive and well. At least for now.
Get Vanity Fair’s HWD Newsletter Sign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood. E-mail Address SubscribeThe issue:
This election has seen the provincial parties make a variety of promises to voters, all of which will cost money. But how will they pay for them?
The parties’ platforms:
The Green Party says it would increase the general corporate tax rate to 12 per cent, and increase the share of taxes paid by those earning more than $108,460 a year. They say they would also eliminate boutique tax credits and increase the carbon tax every year.
The Liberal party says it would implement a personal income tax and carbon tax freeze and introduce several new tax credits. They also say they will cut the small business tax rate and cut MSP premiums in half.
The NDP says it would re-implement the top tax bracket for those making over $150,000 and increase the corporate tax rate to 12 per cent. They say they’d eliminate MSP fees and phase in the new federal carbon tax rate starting in 2020 and eliminate “partisan government advertising.”
Both the NDP and BC Liberals promised to cut the small business tax rate from 2.5 per cent to two per cent.
We asked the candidates
Simon Gibson, BC Liberals, Abbotsford-Mission
During the last election, your leader was adamant LNG would be the route to paying off the province’s debt; what happened to that?
LNG is going to be an incredible source of revenue for our province and create thousands of jobs. There currently are people working on LNG up north and a lot of the infrastructure is in place to ship it across the Pacific. However … the commodity price for LNG has come down quite significantly. So we’re facing the challenge of a product that is desireable but the profit margins are slim for those who would invest. So we’re in a stand-by position.
—
Aird Flavelle, Green Party, Abbotsford South
How would your party pay for its promise to provide free preschool to all three- and four-year-olds
We spend $4 billion on social services and I think we can save an awful lot of that money by making our children stronger. If we had stronger families and stronger early childhood experiences, we’d have so much less crime, we’d have so much less drug use, we’d have so much less people in our prisons.
—
Preet Rai, NDP, Abbotsford West
You say you will find efficiencies to pay for your promises, what if you can’t find enough efficiencies?
I think that is a question for when we get into government and find out what sort the books are [in]. Right now, the BC Liberals have been taking money from BC Hydro and ICBC when your and my rates have been going through the roof … but the BC NDP has promised in its platform that we will be doing this with a balanced budget.Psssst! Sneak peek at a big upcoming modern prefab house announcement
I can start talking about in the new year!
As usual, at my own prefab house,
when the temperatures drop
and the cookstove goes out overnight,
off grid with only a tiny firebox
heating the entire prefab house
we still wake comfortably.
I will be going in to each passive solar modern prefab house construction project in much more detail
The Wolftrot
The Austin Dogtrot Mod
Enjoying Austin with her family.
About three years ago, Amber reached out to us for information on a modern prefab house. We scheduled a conference call, and answered some general questions she had. Over time, she kept checking back, and in the fall of 2018 purchased a lot, called, and said, "I'm ready!"
And thus the process began.
Amber and son checking out their
newly-purchased lot.
There is an R1 Residential modern prefab house on Lake Tahoe project...
Keep an eye on how they flip this floorplan!
Remember the R1 Residential Outside of San Francisco?!?
A *modified* R1 Residential
under construction outside San Francisco.
And finally, we have a Dogtrot Mod in the Northeast update!
The client enjoying the first snow of the year
in her Dogtrot Mod "Little Lab."
Each prefab project and person is fascinating and is it's own vibrant journey.
In OUR family and off grid life, as I have mentioned, we are enduring enjoying the persnickety smelly moody aura of teens the high school years.
Ok maybe they're not SO bad...
Ah, the teen years.
Jobless teen busy at work.
Replacing a well pressure tank
bladder instead of
just going out and buying a new one.
This teen has skillz!
THAT'S how you freakin' get out of my hair, not by scooping ice cream.
The teen girls had a great Halloween handing out candy.
All gussied up for a sailing event believe it or not!
Matching sailors!
Caught up to Granddad.
Love a guy in an apron.
Here is a quick update, andin the coming weeks.In general, when potential clients ask for SIP fabrication quotes from the factory, I tell them the estimated time for fabrication of the panels is about 4-5 weeks. Now, even in winter, this year I need to tell them 6-8 weeks, because that's how busy the plants are, east coastwest coast. It's not just the plants; the architects are slammed, the engineers' schedules are full... so if you are planning on purchasing a prefab home, what you need to know is that if you leave things "as is" and don't start customizing anything that would involve an architect or engineer, even so, it will be a few weeks longer than usual.If you arereconfiguring the prefab house design, expect much longer than you might think for this time of year, because it seems as if this summer's boom still has not ended and everyone is still going full steam ahead already before your project gets into queue! So my message to interested parties is: PLAN AHEAD. Start interviewing contractors now, not when you actually want the house to be purchased.Now let's go over our current prefab house projects and a brief synopsis of where they stand:This Dogtrot Mod modern prefab house from Green Cabin Kits has been modified for the Pacific Northwest and the client's lifestyle.As I mentioned, the clients decided to close in the breezeway between the main and guest units and create a solarium, changed the foundation, roof, and more to accommodate snow load and lifestyle choices.These European clients have lived allllll over the world and have decided to settle on the west coast.What makes this client particularly engaging is his quick understanding of the prefab industry, as he has a background in business, engineering, and, with his wife, has lived in architecture as diverse as restoring a hundreds of years old stone home in England, to also having built their own new homes in the States.They are big fans of SIP, understanding that the consistent quality, energy efficiency and speed in fabrication of the structural insulated panels overcomes the slightly higher upfront price.This prefab house will be sited discretely on this peaceful property, nestled near surrounding woods and overlooking the lake.Currently, this project is in engineering.Outside of Austin,Dogtrot Mod modern prefab house will be a contrast to the Wolftrot in that it will be a standard, push-button prefab house as our architect envisioned. The only divergence from the design is that in order to site the modern prefab house correctly on the lot, the breezeway will be narrowed by four feet in order to remain within the easements of the urban lot, and the roofline raised."While I loved financial analysis and problem solving, I didn't truly love the monotony of accounting. I was hired as a business development representative for a title company where I mentored and coached realtors. Early on, I knew that real estate was something I was very passionate about.I got my real estate license in 2006 and my broker's license in 2008, and I haven't looked back! I created my own brokerage called Austin Domain Properties in 2008. As a Dave Ramsey Endorsed Local Provider (REAL ESTATE) and Master Financial Coach, I use my finance expertise to coach my clients in their real estate plans ranging from 1 year to the next 50 years. "What a great lot!Currentlymodern prefab house is in the engineering and permitting process, with structural insulated panels due to arrive in two months.This Austin Texas prefab house project can be followed here The project shall be thus called, "La Rancho."Amberyou crack me up!!!A local Tahoe City design firm is adjusting the floorplan in the R1 Residential for the client, and an engineer has been engaged to adjust the roof for snow loads and local code.The client is a modern design enthusiast, as is the designer.What makes this prefab project interesting is that the client is flipping the floorplan- the kitchen and dining will be on the SECOND story. They are also building the R1 Residential modern addition The 18,000 sf lot is in an extremely restrictive zoning area, with heavy snow.If you love Lake Tahoe you willwhere this prefab is located! But for now, I will stay mum on that. : ) But I *can* reveal... it is on the west shore.in upcoming weeks!Currently, the quote for this modern prefab house project has been approved, and now moves to engineering, and the client wants to break ground in May.IT HAS BEEN BUILT!!!!I am hoping to share with you interior and exterior photos very soon!This client has been such a joy to work with. If you recall, she built the guest unit of the modern prefab cabin first as a retreat, while still living in her historic farmhouse.It has finally come time to put her farmhouse on the market, and thus, she wrote that in soon she expects to re-start construction and finish the project.Of note: she wants to finish with HEMPCRETE I will be re-publishing this update on our Green Modern Kits News blog in about a week, with details on the TEAM involved with each prefab- the contractor, the engineer, the interior designers, and more.One thing to note is that a lot of these projects happen only after years of discussion, after many gentle leads turn into, suddenly, a very real project where the client has the loan, the lot is purchased, contractor lined up, and suddenly out of the blue I get that call that another prefab house is a GO. Like many families, we are doing too much, and I miss the steady confident-yet-quiet security of homeschooling on the farm, where you worked hard on your studies then spent the afternoons free outdoors. But then again, maybe back then I thought I was overwhelmed, too!Halloween was great, Thanksgiving was great, with friends and family and even sailor friends reuniting, brushing our hair, and gussying up together. So the teen years are good.I just miss our quiet days allllllll together,, I guess.The teens don't.They want REAL SCHOOL and lots of KIDS who are not goats.Anyhoo.Tonight, over dinner, Teen 1 is talking about how much he wants a job.So I put my napkin down, languidly leaned back, and said,"Sure, we're done, pick up my dishes and clean the kitchen.""Well, after you're done helping the F's put up about a 1,000 bales of hay each June, after you're done teaching Code Camp for free to rural kids,you're done letting out, feeding, and locking up the chickens horses dogs and the very-naughty donkey daily,you have swept the house and cleaned your room, after you have folded your laundry, and after you have scrubbed the bathroom, then done your homework, and are making straight A's, AS LONG AS IT DOESN'T INTERFERE, we can talk about it.But... kid: country families have too many jobs they already need you for in the family to hire you out."It seems to me that often, city kids have jobs "to teach them responsibility."But country kids... well, they just have a lot of jobs and we depend on them to be responsible.And thus ends my musing and prefab projects for the day.As my English clients say... TTFN!aaaaOROW.: )Back home = good day for brunswick stew.
Labels: Dogtrot Mod prefab Austin, Dogtrot Mod Wolftrot, green building, hempcrete, Prefab House Project R1 Residential Outside Of San Francisco, prefab house projectsMark Fields is out as Ford CEO and Jim Hackett is in. Ford just made the news official after it was first reported last night by The New York Times. Hacket, 62, who ran Steelcase furniture for 20 years before joining Ford, was most recently in charge of the company's autonomous vehicle subsidiary known as Ford Smart Mobility. Fields was CEO for three years — a period that saw Ford stock drop 40 percent.
“Reporting to Executive Chairman Bill Ford, Hackett will lead Ford’s worldwide operations and 202,000 employees globally. He succeeds Mark Fields, 56, who has elected to retire from Ford after a successful 28-year career with the company,” said the company in a press release. Hackett is charged with three priorities: sharpen operational execution especially in underperforming lines of business; modernizing Ford’s business by leveraging big data, AI, advanced robotics, and 3D printing; and transforming the company’s culture to ensure it keeps up with the changing times.
Palo Alto is a long way from Dearborn
Smart Mobility LLC is located in Palo Alto, a long way from Ford’s headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan. "You want it separate but connected, said Mark Fields in a Verge interview last year. "The reason we wanted to do it separate is because, you have to realize that we needed to give them the flexibility and the operating structure to be able to be competitive with other technology and mobility services companies that move really fast. We didn’t want to overlay them with the Ford bureaucracy."
Ford Smart Mobility was formed in 2016 as an effort to accelerate the company’s metamorphosis into an auto and mobility company. Its aim was to aggressively pursue emerging opportunities and “be a leader in connectivity, mobility, autonomous vehicles, the customer experience and data and analytics,” according to Ford. Hackett’s promotion is a clear sign that Ford thinks the transformation isn’t happening quickly enough. Ford’s car sales are down 25 percent this year and Tesla recently overtook both Ford and GM in terms of market capitalization.
Update May 22nd, 8:34 AM: Story updated with details from Ford’s official announcement.I originally added this after I joined this site. Not sure when. The original idea came from another source and has been around for many years. I came up with the idea of the lines and happy face for the free kite workshop we do at our Kite Fest Louisiane. It helps the kids to make the kite consistently well. We started back in 2005, (before Katrina came in August of that year.) We usually have as many as 400 to 500 kids come from public schools on that Friday. So there are lots of kites in the air all day. Saturday and Sunday is when all the big kites come out and fill the sky!
I hope you and your groups have fun with this design.
Marshall HarrisSearch Gallery Newest Popular Bayonetta's SSB4 tagline 123Megarama 4 Corrin's SSB4 poster 123Megarama 6 Advertisement Advertisement Corrin's SSB4 tagline 123Megarama 2 Cloud's SSB4 poster 123Megarama 4 Cloud's SSB4 tagline 123Megarama 9 Super Smash Flash 2 v0.9b Marth jumping away 123Megarama 3 Super Smash Flash 2 v0.9b Pokemon Battle! 123Megarama 4 Roy's SSB render from Melee and now SSB4 123Megarama 17 Ryu's SSB4 tagline 123Megarama 6 Roy's SSB4 tagline 123Megarama 16 Ryu's SSB4 poster 123Megarama 19 Lucas's SSB render from Brawl and now SSB4 123Megarama 3 Mewtwo's SSB render from Melee and now SSB4 123Megarama 9 Characters that should be DLC in SSB4 (My Opinion) 123Megarama 1 SSB4 Duck Hunt Takes Aim! 123Megarama 5 My Top 5 favorite SSB4 newcomer characters 123Megarama 2 Duck Hunt's SSB4 Poster 123Megarama 2 Marvel vs. Capcom 4 (2018) Fan-Made poster 123Megarama 2 X-Men vs. Street Fighter 2 (Fan made) 123Megarama 2 X-Men vs. Street Fighter 123Megarama 0 Cyclops vs. Cyclops 123Megarama 0Google wants to continue its efforts to expand its Google Fiber TV and 1 Gbps Internet service to more cities. It is now exploring the idea of bringing the service to two big metropolitan areas in the U.S., Chicago and Los Angeles.
LA is the second biggest city in the |
paintings that have come up for sale at Sotheby's and Christie's in the past year. “I believe in the artist,” he says. The Mugrabi family owns some 110 Hirsts, including an installation that features 30 sheep, two doves, a shark and a splayed cow in formaldehyde. The Mugrabis offered $35m for the artist's diamond skull, “For the Love of God”, but failed to secure the work that was marketed at $100m and has never sold. “The Mugrabis rarely buy directly from me,” says Mr Hirst. “We can never work out a deal because they want such fierce prices.”
The Mugrabis liken the tumble in Mr Hirst's secondary prices to Andy Warhol's in the early 1990s. “In the long term, the market will be more than fine. I couldn't be more optimistic,” says Mr Mugrabi. Yet they have not invested in Mr Hirst's latest line of Francis Bacon-inspired skull paintings, saying that they are “not visually continuous with the old work, which we find more beautiful and relevant.” Unlike most of the work, which is made by teams of other people, the artist actually paints these himself. Most of the reviews have been ruthless: “The Worst of Hirst” and “Hirst, Renaissance man, obviously not”.
Americans who did not make purchases at the “Beautiful” sale have recently shown more confidence, buying from Gagosian Gallery's “End of an Era” show in New York earlier this year. The Broad Art Foundation acquired “Judgement Day”, a giant gold-plated cabinet containing lab diamonds. Millicent Wilner, a Gagosian director, affirms that all 15 new works in the exhibition sold for a total of over $30m.
At the Hong Kong art fair in May a special Hirst stand by his British dealer, White Cube Gallery, was swarming with young people having their photo taken in front of the works. Daniela Gareh, White Cube's sales director, confirms that it sold to first-time Hirst buyers from Korea, Taiwan and mainland China. “The Chinese respond to branding and Damien is a master brander,” she says. Other Criteria, Mr Hirst's print business, also did a solid trade at the fair. Photos of Mr Hirst's most expensive unsold work went like hot cakes. The most popular item was a foot-high image of the artist's diamond skull, an edition of 1,000, priced at £950.
In 2008 and 2009, Mr Hirst repeatedly made statements like “The first time you sell something is when it should cost the most” and “I've definitely had the goal to make the primary market more expensive.” The artist was frustrated by the speculators who were buying from his galleries then quickly reselling his work at auction. Moreover, the acquisition of a package of 12 of his own works from Charles Saatchi for £6m in 2003, far more than what Mr Saatchi had originally paid, may have led to an Oedipal determination to overthrow all the high-rolling dealers and collectors who thought they might lord it over the little artist.
The goal of making the primary works more expensive may benefit Mr Hirst's personal income in the short-term, but it makes no sense from the perspective of his market. Part of the reason that art costs more than wallpaper is the expectation that it might appreciate in value. Flooding the market with new work is like debasing the coinage, a strategy used from Nero to the Weimar Republic with disastrous consequences. If Mr Hirst were managing a quoted company, he would be unable to enrich himself at the expense of his investors in quite the same way. But Mr Hirst is an artist and, in Western countries, artists are valued as rule-breaking rogues.
Two developments could help Mr Hirst's secondary market. He has started compiling his catalogue raisonné, a complete list of all the works he has made, which will comfort those who suspect he has made hundreds more spot and spin paintings than he admits to. According to Francis Outred, Christie's European head of contemporary art, “As with Warhol, this could bring reassuring clarity to the question of volume within each series.” Mr Hirst is also discussing with the Tate a retrospective show to coincide with the Olympic games in London in 2012.
Hirst sceptics point out that the only museum to hold a Hirst show was in Naples, Italy, in 2004. From October 28th a private New York gallery, L&M Arts, will show 18 of his earliest medicine cabinets. The changing shape and contents of these pieces are the most intriguing evolutionary thread in Mr Hirst's work. Indeed, they foreshadow the artist's drive to assemble objects into auction spectaculars.
Where will the Hirst market go from here? The ball is still in Mr Hirst's court. “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” may have been an historic moment in artist empowerment, but such performances risk destroying the delicate ecology of living artists' markets. Mr Hirst should repair his relationship with his collectors and concentrate on his retrospective. Another “Beautiful” sale could be ugly.When digging through the statistics for the top second basemen in Kansas City Royals history, Frank White had easily separated himself from any other player at that position. Not only was White a solid offensive player, providing a bit of power and speed at a time when offensive production was not a requirement at the position, he was also one of the best defensive players ever at second. His eight Gold Glove awards rank third all time, tied with Bill Mazeroski, trailing only Roberto Alomar and Ryne Sandberg.
In fact, when looking through White’s overall statistics, they greatly resembled the career production for Mazeroski. White produced a.255/.293/.383 batting line with 160 home runs and 178 stolen bases in his career, while Mazeroski hit at a.260/.299/.367 rate with 138 home runs and only 27 steals.
Bill Mazeroski still ranks as the all time leader in defensive runs saved at +148 and in double plays turned, while ranking in the top ten all time in most defensive categories. While Frank White does not lead in any of the all time categories, he is second in defensive runs saved at second with +126, and also rates among the all time best in virtually every defensive category at second. Not bad considering White was a utility player for the first few years of his career.
Perhaps it is not surprising that, based upon Baseball Reference’s similarity score rating, White and Mazeroski are considered to be the most similar to one another. Both were superb defensive players, easily the best of their generation, while providing a bit of offense at a time when the ability to field the ball in the middle of the infield was a lot more important than being able to hit with anything resembling competence. Yet, Mazeroski is in the Hall of Fame, voted in by the Veteran’s Committee after spending fifteen years on the BBWAA ballot. White, meanwhile, received only 3.8% of the vote in 1996, falling off the ballot after only one year.
What was the big difference between Bill Mazeroski and Frank White? It may be that the game winning home run that Mazeroski hit in Game Seven of the 1960 World Series, leading the Pirates past the dreaded New York Yankees, while White does not have any such postseason heroics on his resume. Considering the Hall of Fame candidacies of Jack Morris and Curt Schilling, that postseason performance may have been what let Mazeroski in the Hall while White is stuck on the outside.
Plenty of players other than Mazeroski have been inducted for their defensive ability. Ozzie Smith was a mediocre hitter at best, but is in the Hall because of his glove. Ray Schalk “hit” at a.253/.340/.316 clip, but was inducted into the Hall because he is considered the best defensive catcher of all time. If they could get in, why not Frank White?
Frank White may not have the typical Hall of Fame case that most other candidates possess, but if players like Mazeroski, Smith and Schalk could be inducted, why can’t he? Perhaps it is just because he lacks that iconic moment that lives forever in baseball history.Bank officials in Greece say citizens are withdrawing record amounts of cash from their bank accounts, unnerved by instability and the country possibly voting to leave the eurozone on Sunday.
An official said Wednesday that outflows from banks picked up after the inconclusive May 6 election, but they have picked up again in the days ahead of the new vote this weekend.
The levels of outflow are not yet at a pace that would destabilize the country's battered banking sector, the official said, although much will hinge on the election's result.
Since the European debt crisis began in 2009, Greeks have withdrawn 72 billion euros (the equivalent of $90 billion US) from domestic banks, with total household and corporate deposits standing at 165.9 billion euros or $207.94 billion US in April, data from the Greek central bank shows.
Some of that money was spent, much was redeposited or invested abroad, while a portion has also been hidden away in homes, despite the risk of burglary or accident.
Reuters reported Wednesday that the equivalent of $1 billion a day is being withdrawn daily. Greece's population is a little over 11 million, so per capita, every citizen is taking out $90 in cash more than is being put in every day.
"The outflows are continuing but they have not increased, compared with what happened after the May 6 elections," a Greek banking official told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity. "There was an increase then, and since then the outflow is steady. We haven't seen an explosion in recent days."
The vote is expected to be a close race between the pro-bailout conservatives and a radical left party vowing to scrap Greece's commitments to rescue loan creditors.
Another government official said Wednesday that while depositors are steadily pulling money from his bank, there has been no great increase in recent days.Post hurricane we’re happy to report that CCGesus and family emerged largely unscathed, but they aren’t out of the woods yet so Dave is joined by CCG Kelly Wallick for a PAX recap, stress-coping mechanisms, X12 talk, Godzilla, and Laditime (which isn’t what you probably think it is, sadly).
3:00 – Dave tries to get Kelly to burn her new bed and buy into the Sleep Number system.
11:00 – Dave and Kelly recap PAX, including the Team GFB Radio meet-up (which was rad). Pack a lunch, this is a big segment.
44:00 – Dave talks about his “coach” for a bit, in case you’re wondering who he’ll blame when everything goes to shit. Kelly also talks about her nascent podcast.
50:45 – Dave is rolling out to TGS, Kelly plugs her Indie Mega Show that’s Wednesday night. Come out and say hi!
57:35 – In a new segment, Kelly reviews some movies using The Raid 2 scale.
1:10:30 – Dave and Kelly answer a mail from Tudor from Toronto (WORLDWIDE), and dish out some advice on dealing with stress.President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama look on as Manny Lindenbaum, left, and his granddaughter Lauren Lindenbaum light the menorah during a Hanukkah reception at the White House in Washington, DC, Dec. 9, 2015. Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, lights the menorah and sings, joined by President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama during the first of two Hanukkah receptions the East Room of the White House in Washington, Dec. 9, 2015. Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo
First lady Michelle Obama walks into the East Room to speak with children during a preview of the 2015 holiday decor at the White House, Dec. 2, 2015, in Washington. Mark Wilson/Getty Images
This year's White House Christmas Tree is seen inside the Blue Room from the Cross Hall of the White House during a preview of the 2015 holiday decor at the White House in Washington, Dec. 2, 2015. Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo
Holiday decorations are seen at the White House, Dec. 2, 2015, in Washington. Matt McClain/The Washington Post/Getty Images
Holiday decorations are seen in The Green Room of the White House, Dec. 2, 2015, in Washington. Matt McClain/The Washington Post/Getty Images
A gum ball machine is seen in the State Dining Room at the White House, Dec. 2, 2015, in Washington. Matt McClain/The Washington Post/Getty Images
Decorations in the China Room are seen at the White House, Dec. 2, 2015 in Washington. Fashion Designer Carolina Herrera designed this room of the White House for the holidays. Matt McClain/The Washington Post/Getty Images
A hallway is decorated during first lady Michelle Obama's preview of the 2015 holiday decor at the White House, Dec. 2, 2015, in Washington. Mark Wilson/Getty Images
A display of the Obama family dogs, Bo and Sunny are seen during first lady Michelle Obama's preview of the 2015 holiday decor at the White House, Dec. 2, 2015, in Washington. Mark Wilson/Getty Images
A Christmas tree decorated in red, white and blue stands in the Blue Room at the White House during a preview of the 2015 holiday decor, Washington, Dec. 2, 2015. Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images
A chocolate replica of the White House sits in the State Dining Room at the White House during a preview of the 2015 holiday decor in Washington, Dec. 2, 2015. Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images
A decorated hall is seen at the White House during a preview of the 2015 holiday decor in Washington, Dec. 2, 2015. Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images
The Library on the ground floor of the White House, Dec. 2, 2015, in Washington as Christmas decorations for 2015 are unveiled. Fashion design duo, Humberto Leon and Carol Lim, of Opening Ceremony and Kenzo decorated the Library of the White House for the holidays. Jon Elswick/AP Photo
Christmas ornaments are seen on a tree in the State Dining Room at the White House during a preview of the 2015 holiday decor in Washington, Dec. 2, 2015. Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images
Decorations in the Red Room on the State Floor as part of the 2015 White House Christmas theme "A Timeless Tradition" at the White House in Washington, Dec. 2, 2015. Ron Sachs/AP Images
First lady Michelle Obama, with dogs Bo and Sunny, speaks with military children as she hosts a preview of the 2015 holiday decor at the White House in Washington, Dec. 2, 2015. Douliery Olivier/AP Photo
Decorations in front of the fireplace in the Vermeil Room at the White House, Dec. 2, 2015, in Washington as Christmas decorations for 2015 are unveiled. Fashion Designer Duro Olowu decorated this room of the White House for the holidays. Jon Elswick/AP Photo
Holiday decorations are seen at the White House in Washington, Dec. 2, 2015. Douliery Olivier/AP Images
Fake snowmen are seen at the White House during a preview of the 2015 holiday decor in Washington, Dec. 2, 2015. Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty ImagesHave you recently heard, or made, the argument: “The need for feminism is gone. There are more women in universities than men, and more and more female CEOs all the time!”
Yeah. This week, that theory was disproven. Spurts of deeply engrained Canadian media misogyny oozed out like the tart fillings of packaged fruit snacks popular in the mid-90s. Truly, an ugly scene: a couple of dudes said in the
Globe and Mail
that marginalized people really need to be quiet—privileged dudes want to talk still! And a radio station in Edmonton posted a poll on Twitter asking if people who are sexually assaulted are partially to blame.
Screencap via.
But Let Me Mansplain!
Remember when you were a kid, and there was always that bossy asshole in your class who forced the teacher to implement the talking stick rule at least once a week, because some kids were never able to get a word in? It seems those assholes never learn, doesn’t it?
Two men are sad this week about terms like “mansplaining” and “whitesplaining.” They feel those terms are limiting. Recent med school grad Tom McLaughlin and law grad Joshua Sealy-Harrington took to the pages of The Globe and Mail to explain to everyone just how tired they were of being discriminated and silenced by people just for being themselves! For being men!
The two felt like their opinions were diminished after Tom was accused, by a female colleague, of not fully understanding women’s health because he is a man, and after Joshua, who is Black, was accused of both mansplaining and white privilege in a Facebook thread discussing the definition of racism.
“Both Tom and Joshua’s stories exemplify a worrisome trend in our society,” the piece reads. “Discrediting opinions (or even fact-based research!) because the individuals expressing them come from a privileged background, such as being male or white. Representing diverse backgrounds in a discussion is important, but dismissing opinions solely because of their origin does more to stifle progress than to hasten it.”
Sorry guys, but you just don’t get it. The irony of a male doctor and lawyer whining about being silenced in The Globe and Mail is just too much to bear. You just graduated from medical school and law school, respectively, and your platform is one of the most respected, widely-read media organizations in the country. You speak from a place of utmost authority, and you and others like you have been, and will continue to be, heard. In fact, you’ll spend your lives dictating to others, and they will have no choice but to listen. I hardly think you are disenfranchised. (Take the How Privileged Are You quiz, maybe).
“The use of terms such as “mansplaining” (and its racial counterpart, “whitesplaining”) can cause disengagement. These labels are sometimes used to dismiss arguments when men and white people simply disagree,” they say.
So basically, two men are mansplaining and whitesplaining why they should be permitted to mansplain and whitesplain. The irony is doubly cruel.
The terms “whitesplaining” and “mansplaining” are used to refer to the insufferable habit these groups have of speaking over everyone else, and from overly-broadcast points of view.
Sometimes women, people of colour and queer people (and those with intersectional identities, obviously) don’t want to hear from men or white people, and that is okay. Sometimes we don’t want to have to offer up yet another fruitless explanation, as McLaughlin and Sealy-Harrington suggest.
Women and people of colour and queer folk are forever having to justify and define elements of our everyday lives and identities. Make explanations. And we often say, privately amongst ourselves, that though we’re trying to affect change, we’re so goddamn sick of explaining. That’s why we need to be able to speak freely, and sometimes that means privately, within our communities. We can choose to exclude men or white people as required, and to varying extents, if that’s what we need to feel heard, and to avoid being interrupted by male or white voices demanding to take precedence.
“Discussing issues such as white privilege and masculinity without white people or men limits dialogue and disengages privileged communities...The unspoken message of excluding an entire group from a discussion is that not a single person in that group has anything worth hearing – an astounding proposition,” the Globe piece continues.
Because heaven forbid a privileged community be disengaged, and that a dialogue be “limited” to only voices of colour, or women’s voices. You’re only preaching the harmful paternalistic tropes you’re claiming to fight against. You don’t get to have unlimited access to our conversations simply because you are used to being granted unlimited access to any space you desire.
If you want to learn more about the importance of safe community spaces, check out the site and philosophy of Black Girl Dangerous. Editor Mia McKenzie, as a queer person of colour who edits a site showcasing the work of queer people of colour, is strict about who gets to speak on her site. She does not publish work by straight white people, because the world is already oversaturated with privileged white voices. She is correcting that imbalance, and that’s what “excluding” white or male voices is about.
McKenzie also offers a primer on how to check your privilege, should you be so inclined. From the section on knowing when to shut up:
“1) no one asked you, 2) the subject matter is outside your realm of experience (why do you even think you get to have an opinion about the lives of black women??), 3) anything you say is just going to cause more harm because your voice, in and of itself, is a reminder that you always get to have a voice and that voice usually drowns out the voices of others.”
Similarly, I attended the Feminist Porn Conference in Toronto a couple of weeks ago, and the strongest statement of the weekend came from performer and activist Arabelle Raphael:
“If you want to be a good ally, learn to shut the fuck up,” she said. Yup, that.
Voices like McLaughlin’s and Sealy-Harrington’s already carry a disproportionate amount of weight in our social, political and economic dialogues. It is time to pass the stick.
Screencap via Twitter.
Radio Station 630 CHED Wonders, Are People Who Are Sexually Assaulted…To Blame?
This week, an Edmonton radio station asked in an online poll: do you think victims of sexual assaults share any blame for what happens? There was much in the way of backlash, happily, but the station reacted in a bumbling fashion which only served to illustrate its ignorance.
It revised the poll before finally taking it down, arguing that it hadn’t been properly contextualized.
The poll reportedly gave two options for a response, yes and no. According to the Calgary Herald, the “no” option said: “women should be able to dress, drink and walk as they choose without fear of being blamed.” And the “yes” option said “if women drink too much, dress too little or walk in harms way, they put themselves at risk.”
This is a radio station (remember those?) with a staff of four humans handling “new media.” The fact that one or all of these humans failed to recognize the hateful and egregious nature of their poll is a signifier of how deeply rooted we are in rape culture in Canada.
I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again: rape is a men’s issue. Men can stop rape. And we need to, collectively, do a better job of educating boys about sex and rape in order to fix the problem.
@sarratch“What helps offset the predictable in this very predictable movie is a series of show-stopping numbers, so props to the folks who oversaw music and choreography.” – Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times Film Critic
Full disclosure to anyone reading this, I myself helped out on this film for just under half of the process; my boss is one of those “folks who oversaw music.”
It doesn’t take a member of the music industry, though, to appreciate how much work went into the musical aspects of Pitch Perfect. Julia Michels and Julianne Jordan were the executive music producers of the film – responsible for working with the director on music selection, overseeing all the a cappella arrangements, music clearance, both pre-recording and vocal sessions during post-production, facilitating the creation of the three recorded mashups in the film, playing vital roles in the creation of the soundtrack and so much more.
Watch an interview these two powerhouse ladies did with The Weekly Comet a few weeks ago (interview begins at about 8:00):
Those who have purchased the soundtrack will notice that it is almost entirely comprised of the a cappella tracks in the film. While these are all of course stellar, the many tunes that didn’t make it onto the record are equally top notch.
That said, here is a full list of all the tracks used in the movie. I was going to put scene descriptions too, but instead just included a few points of reference for some of the tracks. I don’t want to spoil the movie – go see it for yourself!
Some of the songs are used a few times – I only included a song multiple times if it was used in different ways (i.e. by itself and then in a mashup).
Score was composed by Christophe Beck and Mark Kilian.
And there were of course a myriad of others who stayed up late nights putting their blood, sweat and tears into this little film that could, just in terms of the music alone. I won’t list them out here, for fear of accidentally forgetting someone – but if you enjoy the film and have some time – try and stick it out until the end of the credits and give them a round of applause. They deserve it.
1. “Don’t Stop The Music” – Rihanna (A Cappella)
2. “The Sign” – Ace of Base (A Cappella)
3. Mashup of “212” by Azealia Banks and “Bust A Move” by Young MC
4. “Carry On My Wayward Son” – Kansas (Sung by Jesse)
5. “Let It Whip” – The Dazz Band (A Cappella)
6. “Punching In A Dream” – The Naked and Famous
7. “Keep You” – Wild Belle
8. “Don’t Move” – Phantogram
9. Mashup of “Titanium” by David Guetta feat. Sia and “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by The Proclaimers
10. “Titanium” – David Guetta feat. Sia (Sung by Beca and Chloe in the shower)
11. “Since U Been Gone” – Kelly Clarkson (A Cappella)
12. “Cups” (Watch Anna Kendrick perform this on Letterman!)
13. “Before We Fall In Love” – Damato
14. “Keep Your Head Up” – Andy Grammer (Sung by the aca-initiates)
15. “Starships” – Nicki Minaj
16. “Turn The Beat Around (Love To Hear Percussion)” – Gloria Estefan (A Cappella)
17. “Rome” – Yeasayer
18. The Riff Off – Ladies Of The 80’s – “Mickey” by Toni Basil, “Like A Virgin” by Madonna, “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” by Pat Benatar, and “It Must Have Been Love” by Roxette (All A Cappella)
19. The Riff Off – Songs About Sex – “S&M” by Rihanna, “Let’s Talk About Sex” by Salt ‘N Pepa, “I’ll Make Love To You” by Boyz II Men, “Feels Like The First Time” by Foreigner and “No Diggity” by Blackstreet (All A Cappella)
20. Mashup of “Bulletproof” by La Roux and “Release Me” by Agnes
21. “Don’t You Forget About Me” – Simple Minds
22. “F**k You” – Lily Allen (A Cappella)
23. Bellas Regionals – “The Sign” by Ace of Base, “Eternal Flame” by The Bangles and “Turn The Beat Around (Love To Hear Percussion)” by Glora Estefan (A Cappella)
24. “Right Round” – Flo Rida (A Cappella)
25. “Booty Wurk (One Cheek At A Time)” – T-Pain (A Cappella)
26. “Party In The USA” – Miley Cyrus (A Cappella)
27. “Blame It On The Boogie” – The Jacksons (A Cappella)
28. Mashup of “The Sign” by Ace of Base and “Bulletproof” by La Roux (A Cappella)
29. “Open Season” – High Highs
30. “Get You Off” – Stan Carrizosa
31. “Chelsea Dagger” – The Fratellis
32. Mashup of “Just The Way You Are” by Bruno Mars and “Just A Dream” by Nelly (A Cappella)
33. “Final Countdown” – Europe (A Cappella)
34. Treblemakers Finals – “Bright Lights Bigger City” by Cee Lo Green and “Magic” by B.o.B. (A Cappella)
35. Bellas Finals – Mashup of “Price Tag” by Jessie J, “Don’t You Forget About Me” by Simple Minds, “Give Me Everything” by Pitbull, “Just The Way You Are” by Bruno Mars, “Party In The USA” by Miley Cyrus and “Turn The Beat Around (Love To Hear Percussion)” by Gloria Estefan (A Cappella)
36. “We Came To Smash (In A Black Tuxedo)” – Martin Solveig feat. DevDecember 2015 prices are used to project 2016 fertilizer costs for corn grown on high-productivity farmland in central Illinois. December 2015 prices are lower than in recent years, leading to lower projected 2016 fertilizer costs.
Fertilizer Prices in December
The Agricultural Marketing Service reports fertilizer prices in its twice monthly Illinois Production Costs Report. In the December 10th issue, the average price of anhydrous ammonia in Illinois is $650 per ton. This 2015 December price is $78 per ton lower than the $728 per ton in December 2014. The $650 price is the lowest price since 2008 when anhydrous ammonia was selling for $478 per ton (see Table 1).
Diammonium phosphate (DAP) currently is $536 per ton. The 2015 price is $23 per ton lower than the 2014 price of $559 per ton. DAP has been lower than the 2015 price two times since 2008: $408 per ton in 2009 and $501 per ton in 2013 (see Table 1).
Potash is $414 per ton in December 2015. The 2015 price is $65 per ton lower than the 2014 price of $479 per ton. The potash price has not been lower during the 2008 – 2015 period covered in Table 1.
Fertilizer Costs
Implied fertilizer costs for the coming year are calculated using December prices. These implied costs allow assessing the joint impacts of fertilizer price changes across years as well as to provide predictions of coming year’s costs. Per acre fertilizer costs are calculated using requirements for corn producing 200 bushels per acre, with phosphorus and potash applications at replacement levels. Fertilizer requirements come from the Illinois Agronomy Handbook. Amounts used in calculations are 215 pounds of anhydrous ammonia, 190 pounds of DAP, and 60 pounds of potash. Resulting costs are shown in the “Implied Corn Fertilizer Costs” column of Table 1.
December 2015 prices result in fertilizer costs of $133 per acre. This cost is below the implied cost using December 2014 prices of $145 per acre. Overall, the December 2015 prices result in the lower cost than any year back to December 2009. In December 2009, implied costs were $109 per acre (see Table 1). Lower implied costs suggests that 2016 fertilizer costs will be lower than in recent years.
As one would expect, implied fertilizer costs using December prices are not a perfect indicator of fertilizer costs in the following year. December is only one month out of the year while fertilizer is purchased in many months. Moreover, quantities can vary from those used to calculate implied costs. The final column of Table 1 shown actual fertilizer costs for central Illinois high-productivity farmland in the year following the calculation of the implied costs. For example, implied fertilizer costs using December 2008 prices is $204 per acre while costs incurred in 2009 is $185 per acre. Even given these differences, December prices are useful predictors of fertilizer costs in the following year.
Summary
Implied fertilizer costs in December 2015 are lower than in all years since 2009, suggesting that fertilizer costs in 2016 could be lower than in recent years. Current projections put fertilizer costs in 2016 about $10 per acre lower than in 2015. If fertilizer prices continue to decrease, this cost decrease could become larger.Ever wondered how the LCD of your laptop/ macbook works?
Most of the people when visit our site are usually aware of what an LCD panel is but most of them do not have the know-how of how it basically works. If you use a laptop it is important that you know how each component works so if any problem arises you know what to do and whom to contact. Let us give a brief insight into the working of an LCD panel of laptops and how it operates.
LCD stands for Liquid Crystal Display. You may be wondering what liquid crystal is. Well it is not a solid or a liquid specifically rather its nature depends on external factors like temperature. So it can both be solid at one time or liquid at another depending on temperature. The discovery of liquid crystal was made in 1888 by Fredreich Rheinizer who was an Austrian botanist. Due to this dual nature of liquid crystal our laptops may misbehave in extreme hot or cold weather.
We know that candles can regain their solid state when they cool down after being heated. Scientists in the 60s performed various experiments on liquid crystals and found out that if they apply varying degrees of electric voltages on the liquid crystals, they can change the properties of light that passes through them.
This experiment was further enhanced by a British researcher who succeeded in creating Biphenyl, a secure working liquid crystal material.
The LCDs that are produced for laptops today have a layered structure resembling a sandwich. Here we will introduce the concept of pixel before moving forward with our explanation. Every image has a resolution which is made up of tiny colored dots known as pixels. For example, a WXGA laptop screen has 1280×1024 pixels that make up the display of the screen. The higher the pixels, the better the resolution of the display and hence better the picture quality. This concept is known as matrix and the technology used in laptops LCD is known as “Active Matrix”.
Now we will get back to the structure of the LCD. As mentioned earlier, the LCD display is made up of different layers each layer pressed closely together to form a thin panel which is basically the LCD screen. The image below shows the layered structure of LCD panel.
Now we will highlight the differences of different types of LCD screens that are used in laptops.
1. Touch vs non touch
There is no significant difference between touch and non touch LCD display on laptops. Both are almost similar in functioning except for the fact that there is an additional layer of touch glass in a touch screen display which is attached separately. So if your touch screen laptop is broken then either the LCD screen is damaged or the touch glass digitizer is damaged. Not both.
2. PC vs MacBook
Macbook display screen is entirely different from a PC display screen and they are only replicable if the entire top half is replaced with a new. Hence MacBook LCD screen repair is costly than a PC LCD screen repair.
3. Different quality and Different Priced Screens
There are many after-markets LCD available in the market that are very inexpensive. But one should be aware of them because these LCDs have many faults and are not durable and reliable at all. So look out for dead pixels, many color patches, and color consistency as they are all indicators of an after-market LCD. Moreover an original LCD costs from $110 to $200 so if you are getting an LCD screen for your laptop that costs lower than this rate then it means that you are getting after-market version of the LCD. So watch out!
If you encounter dim backlight or different colored display on your laptop, you must call the reliable laptop screen repair technicians to help you to fix the laptop. Sometimes, the prices that they offered is much cheaper if compared to the official store.On Wednesday, The Daily Beast published a piece detailing President Donald Trump's chief strategist Steve Bannon's time as a college student at Virginia Tech in the 1970s.
Bannon has stirred controversy since his position in the White House was announced in November. Before his stint in Washington, he headed up Breitbart, a news site that's a favorite among the "alt-right" (AKA white nationalists). NBC also reported that his ex-wife accused him of making anti-Semitic comments during their divorce proceedings, and he was reportedly one of the main architects of Trump's Muslim ban that was signed during his first week in office.
What was Bannon like long before he took the helm at Breitbart and then eventually landed at the White House? Here are some of the tidbits from The Daily Beast's profile on Bannon as a college student at Virginia Tech.
1. He was very involved in campus politics.
“I can remember one of [our] roommates saying, ‘Steve’s gonna end up in the White House one day,’” John DePaola, a former roommate of Bannon's, told The Daily Beast. “He was more intellectual than any of us.”
According to Virginia Tech's student-run newspaper The Collegiate Times, Bannon was student body president during his senior year. "During his campaign and after his win, he was known for the same controversial style as he is today," Jeanne Centracchio DaDamio, a student government peer of Bannon's, explained to The Collegiate Times.
2. His political views were very different.
According to his friends, Bannon spent a lot of time reading about history, politics, and philosophy; his politics were "left-of-center" at the time. "I was quite surprised many years later when…he popped back up [in Hollywood and then Breitbart] as an arch-conservative," DePaola said to The Daily Beast. "Honestly, I was shocked."
The Washington Post reported back in February that Bannon's political views changed greatly during his time in the Navy after college. More specifically, he served during the Iran hostage crisis, where 60 American hostages were held for 444 days in the U.S. Embassy in Iran from 1979 to 1981.
3. He had a put-together demeanor.
Much has been written about how Bannon is in control at the White House, and his friends from school said he had a similar demeanor and |
was warned by Washington of «severe repercussions.» The more Washington bared its chest and stomped its feet, the more it became a laughing stock to the rest of the world. Here was a failing superpower possessing the world’s largest surveillance system crying like a spoiled child because its global system of collecting intelligence from which to blackmail and intimidate political leaders was exposed by one lone individual for all the world to see. China’s Mao Zedong once referred to the United States as a «paper tiger.» However, Obama has shown the world that America is merely a meaningless piece of paper masquerading as a democratic Constitution and no longer even a tiger.
Obama, in defending NSA’s surveillance power, never once was asked about the participation of NSA director General Keith Alexander at five meetings of the global elitist Bilderberg Conference. Alexander laughably claims he is protecting the American people from a constantly changing number of terrorist attacks. In fact, Alexander is what Marine Corps General Smedley Butler once called a «finger man,» someone who identifies enemies to the power elite. Butler, who launched Marine invasions of Mexico, Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and China, lamented that he had been a «racketeer for capitalism.» Today, those like Alexander and his supporters in government are «racketeers for fascism.»
That NSA and its British partner, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), operate outside any recognized international laws and bounds is exemplified by disclosures such as the fact that GCHQ, on behalf of the NSA, taps into the TAT-14 transatlantic cable linking Blaabjerg, Denmark to Norden, East Friesland, Germany to Katwijk, Netherlands to St. Valery-en-Caux, France, to Bude, Cornwall, England to Tuckerton, New Jersey. At Bude, the GCHQ and NSA jointly tap the cable to data mine Internet and phone traffic for ultimate storage in the NSA PRISM meta-data system, much of which will be stored at the massive NSA Utah data center in Bluffdale, Utah. The Bude tapping operation is code-named TEMPORA and its details were disclosed by Snowden.
Britain has always been considered an American intelligence «Trojan horse» within the European Union and the Bude cable tap highlighted the fact that the U.S.-British intelligence alliance outweighed all other alliances and agreements, including the Maastricht Treaty and the NATO treaty. The United States and United Kingdom were jointly spying on their German, French, Dutch, and Danish «allies.» Yet, even with this revelation, bilateral intelligence agreements, whereby NSA received signals intelligence intercepts from the intelligence agencies of Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, France, so-called «Third Parties,» continued without regard to the Bude cable eavesdropping. Essentially, priorities for spying had priority over all other multinational or bilateral agreements, whether they were military, economic, or otherwise.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague, a privileged courtier for the global elites, defended the NSA-GCHQ alliance while speaking at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California. Meanwhile, the Justice Minister of the German state of Hesse, told Handelsblatt that «Great Britain is the data leech of the European Union.» The federal German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, called the TEMPORA operation a «Hollywood nightmare.»
Hollywood has long produced films about dystopian futures where dark forces have assumed control over the private lives of the people of the planet. Today, science fiction has become science fact with repeated disclosures about how wide-reaching NSA’s surveillance has become. Former Bill Clinton and George W. Bush counter-terrorism «czar» Richard Clarke commented that the fiery car accident death of journalist Michael Hastings in Los Angeles may have been the result of the hacking into his Mercedes computer, speeding the care up and sending it into a deadly crash. Hastings had, among other things, been looking into the NSA surveillance system that Snowden exposed and he sent an e-mail before his death that the FBI had him under surveillance. Although Hastings’s death occurred on the streets near Hollywood, this was no Hollywood action stunt. It was frighteningly real and NSA has become the dark ultra-secret agency portrayed in countless movies ranging from «1984» and «V for Vendetta» to «Soylent Green» and «Fahrenheit 451».
Former NSA satellite signals intelligence operator and analyst Russ Tice is on the record stating that the NSA and its alliance partners spare no one in their surveillance net. In 2004, the surveillance was aimed at a newly-elected U.S. senator from Illinois named Barack Obama. The imagination places no limits on what sort of blackmail personal information NSA now holds over the head of President Obama, someone who has complied with every dictate from the U.S. intelligence infrastructure. Today, Obama believes he is in control of the NSA spying network. In fact, he is not. And in January 2017 when he leaves office, he, like Presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, and Lyndon Johnson before him will become the targets of NSA surveillance, even as members of the very elite fraternity of ex-presidents. Those who control the NSA panopticon of surveillance are even more elite than the ex-presidents club.
Others monitored by NSA include all sitting members of the U.S. Congress, every governor of the 50 states and territories, every celebrity, in fact, everyone who uses an electronic communications device or network anywhere in the world, from the busy streets of Hong Kong and Cairo to the very remote city of Kyzyl in the Tuva Republic of Siberia and Grytviken on the Antarctic island of South Georgia…
Even if the people of the world rose up to destroy the system of overbearing surveillance, they would not know where to start. The surveillance is everywhere but the masters of the system are well hidden from their own omniscient sensors.2014 Team Kit Launch
ORICA-GreenEDGE and ORICA-AIS unveiled their 2014 race kits at The Prince in St. Kilda on Tuesday. The men's and women's teams will debut the clothing, made in collaboration with Craft, the team’s official race and casual wear partner, at the Mars Cycling Australia Road National Championships.
“We’re really pleased with the new kit and look forward to putting it into action at the Nationals this week and when we kick start our third season in the WorldTour at the Santos Tour Down Under,” said ORICA-GreenEDGE General Manager Shayne Bannan. “We’re excited to start a new season with a brand new look.”
“It’s been a great collaboration with Craft to date,” Bannan added. “We’ve already been able to benefit from their experience in developing state of the art technical clothing. This type of partnership is crucial for a team at this level. We’re also pleased to have Craft as a casual clothing partner. This is great for both the riders and staff who work and ride in all sorts of weather conditions during the season.”
Craft Sport Marketing Manager Daniel Högling echoed Bannan’s sentiments. He considers the long-term partnership between Craft and Australia’s top rated teams as mutually advantageous.
“We’re really happy to be the clothing partner for the ORICA-GreenEDGE family,” said Högling. “It’s a partnership that focuses our ambition to develop a great looking and exceptionally fast cycling kit. We want the team to have the access to the best clothing on the market, and we want them to win races wearing our kit.”
“Small advantages can make a big difference, and we will constantly pursue those advantages as we work closely with the team,” Högling continued. “It’s also important to us that the riders and staff look great and feel good – on and off the bike. With the new kit, I think we’re off to a solid start.”
Orica’s Executive Global Head of Corporate Affairs and Social Responsibility Gavin Jackman said the alliance between Orica, GreenEDGE and the AIS is a partnership based on shared values.
“We have brought together world class organisations that share an Australian DNA to perform successfully on the world stage,” Mr Jackman said. “Critical to this success is teamwork and technical innovation – whether it is the new team kit, the bike or blasting solutions for the mining sector.”Back in June, Micron announced that it was preparing to kill off the Lexar brand, a brand we had gotten used to seeing over the past two decades. Need a memory card or USB stick? Lexar had plenty to choose from, and still does due to the stock that's left in the supply chain.
However, as Liliputing reports, it looks as though the Lexar name isn't going to disappear after all, but it is changing hands. Micron may have killed the brand internally, but the actual name and branding rights have been sold to Chinese flash storage company Longsys.
In a press release announcing the acquisition, Longsys CEO Huabo Cai makes it clear the Lexar name isn't going anywhere. He said, "Existing customers can rest assured that the innovative solutions and excellent support that they have experienced from Lexar will continue. The mission to make Lexar the go-to brand for high-performance removable storage continues, and we will expand upon it to offer even more compelling solutions as the age of wireless and big-data impact the consumer storage markets."
So we will still be able to buy Lexar-branded storage products, but will they be of the same quality? Longsys has been around since 1999 offering products in the embedded memory, solid state drive, memory card, and USB flash drive markets. If you own a storage product carrying the Foresee brand, that's Longsys.
It seems like the perfect home for the Lexar brand considering Longsys' existing product line-up. And it looks as though the new owner has plans to greatly expand the Lexar product range, with talk of virtual reality, 8K video, automotive entertainment, and video surveillance.Next Game: at Ole Miss 12/12/2017 | 6 PM ESPN3
With the win, Texas Tech has secured its most win sin a season since 2000.
Texas Tech won all three meetings with the Horned Frogs in 2017, improving to 9-9 all-time against TCU.
With four wins in the NIVC, Tech is now 7-8 overall in postseason history.
Sophomores Chandler Atwood and Emily Hill have been in double figures in every match of the NIVC.
and have been in double figures in every match of the NIVC. Klepetka's 32 digs matched the most in a match by a Red Raider this season and was seven more than the previous best in a four-set match.
Atwood led the team in kills for the 13 th time, second most on the team behind Hill.
time, second most on the team behind Hill. Tech's 13.0 team blocks were its most since recording the same number against South Carolina on Sept. 16.
Atwood's 19 kills matched the fourth-highest total for a Red Raider this season.
Texas Tech volleyball dug out of an early hole and used a big run through the third and fourth sets to capture a hard-fought 3-1 victory over TCU Thursday at TCU's Recreation Center and advance to the finals of the National Invitational Volleyball Championship.Behind big performances from seniorand sophomore, the Red Raiders (19-14, 4-12) saved four set points in the third, rallying with a 6-0 run to take the set and a 2-1 lead. They expanded the run to 13-0 with the first seven points of the fourth on their way to a 23-25, 25-17, 26-24, 25-15 victory and improve to 3-0 against TCU this season.Texas Tech heads to the NIVC Finals where it will play the winner of Ole Miss and West Virginia, who play their semifinal match Saturday at 4:30 p.m. in Oxford, Miss. The championship match will take place Tuesday, Dec. 12, at 6 p.m. CT at either West Virginia or Ole Miss."That was one of the most fun matches we have had in a long time," head coachsaid. "To play a team that we know so well, that's a rival and conference opponent we've seen three times – and they started out hot. We were down 13-10 in the second set, and I called timeout and really got on them. I'm so proud of how they responded. To come back and win that third set – that's not supposed to happen. You're trying to hang on and go one at a time. Kate was serving, and Chandler put up a great block. It just worked out for us."Atwood racked up a match-high 19 kills, including nine in the second set and six in the fourth. The Allen, Texas, native was involved in four points during Tech's 6-0 rally in the third with a kill and two block assists and a solo block.Fellow sophomoreadded 12 and finished with 15 digs for her 14double-double of the season. Middle blockerand setterchipped in nine kills each.While Tech had one of its best blocking matches of the season, Klepetka was the star defensively, matching a season-high with 32 digs. Freshmancontributed a career-high 14 digs to go with Hill's 15.With 13 blocks on the night, Tech matched its season high and outblocked the Frogs 13.0 to 11.0. Keenan matched her career high with seven on the night, while Owens posted a career-high with six.Tech finished with 58 team kills to TCU's 47, outhitting the Horned Frogs.202 to.105. The Red Raiders are hitting.286 through its four-match run in the NIVC while holding opponents to.167 hitting. Key in the offensive uptick are Atwood and Hill, who have recorded 4.57 and 4.50 kills per set, respectively.TCU is the first Big 12 team eliminated from the tournament as all three Big 12 teams in the field reached the semifinals. The Horned Frogs, who were led by 13 kills apiece from Anna Walsh and Lexi MacLean, finish the season at 15-17 overall.In the first set, Tech led by four early on at 9-5, forcing a TCU timeout. From there, the set tightened with neither side able to gain a comfortable lead. TCU closed on a 4-1 run thank to three hitting errors from Tech, gaining the 1-0 advantage.Tech evened the match in the second behind the arm of Atwood. The Allen, Texas, native posted nine kills in the frame, fueling a 7-0 run to close out the frame. After hitting just.114 in the first, Tech's offense came to life with a.311 clip in the second stanza.TCU seemed in control of the third set, holding set point at 24-20. The Red Raiders, however, stormed back as Atwood was involved in a kill and then two blocks to make it 24-23. After another Tech block gave Tech set point, Keenan capped off the rally with a slide kill to give Tech the 2-1 advantage.The Red Raiders carried that momentum into the fourth, scoring the first seven points of the frame for a combined 13-0 run spanning the third and fourth sets. Atwood tallied six more kills in the stanza, matching TCU's team total of six as Tech cruised to the win.Texas Tech advances to the NIVC Finals on Tuesday, Dec. 12, at 6 p.m. CT on ESPN3. The Red Raiders will travel to play the winner of West Virginia and Ole Miss. The Mountaineers and Rebels play their semifinal match on Saturday at 4:30 p.m. CT in Oxford, Miss. As always, be sure to follow @TexasTechVB on Twitter for live updates and check out www.TexasTech.com for everything Red Raider volleyball.If you haven't yet become acquainted with Kevin Pezzi, the racist doctor/sex "expert"/robot chef builder who now writes for Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com, you'd be well served to click over to Media Matters' profile and explore the many bizarre and disturbing facets of Pezzi's background. The man is quite clearly a huckster, and basically everything he does is aimed at selling copies of his e-books, which deal largely with sex. To that end, he's apparently created at least six fake MySpace profiles of women -- most of them featuring badly photoshopped stock images of models with large breasts -- claiming to be enthralled with Dr. Pezzi and his sex books. Let's run them down in alphabetical order: "Annie": Claiming to be from New York, "Annie" devotes most of her bio to gushing about "'Love & Lust in the ER' by ER doc Kevin Pezzi." She encourages people to visit Pezzi's website and download the book: "If you don't read it, I'll assume that you are lazy or don't like such stories -- bad news for you, because I'm a nurse." If "Annie's" face seems a little... off, that's because it's been crudely photoshopped onto a stock image of a model:
"Cathi": Another Pezzi enthusiast with a face that doesn't match the rest of her head, "Cathi" lists as her favorite book: "The Science of Sex by Dr Kevin Pezzi has been my most recent read and I absolutely loved it. It changed my attitudes regarding sex and sexual pleasure..."
"Denise": Yet another buxom lass with a photoshopped face, "Denise" just loves to talk about sex: "I read several sex books and learned a few things here and there, and then I stumbled across Dr. Kevin Pezzi's 'The Science of Sex' -- and WOW! -- what a great book! I've found that it can be a useful screening test for potential boyfriends, too. If a guy wants to get to know me, I ask him to read the book first."
If you're interested in what "Denise" really looks like:
"Kelly": "Kelly's" enthusiasm for Dr. Pezzi isn't as ardent as her MySpace sisters', as she simply lists "The Science of Sex by Dr Kevin Pezzi, MD" as her favorite book, but doesn't expound on its virtues. Like the others, however, "Kelly's" profile picture doesn't quite pass the smell test.
"Lilah": Without doubt, "Lilah" is my favorite. This 30-year-old woman just moved from Boise to New York and thinks Pezzi's "The Science of Sex" is "the best book ever on the subject of... SEX!" And while "Lilah," like "Denise" and "Annie," is a busty young woman who fell victim to a poor photoshopping job, she stands apart for having the brashness to talk openly about her breasts: "And by the way... they are REAL!"
Unfortunately, the same can't be said about her face:
"Melonie": The complete package. Not only is "Melonie" well-endowed and facially challenged, but she can't talk enough about how great Dr. Kevin Pezzi is. Under the heading "Who I'd like to meet," the effusive "Melonie" has written:
Someone like Dr. Pezzi, but closer to my age. He's kind, thoughtful, highly intelligent and knowledgeable, dedicated, interesting, diversified, and does things that will boggle your mind. He designed and built a shed from scratch that looks just like a lighthouse... amazing! He's made countless gizmos, from motorized toboggans to medical devices that you can't even pronounce. And when he writes a book, it's not the usual "just another book on the bookshelf" type of book that is boring and soon forgotten. His books of ER stories (True Emergency Room Stories and Love & Lust in the ER) are an intense and often shocking revelation of what REALLY happens in emergency rooms. He also wrote a book about sex and claims to know more than Dr. Ruth -- and he does! Probably ten times more, I'd say. Most adults (and every man I've met) think they know everything they need to know about sex. Trust me, you don't know 1% of what he does.
And, like "Annie" and "Denise," her face has been ham-fistedly photoshopped into a stock image:
If you think these profiles are all strange coincidences, consider this: all six profiles were created within days of each other:
Annie: Signup Date: 8/31/2006
Cathi: Signup Date: 8/23/2006
Denise: Signup Date: 9/5/2006
Kelly: Signup Date: 8/31/2006
Lilah: Signup Date: 8/22/2006
Melonie: Signup Date: 8/31/2006
And don't for one second think that this creepiness is limited just to MySpace. We've also turned up two fake Twitter accounts belonging to "Lynda W" and "Jennie Simmons," who tweet almost exclusively about their love of Dr. Pezzi's books: "I wish there were others out there like myself who enjoy Dr. Kevin Pezzi's books. I must be lone reader." For some mysterious reason, they both stopped tweeting within days of each other in December 2009.
Heckuva hire, Breitbart.I highly aspire that when you hear my name you one day are brainwashed enough to not help but think of some keywords: Kingdom Hearts, the moon, blogger, Perfect Humans, the sea, Sailor Moon and....NANCY DREW. Nancy Drew has been a gigantic part of my life and always will be. I read all of her yellow books growing up and that is what primarily got me into enjoying to read. At age seven I started playing HeR Interactive's game series based off of the books and those are one of my largest obsessions in life - and I am 25 now! Nancy Drew is a role model to me and I think can be for anyone. She shows you that it's possible to do anything on your own, that if you work hard you can solve any puzzle that life throws at you, that you should always have manners / be kind, and that you can do all of those things in STYLE! I could go on about why Nancy Drew should be someone you look up to - but I'll leave it there. As I mentioned, the company that produces the Nancy Drew games is called HeR Interactive. They were nice enough to do a giveaway with me almost five years ago when kenNERDdy just launched its baby self. (If you read that don't mind the awful formatting as it was imported from Blogger!) I was fortunate enough to land an interview with Calina Joyce of the Marketing team at HeR! She gave me the inside scoop of what it's like at HeR, offers her advice to the younger generation out there and much more this week on kenNERDdy!(a) Prototype of the proposed 3D display. (b) The microsphere lenses can project images to different spatial directions. Their larger curvature compared to planar lenses increases the viewing angle. Credit: Lv, et al. ©2015 IEEE
One of the most common methods of creating the illusion of 3D is the autostereoscopic display, which is based on parallax: each eye is presented with a slightly different angle of a scene. Often this is done with many tiny microlenses, each projecting a small amount of light. Although this method has many advantages and is already being used in commercial products, such as the Nintendo 3DS, its narrow viewing angle is still a problem for expanding its use to larger displays.
In a new paper published in IEEE's Journal of Display Technology, researchers at Chengdu Technological University and Sichuan University, both in Chengdu, China, have addressed the narrow viewing angle problem by replacing the flat microlenses with microsphere lenses. They have built a prototype that demonstrates that the larger curvature of the spherical lenses increases the viewing angle from 20-30° to 32°, with a theoretical viewing angle of up to 90°.
Although there is still room for improvement, the researchers hope that this strategy could lead to wider viewing angles and eventually to multiview 3D displays. Because microsphere-lens arrays can be easily manufactured by ball placement technology, the researchers estimate that the displays could be made at low cost, making it promising for applications.
"The greatest significance is that we propose a cheap and simple way to fabricate a lens array which can bring a wider viewing angle," lead author Guo-Jiao Lv at Chengdu Technological University told Phys.org.
Another advantage of using the microsphere lenses for 3D displays is low crosstalk, the problem that occurs when light from the right and left channels leak into each other, interfering with the overall image. In the new prototype, the researchers show that the light from each lens can be concentrated in a small area so that crosstalk is limited. However, there is a tradeoff here, since lowering crosstalk by making smaller light spots has the negative effect of decreasing the brightness and overall optical efficiency. The researchers plan to address these challenges in the future.
"We are planning to improve the performance of 3D display devices further, including improving the resolution ratio, crosstalk, and optical efficiency," Lv said. "We are also trying to make 3D display devices thinner because the optical component makes 3D displays much thicker than the conventional 2D displays now."
More information: Guo-Jiao Lv, et al. "Glasses-Free Three-Dimensional Display Based on Microsphere-Lens Array." Journal of Display Technology. DOI: : Guo-Jiao Lv, et al. "Glasses-Free Three-Dimensional Display Based on Microsphere-Lens Array.". DOI: 10.1109/JDT.2014.2385098
© 2015 Tech XploreDroid still does.
Verizon Wireless
Verizon Wireless's premier smartphone franchise, the Droid line, will get a new sibling when the carrier unveils another Droid smartphone next month, according to people familiar with the launch plans. The exact date hasn't yet been determined.
The latest Droid will be built by Motorola Mobility, which has the exclusive rights to build phones for the franchise. Its marquee feature will be the ability to quickly charge, building on its reputation for long battery life.
Unlike the previous two generations, when Motorola would unveil three Droid devices, the company is opting for a single product, the people said. Earlier this month, Verizon teased a Droid launch in a cryptic tweet sent from its @DroidLanding account.
"Reactivation fast approaching, wait and see," it said.
In an era when most high-profile smartphones -- think Apple's iPhone 6 or Samsung's Galaxy S5 -- are distributed across multiple carriers, the Droid franchise is a throwback to a time when devices that were exclusively tied to one carrier ruled the market. The new Droid satisfies a segment of Verizon customers still loyal to the brand, while giving Motorola a secondary revenue stream beyond its core Moto line of smartphones.
Motorola declined to comment.
Reactivation fast approaching, wait and see -- DroidLanding (@DroidLanding) September 2, 2014
One name bandied about is the Droid Turbo, first mentioned by Android Authority, but Verizon hasn't yet settled on the moniker, the person said. It has also been listed under the code-name Quark.
The Droid Landing account has already teased the fast-charging capability, so the Turbo moniker would be appropriate.
"Faster charging is a big deal. That's why we made it a bigger deal," the account said last week.
Motorola Mobility catapulted into the modern smartphone age with the original Droid in October 2009. The smartphone was developed closely in partnership with Verizon and Google, and backed by a $100 million marketing campaign, where the original "Droid Does" catchphrase originated. It was seen as the first legitimate competitor to the iPhone, which AT&T had the sole rights to selling at the time.
While the Droid franchise persists, the debut of the new Droid comes as a crop of super smartphones battle for the spotlight. Last week, Apple unveiled the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, and the previous week Samsung unveiled its jumbo Galaxy Note 4 and Galaxy Note Edge phones. Other companies such as HTC and LG have opted to widen their distribution to multiple carriers.
The new Motorola Mobility has served as a unit of Google over the last two years but is awaiting a takeover from Chinese electronics manufacturer Lenovo. The Google-influenced company had focused on an unaltered version of the Android operating system, quick software updates to the latest version of Android and long battery life as central tenets for the Droid devices. Over the last two years, the company had a pattern of releasing three models at once: a smaller, more affordable version, a midrange version and a premium device with extended battery life.
Sarah Tew/CNET
Last year, the line consisted of the Droid Ultra, the Droid Mini and the Droid Maxx.
Other manufacturers such as HTC have built Droid smartphones for Verizon, but last year CNET reported that Motorola had snatched up the exclusive rights to build Droids for the franchise. The franchise is controlled by Verizon, which licensed the Droid name from Lucasfilm, of Star Wars fame.
The Droid line of smartphones that debuted in July 2013 came shortly before the Moto X, which is considered the first true Motorola Mobility smartphone built under the Google influence. The company followed that up with the affordable Moto G and a low-end Moto E. Motorola Mobility earlier this month debuted the second-generation Moto X and Moto G at an event in Chicago.
With the new Droid smartphone, Motorola keeps a valuable customer -- Verizon is the largest US wireless carrier by subscribers -- happy and shows it isn't ignoring its roots.The current furore over the crisis in A&E and the poor regulation of hospitals, tells us less about the future of the NHS than two recent documents which demonstrate how, despite the ringfencing of its budget in yesterday's spending review, the NHS will effectively be dismantled by 2020 if policy is not radically changed.
One document relates to social care. If you were living in a care home, what would it be worth to you not to be worried that the homeowner might become bankrupt, so that you might have to move at short notice? You have no idea? Well, the Department of Health (DoH) does: £6,510. How did it arrive at this figure? According to its recent impact assessment, a "quality-adjusted life year" (QALY) for a care home resident is worth £60,000. Avoiding an assumed three months of stress when a care home company "exits the market" is estimated to be worth 0.1085 of a QALY, or £6,510.
The reason for this bizarre bit of pseudoscience is that the government wants to avoid the political fallout of another Southern Cross-type failure. Many care home companies are deeply in debt, and some of the larger ones are owned by private equity funds. The DoH estimates that 19,000 frail elderly or disabled people will experience a disruption in the course of every decade. In the looking-glass world of market-think it has to show that the benefits of regulating the care home industry will outweigh the cost; and to do this it is required to put a cash value on the benefits.
But instead of trying just to reduce the stress that disruptions cause, shouldn't the aim be to prevent the stress happening in the first place by replacing private with public providers? No, that's out of the question. The government is not about to ask the ingenious arithmeticians in the DoH to calculate the potential benefit of eliminating disruption this way.
Another document that reveals where the NHS is destined to go is Monitor's fair playing field review. The review sets out what the healthcare financial watchdog considers fair competition between NHS and other providers. Its evidence base is negligible – unstated calculations, plus the claims or opinions of unnamed interviewees, or participants in "deep dive workshops". It doesn't say whose opinions were sought, or give the numbers of each kind of interested party it listened to.
It makes judgments about what should happen and makes it clear it thinks most of them will become policy – and since Monitor's remit is to regulate the "market" in which healthcare operates in England, most of them will.
It says a fair playing field is "for the benefit of NHS patients", but any benefits patients might get from the NHS having advantages on the playing field it sees as market "distortions". For example, the fact that public providers can borrow more cheaply than private ones is treated not as a benefit to patients, but as a "distortion" of the market which must be rectified – in other words, to enable private providers to compete, we will have to pay more.
Similarly with medical training. The government pays NHS teaching hospitals and GP practices in full for all the training they do, so you would think that private companies employing NHS-trained staff for free are actually getting a competitive advantage. But from Monitor's purely market standpoint, the fact that this represents a massive public subsidy to private shareholders is irrelevant.
The fair playing field document also reveals – unintentionally – some of the huge costs of operating the market. It complains that finalising a contract for each service put out to tender can take NHS commissioners anything from three weeks to 22 months. It doesn't mention the additional work of performance monitoring, auditing, etc. The amount of expensive NHS staff time involved is clearly immense, and the equivalent costs incurred by the company that wins the contract must also be recouped via the price that is agreed. But Monitor wants more and more services "unbundled" and put out to tender.
The benefits of the market are simply assumed to outweigh all these costs, Does anyone outside the current policymaking bubble really believe they do? As John Lister notes in his important new book on health policy reform, the overwhelming consensus of researchers is that markets in healthcare globally either lower quality or increase costs, and often do both. But in the UK, we are supposed to stop worrying and love the market, while the NHS unravels.Auditor General Michael Ferguson crawled out of Mike Duffy's shoebox full of Keg receipts this week and said he was shocked to discover that "a number of senators simply felt they didn't have to account for their spending."
What a shocker! Nobody tell Ferguson where babies come from or the truth about Santa Claus. I fear his heart won't be able to take it.
By now, you've heard about the senators who charged flights for friends to attend a 50th wedding anniversary party, a fishing trip, a book launch and expenses for the houses they didn't actually live in. The audit blames these things on "a lack of independent oversight."
To a senator, "independent oversight" means "look over your shoulder to make sure nobody sees you write 'public outreach' on that strip club receipt."
The spending review makes for great reading. But it's nothing compared to the statements the senators themselves have written in defence of their actions.
Dear angry mob,
I have reviewed the audit assessment and do not agree the conclusions are factually based. The auditor general has concluded that I live in Ottawa and not the province of "Lower Canada – Rupert's Land," which I represent, and which the auditor general claims is "not a real place." Anyone who knows me is aware that I have been in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina since 1988 so how can I reside in Ottawa? It makes no sense.
I was asked to defend my expenses by writing this letter. Therefore, I am sending you the bill for the computer I am writing this on, this month's power bill, a desk and chair, printer and stationery, and my cable and Internet bills.
The fault lies not with me but with your process. There were no clear rules so I was forced to define my own. I asked myself, "Is what you're doing wrong?" I answered, "No." If I was not clear on what I expected of myself, am I really to blame? The fault, you see, lies not with me but with myself.
I was asked to defend my expenses by writing this letter. Therefore, I am sending you the bill for the computer I am writing this on, this month's power bill, a desk and chair, printer and stationery, and my cable and internet bills. I am also expensing the cost of hiring my wife's stepson Gerry to research me so I could best defend myself. Also, these expenses appear twice as I felt it important to also respond in French.
With greatest contempt,
Senator Critch
Mr. Ferguson is calling for a transformative change. This is not possible. The senators fear change — not only because they prefer to charge everything. They see the Senate as a "time-honoured Canadian tradition." But there isn't much Canadian in any of this.
In the many words spoken and written about this whole mess, the most Canadian word of all is missing — sorry. You won't hear an apology from any of this crowd. They see the Senate as the cost of doing business — a reward for past partisan services rendered.
Well, perhaps it's time we billed them for our services.
Dear Senate,
I am billing you for the time lost listening to, watching and reading stories about the Senate expense scandal. You will also see a bill for the stomach medication I take to keep the gall from bubbling over in my gullet upon hearing the term "Duffy."
With disgust,
A Taxpayer
The political price will be known this fall, but will we ever see any of this money back? Who knows? Sadly, it's doubtful any of these people will ever truly be punished but the one letter I'd love to see would look like this:
Dear Warden,
Recently, I was traded by my cellmate Lefty to a gentleman named Rizzo on Block D for three cartons of Export A's. Personally, I prefer Du Maurier but my wife was once on the board for a symphony sponsored by Du Maurier, so I felt being traded for Du Mauriers would be a conflict of interest. There is some confusion over my diet. The food here is starchy and dull so I applied for the vegan diet. I am writing to petition to have filet mignon added to the vegan diet for dietary reasons. The food here makes me long for the business class menu aboard an Air Canada domestic flight. As we both know, one cannot live on Camembert alone.
In greatest fear,
Rizzo's Bitch
Mark Critch is a comedian and a cast member of This Hour Has 22 Minutes, which airs Tuesdays at 8:30 p.m. ( |
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With the Rockies 40-48 at the break, general manager Jeff Bridich resisted calls -- especially from other clubs -- to trade off expensive or experienced players and turn attention to the future. But between then and July 31 -- the eve of the Deadline -- the Rockies backed Bridich's strategy by going 12-5 to move into clear contention.
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The Rockies didn't trade for reinforcements. They didn't change their minds and become sellers, either. But ultimately, the lack of options in the bullpen and their inability to cover for injuries -- areas that existed even when the team was playing well -- led to a sixth straight sub-.500 season.
Within the coming days, Bridich and manager Walt Weiss will decide whether to go forward together. Regardless, what happened in 2016 raises a question that can be answered only by future decisions: Will the Rockies always try to win on homegrown depth, or will the time come to make bold moves?
This year, there were circumstances that could be argued for or against the decision to stand pat.
Two days before the Deadline, star rookie shortstop Trevor Story suffered a season-ending left wrist injury. A second bout with back problems cost the team pitcher Tyler Chatwood for the second half of August, and first baseman Mark Reynolds was lost twice after Aug. 1 because of broken bones in his left hand. Add to that the fact the Rockies were using their organizational depth and didn't have it to trade for bullpen help.
The offseason moves -- the trade for lefty Jake McGee from the Rays, and free-agent signings of veterans Jason Motte and Chad Qualls -- went for naught as all were injured and ineffective.
Could, or should, the Rockies have augmented the roster and the bullpen?
"The right answer to your question is that we decided not to make any trades," Bridich said. "We could've made trades. The decision was that we wanted to stick with the group that we had. Statistically or in hindsight, a lot of people will say you should've done this or should've done that.
"But when you have the opportunity to do some things and play some meaningful games that you haven't played in a while, you saw the way the group of players was interacting and how they were going about their business, we made the decision to stick with the group, keep the group together and give us a true chance to win."
Players, many of whom have not known another organization, appreciated the continuity but wondered if it's time for reinforcements. With Reynolds due for free agency, first base joins the bullpen as an area of obvious need.
"We have some guys that are impact guys, but at the same time, we need other ones that can make an impact," star third baseman Nolan Arenado said. "I don't necessarily think it's on the offensive side but on the pitching side in the bullpen. But we've had injuries here this year, and that's been the tough part -- we haven't been able to see them really contribute."
Center fielder Charlie Blackmon said the days when the team was close were fun. He was diplomatic about the overall roster strategy.
"I'm going to say that I have a lot of confidence in the guys we have, but there's always room for improvement," Blackmon said. "That's all I'm going to say."
Second baseman DJ LeMahieu said of the roster strategy, "I think it's time to be aggressive. It's time to go for it. We've kind of been in that middle stage since I've been here. We're not rebuilding, but we're not going for it.
"I think everyone in this locker room would say we're ready -- the guys we have in this locker room are good enough to win. But the few holes we have, we need to fill."
Veteran outfielder Carlos Gonzalez's name always comes up in trade speculation. But last offseason, Bridich saw him as enough of a key cog that he called to give him an early look at offseason strategy.
Gonzalez thought at the Deadline, even with a youthful group, "We were in a good spot, had a good thing going." He still expresses confidence in the organization's strategy.
"If you really believe in a couple guys we have in here, you deposit all your confidence in those guys and let them know what they need to do to make adjustments," Gonzalez said. "We want to win. We want to be in the postseason. I'm starving for postseason games. I want to celebrate my birthday [Oct. 17] playing, not watching games on TV. I want to have my cake in the clubhouse.
"Obviously, when things fall apart, it's easy to point fingers. I'm not too worried about it. I feel like Bridich and the organization know what they need to do to reach the next level."
Thomas Harding has covered the Rockies since 2000, and for MLB.com since 2002. Follow him on Twitter @harding_at_mlb, listen to podcasts and like his Facebook page.The Consumer Review Fairness Act Is an Win for Free Speech Online, Despite Possible Flaw
President Obama recently signed the Consumer Review Fairness Act of 2016 (H.R. 5111), which passed both houses of Congress unanimously. The bill addresses a dangerous trend: businesses inserting clauses into their form contracts that attempt to limit their customers’ ability to criticize products and services online. We’re pleased to see Congress taking a big step to protect free speech online and rein in abusive form contracts.
The CRFA tackles two different ways that businesses attempt to squash their customers’ reviews. The first is rather straightforward: simply inserting clauses into their form contracts saying that customers can’t post negative reviews online, or imposing a fine for them. For instance, the Union Street Guest House used such a contract and attempted to fine guests over their bad reviews.
The second tactic is a bit more roundabout: businesses put a clause in their contracts saying that they own the copyright to customers’ reviews. Then, when they see a review that they don’t like, they file a takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). One notorious example of that trick is a form contract for doctors offered by a company called Medical Justice. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services ordered doctors to quit using such contracts in 2013, but similar practices live on across different industries. The CRFA voids both types of contract clauses and makes it illegal for businesses to offer them.
When we’ve written previously about the CRFA, we’ve noted a potential gap in the way the law was worded. Companies may try to argue that they are allowed to craft contract clauses assigning themselves the copyright to customers’ reviews so long as the reviews are not “lawful.” Companies may then attempt to remove web content written by customers using the special censorship tools available to copyright owners under the DMCA, claiming that that content is not lawful (for example, because it allegedly defames the company). If courts—or service providers who receive takedown notices—accept that reasoning, then vendors could bypass the traditional protections for allegedly illegal speech, having content removed immediately under the DMCA rather than going through a court as it normally would for non-copyright speech claims. We are disappointed that Congress failed to clearly foreclose this abuse of form contracts and the DMCA takedown process.
Ultimately, though, anti-review contracts were already on very shaky legal ground before the CRFA passed, as were form contracts that included surprising transfers of copyright ownership. Courts have reliably sided with the customer’s freedom to write negative reviews. We will be watching closely to see if any unscrupulous companies attempt to take advantage of the ambiguous wording in the law. If that happens, the courts should shut it down.
Despite this oversight, we’re glad to see Congress standing up to the use of abusive form contracts to stifle freedom of expression. It’s telling that the bill passed both chambers unanimously: in a session that’s been marked by gridlock, this has been one area where lawmakers in both parties agree. We hope to see lawmakers build on this progress and protect customers in the next session of Congress via bills like the SPEAK FREE Act and the Justice for Telecommunications Consumers Act.NFL commissioner Roger Goodell on Tuesday wrote a letter to all 32 league owners regarding the protests that have taken place during the national anthem, ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported.
In the letter, which Schefter shared on his Facebook page, Goodell wrote that the “current dispute over the National Anthem is threatening to erode the unifying power of our game, and is now dividing us, and our players, from many fans across the country.”
Last year, former San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat down and later took a knee during the playing of the national anthem as protest against racial injustice. More players have joined the protests and President Donald Trump spoke out against the activity in September and has continued to do so.
Chiefs cornerback Marcus Peters has sat during the playing of the national anthem at every game this season.
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Goodell would like players to stand, but the national anthem is not mentioned in the NFL rulebook. However, players “should” stand for the anthem, according to the league’s game operation manual.
“Like many of our fans, we believe that everyone should stand for the National Anthem,” Goodell wrote. “It is an important moment in our game. We want to honor our flag and our country, and our fans expect that of us. We also care deeply about our players and respect their opinions and concerns about critical social issues. The controversy over the Anthem is a barrier to having honest conversations and making real progress on the underlying issues. We need to move past this controversy, and we want to do that together with our players.”
Could the NFL change the language in the operations manual to require players to stand without consent of the players?
“I don’t believe that the anthem per se is an issue that’s collective bargained,” NFL spokesman Joe Lockhart said Tuesday a conference call, per ProFootballTalk.com.
The Goodell letter notes that during NFL committee meetings in September, the league heard from players about issues that are essential to them, and the the league met with NFL Players Association leaders last week about the protests.
The NFL, Goodell wrote, “would include such elements as an in-season platform to promote the work of our players on these core issues, and that will help to promote positive change in our country.”
Goodell said in the letter that the issue will be a topic of discussion at league meetings next week in New York.
“Everyone involved in the game needs to come together on a path forward to continue to be a force for good within our communities, protect the game, and preserve our relationship with fans throughout the country,” Goodell wrote. “The NFL is at its best when we ourselves are unified. In that spirit, let’s resolve that next week we will meet this challenge in a unified and positive way.”
Here is the entire letter:Today Grey Worldwide released a statement announcing its plans to officially return the Cannes Lion it won for “I SEA.”
For a quick recap, Grey Singapore created the app in partnership with an organization called The Migrant Offshore Aid Network, which aims to help individuals attempting to leave war-stricken countries by sea. It also partnered with “e-Geos Satellite Imaging Company” to develop the app’s functionality.
The problem, as you probably know, is that it didn’t work. Various tech bloggers raised concerns after downloading the app; at least one called it “fake,” and Apple removed it from the App Store the very day it won a Promo and Activation Bronze Lion.
Apparently, various parties kept up the pressure on Grey to denounce the project entirely. Yesterday, a man named Ali Bullock who calls himself a “Social Media Author & Speaker” and works as manager of sponsorships and social media for Infiniti Formula One in Hong Kong published an inflammatory LinkedIn story on the subject headlined, “Why I will never hire Grey as an agency in my lifetime.”
In the post, he called the app “a travesty” and said that he would never consider working with Grey in any capacity until the network returned the award.
He then included an image of what appeared to be a drowned migrant child and wrote:
“Grey won an award off the back of this. Did the champagne and caviar have a salty taste as you celebrated your win? Imagine the salt consumed by people drowning… A truly horrid way to die. And how many died while you partied away in Cannes? Hundreds, thousands? I guess we will never truly know as your app was a load of bullshit. Oh wait, it was in testing… Sorry, my mistake.”
Bullock claimed that Grey did not have the charity’s permission to promote the project. This is consistent with claims from the M.O.A.N. org, which told U.K. tech blog The Register that “the app probably sounded interesting in concept form but failed miserably in execution. We were asked to support the launch of the app in concept only.”
Bullock then moved into some light hyperbole, writing, “This is possibly the saddest moment our industry has faced.” Here’s Grey’s statement announcing its plans to essentially do what Bullock demanded and return the award.
“During Cannes we said the app was real and its creator, Grey for Good in Singapore, is a highly respected philanthropic unit that has helped numerous non-profit organizations. Moreover, Grey is one of the most creatively awarded agencies in the world with the highest ethical standards. We won over 90 Cannes Lions this year alone so there is no need for scam projects. However, given the unwarranted, unfair, unrelenting attacks by unnamed bloggers, we are putting an end to this and returning the Bronze Lion so there is not even the hint of impropriety or a question of our integrity. The saying no good deed goes unpunished is apt in this case.”
This statement appears, at least in part, to be a response to Bullock’s piece and others written by various press organizations. The story was big enough for The New York Times to cover it on the day Apple removed I SEA from the iTunes store and before the Cannes award became an issue.
It is not clear at this time who the “unnamed bloggers” might be. Grey did acknowledge last month that the app was not yet functional when the case study video was made and the Cannes submission completed. It’s unclear whether work on the project will continue.
Grey’s statement strikes us as surprisingly defensive given that spokespeople have repeatedly admitted that the app never worked as advertised. We also hear that the network’s creative leadership was very upset to learn that such a project had been submitted to the Cannes jury in the first place.
We will leave it to others to define the word “scam” in this context.
CommentsBefore Jose Abreu beat out Matt Shoemaker and Dellin Betances for the 2014 American League Rookie of the Year Award, no White Sox player had won an award worth noting since Frank Thomas took home MVP in 1994. Twenty years of nothing.
Every team in the AL other than Tampa, Baltimore, Kansas City, and Cleveland has managed to have an MVP in that time frame. It gets even more depressing when you look at the last 22 years of AL Cy Young winners. Since Jack McDowell won it in 1993, every team but the White Sox, Orioles, and Rangers have had a winner. It seems almost impossible that a franchise that managed to avoid stacking abysmal seasons on top of one another until lately could have such a stretch, but here we are. At least for now.
Chris Sale‘s 2016 season has not been as fun to watch as his 2014 and 2015 seasons were. His strikeouts are down, he’s giving up more home runs, and he’s seemed to abandoned his changeup for reasons unknown to most. And somehow that has been good enough to finish the first half of the season with a 14-3 record and get the nod to start the All-Star Game. Starting the ASG is in no way a promise that a pitcher will win the Cy Young that year, but other than Dan Haren in 2007 no pitcher who started for the AL in the ASG finished any lower than 5th in the voting.
This makes a great deal of sense, of course. If your first half was strong enough to warrant the honor of starting the ASG, you’ll probably have a strong enough second half to be a solid candidate for the Cy Young. Which is why it’s so fun (and also terrifying) to see Chris Sale go. The last time a White Sox pitcher started the ASG was Mark Buehrle in 2005. Buehrle would finish 5th in the Cy Young voting, ultimately losing to Bartolo Colon on the strength of Colon’s 21 wins. Chris Sale is a mere two wins away from reaching Buehrle’s 2005 season wins total. It is July.
Wins are ultimately meaningless, but they’re a damn fine tiebreaker for writers voting on awards. Sale currently leads the AL with 14. His next closest realistic Cy Young competitors Steven Wright and Danny Salazar are both sitting at 10. His 3.38 ERA has him just outside the top 10. His 123 strikeouts currently ranks third. He leads the league in innings. His traditional resume is looking very strong.
He’s a known entity throughout the league and throughout the country to baseball fans. He’s not having his strongest season and it seems almost unfair that he might finally breakthrough and win the Cy Young in what counts as an off year for him. But an off year from Chris Sale is better than an on year from the vast majority of pitchers in baseball. And it’s about damn time to end that drought.
Lead Image Credit: Kirby Lee // USA Today Sports ImagesCleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams issued a warning to an undisclosed number of masked protesters outside the Republican National Convention: “If you are a member of a group that causes you to have to hide your face, then you probably need a different cause.”
Police claim they have received at least a dozen calls related to concerns about the small groups of black-clad “anarchists” with masks.
So why is Chief Williams so concerned about the face masks? Too early for Halloween?
Nope, facial recognition.
Law enforcement aggressively employs facial recognition technology at events such as the Republican National Convention to identify “persons of interest” and to catalog new persons of interest. Masked faces don’t play as well with the technology (though newer tech can get around some limitations, and iris scan tech needs only to see your, well, eyes. More below.)
With facial recognition, a computer digitizes an image of someone’s face in a way that makes fooling the system difficult, stuff like measuring the distance between eyes, the angle of one’s nose, ear lobe shape and other tough to alter things.
Like this:
Reports suggest in addition to public gatherings where people are enjoying their First Amendment rights to assemble and speak, airports scan passengers, hotels scan lobbies, stores scan aisles, casinos scan their gambling floors and many police street cameras are tied into the systems.
A publicly-known example occurred after the Boston Marathon bombing of April 2013. The subsequent Boston Calling music fest was subject to heavy use facial recognition surveillance, one guesses in case there were more Tsarnaev brothers out there. Law enforcement in the UK used facial recognition technology to scan the faces of thousands of attendees at the Download music festival without their knowledge.
And, oh, yeah, those iris scanners.
Iris scanners have quickly moved from the realm of science fiction into everyday public use by governments and private businesses.
Iris recognition is rarely impeded by contact lenses or eyeglasses, and can work with blind individuals as well. The scanners can catalog up to 50 people a minute without requiring the individuals to stop and stand in front of the scanners.
Information gathered from iris scanners or facial recognition in multiple locations can be sent to a central database that can be used to track an individual’s movement throughout the city, or to determine which individuals in the database associate together.
So hippie protesters, have a great time in Cleveland! Actually, the cops will know if you are having a good time, because they are watching.
Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during Iraqi reconstruction in his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. His latest book is Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent. Reprinted from the his blog with permission.A Virginia teen has been slapped with assault charges despite being brutally beaten in an altercation at his high school. Eric Martin spent nine days in the hospital after a fight at Highland Springs High School in Henrico, Virginia. His story is far too familiar for LGBT+ youth and even those merely perceived to be LGBT+.
The assault charges from the Henrico Police come almost two weeks after Martin and his mother, Mary Martin, claim that the teenager threw a first punch in the altercation which landed him in the hospital, reported by local news channel NBC 12. The Martins claim that Eric only threw a punch because he was consistently tormented by bullies who repeatedly harassed him with anti-gay slurs.
Regardless of whether or not the first overtly physical action taken was by Eric, the long list of injuries make it clear he was pretty unevenly matched. His mother says that the response to her son's punch was beyond commensurate.
A head injury. A broken hand. That's not just a fight. That's a beating. That's a vicious beating.
Yeah... that sounds awfully familiar. One of the best parts of working for a publication which has an editorial style like the family of Gawker Media sites is in the freedom authors have to contextualise news events like this with their own personal stories. While I have never spent nine days in the hospital, some of my own beatings were pretty severe as a clearly gender-variant child and adolescent, including a few weeks on crutches and a barely survived fall on my neck. So let me contextualise:
I completely believe that Eric Martin threw the first punch. What seems to be missing from the reporting, and probably from the administration's version of events, was how Eric ended up in the position of having to throw the punch in the first place. That's extremely important to understanding how badly the administration fucked up in its mission of protecting Eric, and how likely it is that assault charges are completely ridiculous.
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Look, I know these kinds of kids. They were literally, not figuratively, the bane of my existence growing up. They don't verbally harass you from across the hall. They don't yell slurs at you in the middle of an open area. That's now how this works. They corner you. They do it in private. An alcove area in the school's architecture. Behind the bleachers. In a locker room or bathroom. They get between you and your method of escape. And if they can get away with it, they get violent. You never know if today is going to be the day they think they can, so you nervously watch them, and you start looking for an opening. Your first instinct isn't to break a nose, it's merely to get the hell out of there. And yeah, maybe, after frantically considering your options, you think a punch will be enough of a surprise or a distraction that if you just keep moving as you do it, you can escape. Sometimes luck is on your side, the bullies really are surprised. Sometimes, you're not so lucky, and the wrath of God comes back on you, and you get the shit kicked out of you for the audacity to think you can fight back.
And even if you succeed, you'd better hope that the bullies don't have more than two brain cells to rub together, because if they do, with the completely unfair "zero tolerance" policy adoption we've had for the last twenty years in the American education system, you're going to have to face the school administration, too. You might even be looking at trying to keep yourself out of trouble with the law. All because the system says you defending yourself is morally, ethically, and legally the same as the routine bullying you've dealt with or the beating you receive after you do the only thing you can to try to escape.
Tammy Motola, a family advocate, has taken the Martins' case, and she and the family are apparently considering legal action because of the commonness of the experience I just related above.
It's always the perpetrators that get away with the crime. When the victims have finally had enough, after being verbally attacked and bullied for years and they snap...they are the ones that are penalised.
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Another of my own personal experiences which meshes with Eric's: Mary Martin says the school demanded that Eric admit to having threatened the school because of his choice to stand up to his bullies. I had a similar experience where comparisons to Columbine were abhorrently thrown around as if an LGBT+ youth standing up against her bullies was somehow the same as prepping for a school shooting.
NBC 12 reports that the Henrico school system has refused to comment about the claim that they refused to allow Eric to return to school without signing a document where he admitted to verbally threatening the school.
That's fine, because Mary Martin has it on tape.
"That's the document, and unfortunately we are not going to be able to move forward with the variance until we have that," said a school administrator to Martin. "Did you all hear Eric say it?" Martin asked. "Because that's hearsay." "It is," replied the administrator. "But we have to complete documentation." "I'm not signing anything," said Martin.
Yeah. That's some bullshit. Some bullshit I know happens because it happened to me. And although Eric may be able to get permission to move to another school, he will still have to fight these almost certainly ridiculous assault charges. It is deeply upsetting that it appears nothing has been learned since my school days came to an end. Nothing at all.
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The family has set up a campaign to allow concerned individuals to show support for Eric by writing to him, according to Motola, his advocate.
It's just to encourage Eric to know that he is loved by many and that he is supported by literally thousands of people.
Letters can be sent to the following address: Letters for Eric, P.O.Box 993, Sandston, Va. 23150
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Screencap via NBC 12.The Clinton campaign's wobbly performance over the past 72 hours has set off a rash of behind-the-scenes handwringing among professional Republicans as they confront an unnerving new possibility: What if their nominee actually wins the White House?
For months, the prevailing wisdom within GOP political circles has been that Donald Trump stands little chance to win in November — and a large number of the party's consultants, fundraisers, and operatives privately preferred it that way. Though many of them are reluctant to say so in public, they argue that a Trump presidency would fracture their party, decimate the conservative movement, and wreak havoc on the global economy (not to mention their own industry).
But now, with polls tightening and Hillary Clinton's illness temporarily sidelining her from the campaign trail, those Republicans are expressing alarm at Trump's sudden electoral viability.
"It's terrifying," said one GOP consultant, who like others spoke to BuzzFeed News on condition of anonymity. "He's not qualified... and it's a massive problem. I'm not a fan of Hillary Clinton, but at least I feel like some of those jobs that are required for president, she could do them."
"It would be terrible for America, and for the world," said another Republican strategist, referring to a prospective Trump victory. "I can't think of one good thing that would come of it."
A third Republican said that after watching the Clinton campaign's missteps in recent days, "I'm curled up in the fetal position watching The West Wing and drinking a basketful of deplorable liquor."
Fueling this quiet panic in the political class is a broad frustration with Trump's general-election staying power, and growing doubts about the Clinton campaign's ability to put him away.
In the weeks since the Democratic National Convention, national polls have narrowed, and Trump has pulled even with Clinton in some swing states (though the electoral map still presents an uphill battle for the Republican). Trump's critics fret that he's benefitting from perversely low expectations. Clinton, meanwhile, walked back comments she made at a fundraiser last week consigning "half" of Trump's supporters to a "basket of deplorables." And after a high-profile health scare, the campaign admitted Sunday that they'd mishandled the disclosure of her recent pneumonia diagnosis.
"I've heard a lot of conservatives voicing frustration, like, 'How fucking hard is this, Hillary?'" said Ben Howe, a conservative ad-maker and an outspoken Trump detractor. "That's the only reason I'm panicked these days... I'm losing faith in Hillary's ability to win this easy-ass election."
Rick Wilson, a Florida-based GOP consultant now working on Evan McMullin's independent presidential campaign, said few of his #NeverTrump compatriots believe a case of pneumonia will sink Clinton's candidacy. But her impulse to conceal the illness — and her campaign's clumsy response once it was revealed — reinforced a core political weakness.
"There are a lot of Republicans on the 'Never Trump' side that are starting to feel very nervous," Wilson said, "because no matter how minor the next thing is there's a possibility [the Clinton campaign] is gonna screw it up by lying about something. They can't help themselves. It's genetic."
Pragmatic high-dollar donors, meanwhile, are experiencing their own form of trepidation as they survey the campaign landscape less than two months from election day.
"A lot of these guys are really pissed," said a conservative donor adviser. Over the summer, when Trump's campaign was foundering, "they thought they'd gotten a pass — but now that Clinton is going off the rails, they're like, 'Damn it, now am I gonna have to give this guy money?'"
The adviser added that most Republican donors will hedge their bets and contribute to Trump if the race is close, but he said they are generally less wary of a Clinton White House. "If she wins, they aren't going to love it, but they're not going to be facing the apocalypse either — and by apocalypse, I mean actual nuclear warfare."
Asked why they wouldn't go on record criticizing Trump, several Republicans said they were worried about professional repercussions from conservative clients. In the meantime, many of them are preparing to do something they once considered unthinkable: pulling the lever for Hillary.
"I live in a swing state," said one consultant. "If it's close, I'll vote for Hillary Clinton. I'll regret doing it. It'll be the first time on a presidential level that I'll be voting for a Democrat. But I feel like it's my obligation as an American to do it."
Another strategist in a similar situation said he recently found himself engaging in a wishful Google search: "How late can you replace a major-party nominee?"
"I think Joe Biden would be a slam dunk, right?" he mused, in a tone that sounded almost affectionate. "Wouldn't that be an amazing track for Biden's career? Saving the free world by stopping Donald Trump."WB and New Line's 'It' Propels September 2017 to Record Heights
October 11, 2017
September 2017 saw record returns with calendar grosses topping $695 million, falling just shy of becoming the first September to ever total $700 million at the domestic box office. Leading the way was Warner Bros. and New Line's massive hit It, which delivered record numbers of its own and accounted for a massive 41.2% of the month's total gross. September is also the first month since April to show an improvement over the same month in 2016, with September grosses finishing 18.3% higher than 2016.
From a yearly stand point, 2017 was pacing 6.3% behind 2016 at the end of August and September grosses helped turn things around somewhat with 2017 pacing 4.6% behind 2016's record year by the end of the month. However, with October already pacing 20.8% behind last year (as of October 9) it's looking like September's gains will be lost throughout the current month, putting additional pressure on final two months of the year to turn the tide.
Overall, September 2017 saw calendar grosses reach $696.2 million, the largest September ever by almost $70 million over 2015's previous record gross of $626.4 million when Hotel Transylvania 2 broke the September opening weekend record with a $48.5 million debut. Of course, that record was shattered by It's $123.4 million opening, a record that was not only a September record, but a Fall opening weekend record and the second largest opening for an R-rated movie behind Deadpool's $132.4 million opening in February 2016.
Since its debut, It has gone on to become the highest grossing horror release ever, both domestically and internationally, so far pulling in over $605 million worldwide. To no surprise, WB and New Line have already set a September 6, 2019 release date for the sequel.
While the records are impressive, perhaps the most shocking aspect of It's performance is the fact it accounted for 41.2% of the month's total calendar gross. For some perspective, prior to It, the highest percentage of September's total gross was back in 1999 when The Sixth Sense accounted for 18.3% of the month's box office. While a percentage this high isn't an anomaly (The Avengers accounted for 52% of the overall gross in May back in 2012), the massive gap between 2017 and 1999 is the largest when looking at any other month. The story this tells, however, is tough to decipher. Whether it paints the majority of this past month's releases as disappointments or whether September is a new month that can now be groomed for blockbuster size features remains to be seen.
That being said, it goes without saying that Warner Bros. topped all other studios throughout September, bringing in over $355 million between five films, of which It accounted for over 80%. By a margin of more than $285 million, the month's runner-up was Lionsgate, also with five films, which combined for just $70.2 million. Lionsgate was led by the mid-September release of American Assassin, which brought in $30.9 million over the course of the month, just a bit ahead of Lionsgate's The Hitman's Bodyguard, which added $29.7 million to its $75 million gross in September after opening in mid-August.
Fox was the third highest grossing studio in September, brining in $65.7 million, led by the September release of Kingsman: The Golden Circle with $62.2 million, the second highest grossing title in September behind It. The sequel is currently pacing just behind the original which finished just shy of $130 million domestically and topped $414 million internationally. While it might not reach $100 million in North America, Golden Circle's overseas performance will be worth keeping an eye on with releases in France and Argentina scheduled for this week followed by China (Oct 20) and Japan (Jan 5). For some perspective, the first film generated nearly $100 million from France, China and Japan, though $75 million of that was from China, putting more pressure on that October 20 release.
The last film among September's top five grossing titles is Warner's The LEGO Ninjago Movie, which debuted with a disappointing $20.4 million and has since delivered $46.5 million after 19 days in release. Comparatively, this places it $140.5 million behind where The LEGO Movie was at after 19 days and almost $89 million behind The LEGO Batman Movie. The film carries a reported budget of $70 million and with the film's globally tally just over $82 million so far, and only three key releases in France, Italy and UK remaining, things are looking bleak for its overall returns.
Other standout disappointments from September include Darren Aronofsky's mother!, which performed well with critics but fell flat with audiences. The film debuted with just $7.5 million and became one of only 19 films to ever receive an "F" CinemaScore. Thus far, the $30 million production is knocking on the door of $40 million worldwide with openings in South Korea (10/19) and Japan (1/19) remaining.
Sony's Flatliners remake lived up to its title, debuting with just $6.5 million over the final weekend of the month. The $19 million production has so far amassed just over $19 million globally with releases in Mexico, Brazil, Spain, France, Italy, Russia and Germany yet to come.
From a yearly perspective, Warner Bros. is now the highest grossing studio of 2017 with $1.599 billion as of the end of September, leap-frogging Disney, which held the lead coming into the month. Disney, however, had their lowest grossing September since 1985 with just $4.2 million from three films. The reason being, Disney hasn't released a movie since June 16, when Cars 3 hit theaters, and their upcoming slate suggests they've written off releasing films in the months of September and October going forward. Disney's next release is Thor: Ragnarok on November 3, followed by Pixar's Coco and Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
As for the rest of October, the month got off to a rather disappointing start this past weekend with WB's Blade Runner 2049 delivering just $32.7 million. Of the month's new releases, the $150 million project was expected to bring in anywhere from $45-55 million over its opening three-days and lead the way over the course of the month. While it will still likely remain the month's highest grossing release, the amount it will finish with is greatly diminished.
Otherwise, given this is October, a selection of scary films are finding their way into theaters and one such film is this coming weekend's Happy Death Day, the third original film from Blumhouse this year following Split and Get Out, both of which delivered stellar numbers. Expectations for Happy Death Day are a little more modest, but then again, neither Split nor Get Out were expected to perform as they did. Additionally, Universal will deliver thrills with the adaptation of Jo Nesbo's The Snowman the same weekend Tyler Perry's Boo 2! A Madea Halloween hopes to keep pace with the $28.5 million opening the first one delivered only a year ago. And the month will close out with Lionsgate's eighth entry into the Saw franchise with Jigsaw, hoping audiences have a little more interest left in the tank.
Finally, a rather small selection of films closed out their domestic runs in September. Below is a list of selected titles ordered by cumulative gross:
Discuss this story with fellow Box Office Mojo fans on Facebook. On Twitter, follow us at @boxofficemojo.The following is a list of characters from the American situation comedy The Big Bang Theory created and executive produced by Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady, which premiered on CBS |
and there were lots of people there. People are here to pray while we are here for an excursion. There are shops selling bangles, ear rings, lockets and other artificial jewellery. I thought of buying something but nothing impressed - my mother bought ear rings and bangles. MONDAY 5 JANUARY: DO NOT WEAR COLOURFUL DRESSES I was getting ready for school and about to wear my uniform when I remembered that our principal had told us not to wear uniforms - and come to school wearing normal clothes instead. So I decided to wear my favourite pink dress. Other girls in school were also wearing colourful dresses and the school presented a homely look. Swat has been a centre of militant activity My friend came to me and said, 'for God's sake, answer me honestly, is our school going to be attacked by the Taleban?' During the morning assembly we were told not to wear colourful clothes as the Taleban would object to it. I came back from school and had tuition sessions after lunch. In the evening I switched on the TV and heard that curfew had been lifted from Shakardra after 15 days. I was happy to hear that because our English teacher lived in the area and she might be coming to school now. SUNDAY 4 JANUARY: I HAVE TO GO TO SCHOOL Today is a holiday and I woke up late, around 10 am. I heard my father talking about another three bodies lying at Green Chowk (crossing). I felt bad on hearing this news. Before the launch of the military operation we all used to go to Marghazar, Fiza Ghat and Kanju for picnics on Sundays. But now the situation is such that we have not been out on picnic for over a year and a half. We also used to go for a walk after dinner but now we are back home before sunset. Today I did some household chores, my homework and played with my brother. But my heart was beating fast - as I have to go to school tomorrow. SATURDAY 3 JANUARY: I AM AFRAID I had a terrible dream yesterday with military helicopters and the Taleban. I have had such dreams since the launch of the military operation in Swat. My mother made me breakfast and I went off to school. I was afraid going to school because the Taleban had issued an edict banning all girls from attending schools. Only 11 students attended the class out of 27. The number decreased because of Taleban's edict. My three friends have shifted to Peshawar, Lahore and Rawalpindi with their families after this edict. On my way from school to home I heard a man saying 'I will kill you'. I hastened my pace and after a while I looked back if the man was still coming behind me. But to my utter relief he was talking on his mobile and must have been threatening someone else over the phone.
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionOn Day 2 of free agency, we have our first bit of meaningful news about outside linebacker Connor Barwin.
According to a report by CBSSports.com, Barwin’s people are in talks with the Philadelphia Eagles who are in search of a pass rusher. Barwin is one of the Texans’ priorities to re-sign but the likelihood that he’ll return isn’t especially high.
The Texans offered him a contract before the 2012 season began, but Barwin declined it hoping he’d have a season similar to the 2011 season in which he had 11.5 sacks. Barwin had only three sacks during the 2012 season, but was still one of a small number of capable pass rushers available in this free agency class.
Common thinking around the league was that Barwin’s market would become clearer after Paul Kruger and Cliff Avril signed. Kruger signed yesterday with the Cleveland Browns for a deal reportedly worth five years, $40 million.NEW DELHI (Web Desk) – A village mob in northern India beat a Muslim man to death with sticks and injured four others who were accused of smuggling cows to be slaughtered for beef. Four ‘cow smugglers’, who were attacked
NEW DELHI (Web Desk) – A village mob in northern India beat a Muslim man to death with sticks and injured four others who were accused of smuggling cows to be slaughtered for beef.
Four ‘cow smugglers’, who were attacked and injured by locals, were arrested with the help of locals after nearly four hours of chase in the forests in Sirmaur district of Himachal Pradesh and admitted to hospital, said Yogesh Rota, Deputy Superintendent of Police, Pachhad.
The survivors were arrested for alleged animal cruelty. Hardline Hindus have been trying to force a national ban on cow slaughter, triggering mob violence.
A truck carrying five cows and ten oxen was spotted by local people who chased the vehicle. Sensing trouble, the truck driver allegedly tried to smash one of the vehicles by hitting it from the rear, Mr Rolta said.
A Muslim man was lynched in Uttar Pradesh state last month over false rumours his family had eaten beef for dinner.
Read more: Hindu mob kills Muslim man for allegedly eating beef in India
But when the police and people kept up the chase, the truck driver stopped the vehicle at Lawasa Chowki square and allegedly threw some cows out of the truck, he said and added one cow died on the spot while five others received serious injuries, said the police officer.
Read more: Indian mob set van on fire after beef suspicion
Abandoning the truck, the five alleged cow smugglers took shelter in a nearby forest at Lawasa Chowki adjacent to Sarahan-Chandigarh road, said the DSP.
The police, with the help of local villagers, arrested all the five cow smugglers, after several hours of chase in the forest. The area is nearly 260 kilometres north of New Delhi.
The villagers, who far outnumbered the policemen, beat up the alleged cow smugglers after they were overpowered, police sources said.
Read more: BJP’s leading anti-beef crusader owned a meat exporting company in India
Police were investigating whether the assailants belonged to a Hindu hardline group.
The Press Trust of India said those attacked were all Muslims from neighbouring Uttar Pradesh state.
One of the arrested persons identified as Noman (28), a resident of Rampur village of Saharanpur district of Uttar Pradesh, died at Sarahan hospital where he was taken.
A case of murder under section 302 of the Indian Penal Code was registered on the complaint filed by Imran, a relative of Noman, by Pachhad police. The body of Noman has been sent for postmortem.
Mr Rolta said that other four accused of cow smuggling, Mohd Nishu (37), driver of the truck, Guljar (22), Salman (20) and Gulfam (24), all residents of village Rampur of Saharanpur district, would be produced in a local court.
All the accused have been booked under different sections of Cruelty against Animals Act.
The truck, carrying the oxen and cows, was impounded by police.
Violence by Hindu fringe groups has increased since Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party came to power last year.ETHNews breaks down the functions of coins, tokens, and securities. It appears that Ether belongs in all three categories.
In the world of cryptocurrency, one of the most pressing questions facing investors and executives is how regulatory authorities will treat various digital assets. As blockchain technology takes the 21st century by storm, everybody is trying to claim a piece of the money pie. Traders eagerly ride the waves of volatility, turning astronomical profits in a matter of months or even days. Realizing the groundbreaking potential of blockchain technology, institutional investors have increasingly financed moonshot ventures. Now, of course, governments across the globe have begun considering how to approach these nascent instruments.
At the 1986 White House Conference on Small Business, President Ronald Regan humorously paraphrased the government’s approach to industry.
“Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”
Over the last 30 years, the world has become more technologically advanced, more globalized, and significantly faster. Today, we’re faced with a financial future that doesn’t fit neatly into the regulatory structures our nation has created. In the cryptocurrency world, digital assets frequently overlap the boundaries of traditional classifications. ETHNews will attempt to explain the distinctions between coins, tokens, and securities. Please note that many digital assets fit into more than one category and sometimes, an asset even fits into all three.
Coins
Humans have been using coins as a medium of exchange since the dawn of civilization. Thus, it was fitting that Satoshi Nakamoto gave bitcoin a name rooted in ancient history. While “bit” hints at the currency’s digital nature, “coin” appropriately captures how the computational instrument is actually used by society – as a currency.
Traditionally, currency has been issued by a government. The political apparatus of a nation also governs its economic operation – the amount of money in circulation, the inflation rate, and the unemployment rate. Historically, currency was tied to the value of a commodity (often gold). However, this is no longer the norm. In the 1970s, when the Bretton Woods System ended under the Nixon administration, fiat money became standard in the United States and, later, globally.
Fiat money is government-issued currency that is declared legal tender but is not backed by a physical commodity. Fiat money is not dependent – literally or psychologically – on gold reserves or any other tangible product. Instead, it has value based on the strength of government decree.
As demonstrated by the crypto world, currency can also be issued privately – in other words, not by a government. For example, bitcoin can be earned through mining on the bitcoin blockchain. Supporting the cryptographic protection of the network gives miners a small chance of earning a reward, commensurate with the hashing power that they contribute to the effort.
A central bank does not influence the issuance of bitcoin or guide its monetary policy. Regardless, millions of people around the world have adopted bitcoin as a medium of exchange. Bitcoin functions first and foremost as a currency and could possibly even become a global reserve currency.
Since bitcoin is the world’s largest cryptocurrency and because it employs the suffix “coin,” I will define a coin as a digital asset that functions as a currency.
It is also possible for a coin to fit under other classifications that I have not listed. For example, the Internal Revenue Service regards bitcoin as property for federal tax purposes. Classification as a coin does not preclude a digital asset from also being a token or a security – which I will get to later. Ether, the digital asset used on the Ethereum blockchain, functions as a medium of exchange, or “coin,” but also qualifies as a token and even a security.
Tokens
A token is a digital asset that allows a user to interact with, or gain utility from, a platform. In the physical world, a token is similar to buying tickets at a carnival. At the carnival grounds, tickets can be redeemed for hot dogs and cotton candy, or perhaps for a ride on the giant Ferris wheel. Within the carnival, tickets might seem priceless! But outside of the carnival, they are not worth much at all. That’s why there’s a specific kind of sadness when you get home, only to realize that you had a pocketful of tickets remaining.
In the cryptocurrency realm, a token might entitle a person to a specified amount of a good or a certain service. A number of companies have sprouted to offer tokens that represent ownership of tangible goods like precious metals, but service-based tokens also abound.
For instance, a person may have purchased Golem Network Tokens (GNT) to access Golem, an Ethereum-based network for idle computing power. The founders claim, “Anyone will be able to use Golem to compute (almost) any program you can think of, from rendering to research to running websites, in a completely decentralized & inexpensive way.”
The actual price of GNT does not matter at all. One GNT could be worth $1 million or 1 cent and the token would still provide the same service. Essentially, GNT tokens provide utility as long as they can be used on the Golem network. Accordingly, a secondary market for GNT arose after the company’s token offering. Today, GNT has the 26th largest market capitalization of the assets listed on CoinMarketCap. GNT trades for approximately 39 cents per token at the time of publication.
Like GNT, Ether allows a person to access a network. Ether is the only way to submit transactions or record to the Ethereum blockchain. As decentralized applications (Dapps) are built on the public Ethereum blockchain, Ether will be required in order to interact with each of these various platforms. By this logic, Ether is also a token.
Securities
In July 2017, the US Securities and Exchange Commission determined that tokens from The DAO were, in fact, securities. This guidance gave pause to many cryptocurrency executives and investors, as it became clear that the US government has begun exploring digital asset regulation. The question at hand is when a digital asset qualifies as a security. In many cases, it appears that digital assets transcend the boundaries between tokens and securities. Ether may fall into this category.
There are people who will use Ether as a currency and there are people who will use it as a token. There are also folks who will use Ether as an investment opportunity. People who believe in the long-term value of the Ethereum blockchain might actually approach the digital asset as a security – though they don’t possess any voting rights or a formal investment contract.
Nonetheless, Ether fulfills many of standards that the SEC applied to The DAO using the Howey Test.
Many investors have:
invested money in Ether with a reasonable expectation of profits derived from the managerial efforts of others.
As developers create Dapps for Ethereum, many believe that the value of Ether will increase dramatically. Perhaps, the greatest obstacle to classification as a security is that there are no shareholder’s rights or dividends through ownership of Ether. It’s worth noting that these attributes are not even required of securities that trade on stock exchanges.
So, it’s not totally clear whether Ether is a security, but with people pouring record amounts of money into the digital asset, there’s good reason to believe that it’s been regarded as an investment. On its face, Ether appears to qualify as a security.
Closing ThoughtsLLVM Weekly - #161, Jan 30th 2017
Welcome to the one hundred and sixty-first issue of LLVM Weekly, a weekly newsletter (published every Monday) covering developments in LLVM, Clang, and related projects. LLVM Weekly is brought to you by Alex Bradbury. Subscribe to future issues at http://llvmweekly.org and pass it on to anyone else you think may be interested. Please send any tips or feedback to asb@asbradbury.org, or @llvmweekly or @asbradbury on Twitter.
News and articles from around the web
Microsoft have announced a new open source DirectX shader compiler based on Clang and LLVM.
LLVM 4.0.0-rc1 source and binaries are now available. Time to get testing!
On the mailing lists
LLVM commits
NewGVN gained support for dead and redundant store elimination. r293258.
A new MemorySSA updater has been introduced. r293356.
A new guard-based loop predication optimisation has been added. This will enable more guards to be hoisted out of loops. r293064.
lit has been expanded to allow boolean expressions in REQUIRES, XFAIL, and UNSUPPORTED lines. r292896.
Early if-conversion has been implemented for AMDGPU, but is disabled by default for now. r293016.
The llvm-xray graph subcommand now colors edges and vertices based on statistics. r293031.
A new OptimizationRemarkEmitter pass was added, allowing MIR passes to emit optimisation remarks just like IR passes can. r293110.
The MIPS backend gained support for the static relocation model with the N64 ABI. r293279.
A number of new intrinsics for constrained floating point operations have been added. r293226.
Clang commits
A new TableGen-based generator for command line argument documentation was added. r292968.
Comment reflowing has been implemented for clang-format. r293055.
Other project commitsThis question originally appeared on Quora.
Answer by Rory Young, professional guide, ranger, and tracker with 23 years in wildlife and forest management.:
Both of these animals are the largest and most successful mustelids in their respective ranges.
They are equally renowned for their ferocity, their ability to take punishment, and their unbelievable gluttony.
Don’t mess with the honey badger.
Photo by Ian N. White/Flickr via Creative Commons
The honey badger measures up to 96 cm is length, up to 28 cm at the shoulder, and weighs up to 16 kilograms.
The wolverine is much larger; up to 107 cm in length, up to 45cm at the shoulder, and weighs up to 25 kilograms.
I will break down the respective weaponry and defenses for each species.
Firstly the wolverine.
The wolverine’s teeth are unique. They have a special molar that is revered 90 degrees which is used for breaking through bone. Their jaws are powerful and the combination of strong jaw muscles and special molars allow them to eat every part of the animal including hooves, bones, and teeth.
According to Dr. Jens Persson from the Swedish Wolverine Project, wolverine claws are believed to be semi-retractable but are actually fixed. However, the toe biomechanics effectively allows them to perform a similar action, which of course allows them to be kept sharp. These claws are also curved and therefore ideal for hooking and shredding.
In terms of behavior, the wolverine is fearless. It has been recorded killing a polar bear by latching onto the throat with its jaws and suffocating the animal. Its primary means of killing is suffocation by biting the throat and not letting go, and also by crushing with its powerful jaws and specially adapted molars.
The wolverine’s main defense against predators is its ferocity. It uses this together with its sharp claws, sharp teeth, powerful jaws, and thick skin and fur to protect its kills against much bigger predators, including wolves and bears.
Although the wolverine is known to have a thick hide, wolverines have been recorded killed by North American porcupine quills in a number of instances.
Now let’s look at the honey badger.
Other than its willingness to fight to the bitter end, the honey badger’s defenses are fourfold.
First, it is built to take a beating. Honey badgers live in an environment inhabited by many much larger predators, including lions, leopards, hyaenas, Cape hunting dogs, cheetahs, and of course, as we both evolved in Africa: man.
It is normal for predators in this environment to attack and kill any other predator. This is most likely to reduce food competition. That means that honey badgers have evolved to survive in the same environment as these much larger and well equipped carnivores.
Honey badgers need to be exceptionally tough to survive. Lions, leopards, and hyaenas are all well-known to attack and attempt to kill honey badgers. These attempts are sometimes successful but very often they are not. The honey badger will fight non-stop until it is dead or the attacker tires, at which point the honey badger will make a break for it.
The honey badger has an exceptionally tough, thick, and loose hide, specifically evolved to defend it against biting, clawing, and stinging. It is almost 6mm thick and extremely tough. A good example of how tough is the fact that African porcupine quills rarely penetrate it. Bear in mind that African porcupines are three times the size of their North American cousins.
Their second defense is tirelessness. They can literally keep fighting for hours on end. This is a problem for a predator already battling to gnaw through the skin. The effort is tiring, and the whole time, the honey badger is struggling and counterattacking with its own claws and teeth.
The third defense of the honey badger is that when attacked, it will go for its attacker’s groin. There are records (Stevenson-Hamilton 1947) from the Kruger National Park in South Africa of adult male Cape buffaloes having bled to death after being savaged by honey badgers in this manner.
Lastly, the honey badger has a reversible anal gland. The smell produced by it is described as “suffocating.”
The honey badgers weaponry includes a set of much smaller but sharper teeth than that of the wolverine, sharp claws, and equal ferocity and stubbornness to that of the wolverine.
In my opinion, it boils down to whether the wolverine could get through the honey badger’s defenses to kill him and whether the honey badger even has the tools to kill a wolverine.
While the wolverines weaponry is formidable, it does not approach that of lions, leopards or hyaenas. Below is a link to a video of a leopard battling to kill a honey badger. It succeeds in the end, but takes one hour to do so.
Another video shows a honey badger fending off six lions and then making good his escape.
Now, let’s look at a hypothetical fight between the two animals.
I think we can pretty much discount either animal’s claws doing much other than superficial damage to the other. The wolverine’s greater strength and powerful jaws and teeth would very likely enable it to overpower the honey badger. However, like the much more powerful leopards and lions it would very likely have a very hard time getting through the honey badger’s hide. This would take it possibly hours to do. Would it have to have the stamina to keep fighting the struggling honey badger, which would not give up till the death?
As for the honey badger, its teeth, although smaller than the wolverine’s would very likely be able to penetrate the wolverine’s hide. However, it would not be able to kill the wolverine by biting it to death. There is of course the question of whether the wolverine could suffocate the honey badger via biting the throat. This is highly unlikely because of the same loose, thick hide that makes lions and leopards take so long to kill them though they have more powerful jaws and wider gapes.
In my opinion, honey badger would either rip off the wolverines genitalia, thus causing it to bleed to death, or both would die via prolonged mutual mutilation.
After all this talk of these animals’ strengths, I would like to point out the one big weakness they both possess. They are worse than pigs. They will eat anything and everything they can get their greedy gobs ahold of. In the case of wolverines, they are so greedy that they have been recorded dying after stuffing themselves full of porcupine without taking the time to remove the quills.
I have witnessed the disgraceful and the debilitating extent of honey badger gluttony after one got into a store room at a safari camp I once worked at. After spending the entire night gorging himself on every foodstuff imaginable, he was discovered by one of the workers who ran to tell everybody. We were of course worried about how we would get him out of there. We needn’t have worried. When we opened the door he literally crawled out on his belly. He had eaten so much that he went straight past us without even glancing left or right and groaning not growling. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had died as a result.
We didn’t see him again for a week and when we did, he had a very embarrassed look about him.
So, if you ever have to kill one of either of these species, the easiest way would probably be to just feed the bugger to death…
Please support: The Wolverine Foundation Inc., and http://www.rateltrust.org/. If you don’t you may receive a visit from them and their pets.
More questions on hypothetical battles:
Correction, Nov. 5, 2013: This post originally contained a photo of a Eurasian badger, not a honey badger.By the time desperate borrowers — and they are always desperate — find Allan Sadler, they have already been turned down by banks and credit unions.
Mortgage brokers like North Vancouver-based Sadler deal in the private lending market, sometimes called the shadow lending market, and specialize in arranging loans for borrowers with very poor credit history and little proof of income.
Usually the lenders make loans to home buyers or other residential or commercial borrowers for a short period of time, such as 12 to 18 months, and at higher rates, which range from five to 15 per cent, depending on the level of risk (weighing such factors as whether it is a first, second or third mortgage and how much of the house has already been paid off).
Recently, Sadler’s clients, a 53-year-old woman and her 55-year-old husband, were facing the foreclosure of the Tsawwassen home they share with their 16-year-old son. They had bought, renovated and sold a few homes through their own small renovation company. They had also borrowed and lost “almost $2 million” when a 19-unit town home project they were developing in Langley “didn’t sell for as much as we thought it would,” said the woman, who agreed to speak to Postmedia News, but didn’t want her name published.
And so, even though she had taken on an additional job at a consulting company, they started having trouble keeping up with mortgage payments on their own house.
They tried putting it on the market, but with real estate sales slowing in Tsawwassen, it “isn’t moving,” she said.
They went to banks, credit unions and two private lenders, who all declined their bid for a loan.
Then, the woman got a flyer in the mailbox advertising Sadler’s services. “It said, ‘if you are in bad conditions, call me.’”
Sadler put the couple’s situation to his usual network of 20 or so regular contacts who are looking to lend money. Normally, he said, since the couple already had paid off 35 per cent of their house, and had some other equity, this deal “should (have been) a piece of cake.”
But the landscape for borrowing money to buy homes or refinance has been shifting. In October, Ottawa rolled out higher qualifying rates for mortgages with a down payment of less than 20 per cent and limited the kinds of mortgages that will be covered by government-backed insurance. Both were seen as federal action to clamp down on runaway real estate markets in Vancouver and Toronto. Then, in more recent weeks, some banks started boosting their mortgage rates in response to these new rules and because of rising bond yields since Donald Trump was elected president of the U.S.
All of this means it’s likely that more borrowers are turning to non-bank or private lenders.
In 2015, a CIBC report estimated that mortgage loans by non-banks had doubled since 2012. The Bank of Canada, meanwhile, says private lending accounts for about a tenth of total mortgage loans issued by non-banks.
Sadler, who has been brokering such deals for 39 years, said that more loan applications have been hitting his desk recently. In a hot, rising real estate market, his business holds steady because banks are more willing to lend and a homeowner caught in a bind can easily just sell his or her property to access cash. But now, in a softening market, even private lenders with less of an appetite for risk are saying no more often because they know homeowners cannot as easily sell their property in order to rework their finances.
Related
Brokers and lenders bristle to hear their activity described as shadow lending, as if it were being conducted in some kind of dark alley. They point out that these brokers and lenders are registered by the provincial government’s Financial Institutions Commission (Ficom), which recently released new guidelines that tighten its oversight.
Many see their lending as short-term bridge financing that might help a borrower, say, keep up with payments if they are between jobs or a small-business owner building or rebuilding accounts. The loan can be used for renovations in order to sell, then buy a cheaper home and get back on track to eventually qualify for a bank mortgage. They see themselves as working around a lack of good income or good credit by basing a deal on a borrower’s home equity. In return, they earn a much higher rate of return than they could by investing in stocks, bonds or other investments.
The brokers and lenders may indeed be registered and not be shadowy in any way. But it is also true that despite some ballpark estimates, it’s hard to say how much money might be in this non-bank or credit union lending market.
“The money I lend doesn’t show up in stats,” said one Vancouver-based lender who spent 29 years as a mortgage broker and now has about $3 million in personal retirement funds invested in between 30 and 40 mortgages.
In the end, Sadler cobbled together a solution for the Tsawwassen couple using two separate lenders: one who took on a first mortgage of $600,000, charging a rate of 11 per cent, and another who took on $150,000 of the loan in a second mortgage at a rate of 14 per cent.
For the couple, paying these eye-watering rates means they get to stay in their house. The husband has taken an additional job in the early mornings working as a co-manager at a storage facility to help meet payments and their house is still for sale.
“A house cannot be sold in one moment,” said the woman, who hopes a sale in the next six months will turn around their situation.
There is a wide spectrum of private lending.
There are large mortgage investment corporations or MICs, which pool money from a number of different individual investors to offer mortgage loans. Some of these are publicly traded companies that handle funds in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Other lenders are just one person. They range from wealthy, higher net worth individuals with personal retirement money in the millions of dollars to invest to players with as little as $20,000 to lend.
Still others yet are borrowing against their own homes to extend mortgage loans to borrowers. It’s this last category that concerns some analysts, including Ben Rabidoux, president of North Cove Advisors, which does market research on Canadian housing trends.
“If every five years, Joe and Jane Canadian refinance their mortgage and their broker says: ‘Wow, since the last time I saw you, your home has increased $300,000 in value. You should renew for a bigger amount and then you could take $200,000 and invest it in a private mortgage.’ They would only pay, say, two per cent interest on that $200,000, but could loan it out to someone (else’s mortgage) and get a return of 8 to 10 per cent.”
That’s fine until the real estate market wobbles. “When I ask private lenders, ‘what would make you not renew a mortgage,’ they say things such as missed payments and mostly, if I get nervous about the value of my collateral.”
For Rabidoux, the real worry would come if these private lenders started to pull back and, instead of investing, the MICs returned funds to their investors.
jlee-young@postmedia.com
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Is there more to this story? We’d like to hear from you about this or any other stories you think we should know about. Email vantips@postmedia.com.Personality
is a 6 year old male yellow bulldog with a large appetite. He likes to pretend he is Super T-Bone, a caped hero. He is best friend. His human is Sherriff Lewis. T-Bone is yellow in color with orange spots over his back. Mac sometimes takes T-Bone seriously. Once in the episode "The Great Race" he even mentioned T-Bone being the slowest dog on the island. His human is Sheriff Lewis. Voiced by Kel Mitchell
T-Bone is sensitive to things. In the episode "The Ears Have It", It is revealed that T-Bone is scared of loud noises and he wore earmuffs when he went to see the fireworks. He is cowardly and cautious. T-Bone was also scared of the dark but when he had to get Jetta's watch for under the house he got over it and he wasn't afraid anymore. T-Bone loves eating and sometimes feels overconfident. T-Bone has a tag in Clifford's Really Big Movie. In Clifford's Puppy Days he choose to sit out of the TV series along with Cleo,KC and Mac he can be still seen as a cameo in the opening theme otherwise he makes no other appearances in the TV series
Trivia
T-Bone is Kel Mitchell's first voice over. His next voice over was Charlie Ant from Pink Panther and Pals.
He wants to eat a lot of dog food in a factory when he is older.North Korea's military warned last week that it would strike if the South Korean activists carried through with their plan, and South Korea pledged to retaliate if it was attacked.
South Korean police, citing security concerns, had sent hundreds of officers on Monday to seal off roads and prevent the activists and other people from gathering at an announced launch site near the border. Residents in the area were also asked to evacuate to underground facilities, according to local official Kim Jin-a.
Later in the day, some of the activists, mostly North Korean defectors, moved to another site near the border that was not guarded by police and launched the balloons. They had described the police response as a surrender.
South Korea's Defense Ministry said there were no suspicious activities from North Korea's military.
Before acting on Monday, the South Korean government had implored activists to stop their campaign but had cited freedom of speech in not making further attempts to intervene. South Korean activists have sent leaflets across the border in the past, and North Korea has issued similar threats to attack without following through.
Seoul's Yonhap news agency reported on Monday that the ban on entering the border area was imposed as South Korea detected that North Korea had uncovered artillery muzzle covers and deployed troops to artillery positions in possible preparation for an attack. Yonhap cited no source for the information.
Defence Ministry spokesman Kim Min-seek told reporters North Korea was believed to have acted in line with carrying out its threat. He declined to elaborate on the North's army movement as that was confidential military information.
He said South Korea had bolstered its military readiness following the North's threat and would "strongly" retaliate if attacked.
The activists said they floated balloons carrying about 120,000 leaflets critical of North Korea's young leader Kim Jong-un and his country's alleged human rights abuses. They said they wanted to let North Korean people know the true nature of their country.
"We could not delay our plans to send anti-North Korea leaflets because it is our love toward our northern brothers," the activists wrote in a statement posted on the website of Seoul-based Free North Korea Radio, one of civic organisations involved in the leafleting.
Lead activist Park Sang-hak had said the ban on entering the border area was tantamount to yielding to Pyongyang's threat.
"It's surrender. It's clearly surrender," he said.
The top US envoy on North Korea urged Pyongyang to stop issuing destabilising threats.
"It is grossly disproportionate to have threatened to respond to balloons with bombs," Glyn Davies told reporters in Beijing after meeting with Chinese officials.
China, the North's main ally and biggest aid source, welcomed South Korean efforts to quash the balloon-flying and urged all parties to exercise restraint.
"As a close neighbour to the peninsula, China supports dialogue and discussions between North Korea and South Korea in resolving relevant issues, opposes any action which may heighten tension, and firmly opposes military conflicts on the peninsula," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said at a daily media briefing. "We hope the parties involved will stay calm and restrained."
Ties between the rival Koreas were badly strained after two deadly attacks blamed on North Korea killed 50 South Koreans in 2010.
The Korean Peninsula officially remains at war because an armed conflict in the 1950s ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.
The latest flare-up in tensions comes as almost all the regional players are consumed with domestic politics. Elections are being held or are expected soon in South Korea, the United States and Japan, while China's Communist Party is in the midst of transferring power to a younger generation of leaders.
Source: agenciesSEATTLE - People who live along Greenwood Avenue North in Seattle describe their daily walks like a game of dodgeball -- only far more dangerous.
The 24-block stretch between North 112th and North 136th streets lacks sidewalks in many parts, forcing pedestrians to share the road, hopscotch between bushes and cars, and more, residents said.
"It's not safe. I walk on a certain side so I can see the cars coming. It's really scary, too," said Ashleigh Bonner, who lives nearby. "It's ridiculous."
The city of Seattle is currently in the process of making repairs to the busy North Seattle thoroughfare, but the contractor tasked with the job won't be building new sidewalks in this area, officials confirmed Tuesday.
"We just couldn't fund everything. Everybody's got their wish list." said Darby Watson, director of project development for the Seattle Department of Transportation. "It was not selected in the [Move Seattle] levy as a corridor to fund."
Seattle voters approved $930 million dollar levy in November 2015. The Greenwood Avenue corridor was earmarked in Move Seattle planning as needing improvements, but a levy coordinating committee didn't budget for sidewalks, Watson said.
Traffic planners estimate that a single block of city sidewalks costs roughly $500,000 to build, Watson added.
"Including sidewalks for the entire project would have been quite expensive, so we are replacing some curb ramps and installing wheel stops between the walkway and car parking," Watson said. "While it's not an ideal solution, it does fit within our budget."
On Tuesday, Elliot Haack waited for a bus near the retirement community where he works. Senior citizens who live there rely on walking for exercise, making the lack of sidewalks unsafe, he said.
"It'd be nice if they could go five or six or seven blocks in either direction and come back and not have to worry about being in the middle of the street," Haack said. "You think it's a no-brainer. You just think, 'I'm doing the street. Why not put some nice sidewalks in?'"
Workers will put in sidewalks on an eight-block stretch during the second phase of the project, Watson said, but they will only be between North 137th and North 145th Streets -- and only on one side of the street.
She urged people to comment on the city's Pedestrian Master Plan. A draft is out now, and comments help guide planners on what improvements |
” way of defining an inductive data type is by specifying precisely which solution to the recursion equation we want. In the case of lists, if we want to allow only finite lists, we want the least, or smallest solution. We can define it in general like so:
We a set $T$ that satisfies condition $C$, but with the added requirement that $T$ has no subsets that also satisfy $C$. We could then define the set of all finite lists like so:
Or in words, the set $List$ is the smallest set that contains $\text{EMPTY}$ and is closed under adding a new head to the list (i.e., for any list in $List$, the list we get by adding the element with the value $x$ as the head, is also in $List$). This last definition using $Least$ is too abstract to be obvious to people who are not logicians. Indeed, as we’ll see in part 4, it is generally discouraged to specify programs in such an abstract way, as it quickly gets very complex. TLA+ offers alternatives.
We can later use this definition when we define algorithms over linked list to show that the type of the list is preserved. This turns the familiar notion of type into just another, relatively simple property we can specify and verify. For example, $x \in List$ is just another proposition, like $a + b = 0$.
Now, let’s define a view that presents a linked list as a sequence. For simplicity, let’s assume we only allow finite lists. Remember, a finite sequence is just a function of some 1..n:
The operators $ListAsSeq$ and $SeqAsList$ allow us to move between two levels of abstractions and write a theorem like
We could then prove the theorem or check it on a finite model in the model checker to verify that our concrete implementation of lists behaves like an abstract sequence. This is a very simple form of something called a refinement relation between specifications; in particular, this is a data refinement, as it pertains to a data structure. In parts 3 and 4 we’ll see what refinement means exactly, as well as how we can use refinement relations of algorithms.
I hope that it is now clear why I opened by saying that this is the least essential part of TLA+: any other system for defining data and operations on it would do. For example we could have used HOL instead of ZFC, for a slightly different set of tradeoffs, although when it comes to actual work, the similarities would be greater than the differences; after all, math is math. The interesting — and unique — power of TLA+ comes from TLA, the logic used to define algorithms, which we’ll cover in the upcoming installments. Nevertheless, the data formalism chosen by TLA+ is one that is both powerful and relatively familiar to engineers, most of whom learned about sets and functions in a discrete math course.
In fact, this system is powerful enough that we don’t really need anything else. We could define computations as as discrete dynamical processes that change state in time by modeling (discrete) time as the index of an infinite sequence. However, this is not the path taken by TLA+, which offers a more structured and convenient way of describing algorithms and computations using the temporal logic of actions.
Proofs
The most important skill when using TLA+ (or any other specification language) is the ability to express your ideas precisely in the language of mathematics. If there is an automatic verification tool for your language of choice — like the TLC model checker for TLA+ — this is often all you need. However, the most important capability of logic after serving as a precise language, is the ability to use syntactic manipulation rules — often called inference rules, deduction rules or a proof calculus — to write proofs, using the syntax of the logic to arrive at truth.
The TLA+ proof language is more readable than any I’ve seen, so I will cover its main features, as they’re important from a design, if not theory, perspective. The proof language is a relatively late addition to TLA+, added in 2008, along with an early version of TLAPS, the mechanical proof system. The design principles of the proof language, with comparisons to other proof languages, is covered in its introduction paper. Details of usage are covered in detail in section 7 of the TLA+2 Preliminary Guide, and a good tutorial, which includes the use of the mechanical proof system, is found in “The TLA+ Proof Track” of the hyperbook. More information about TLAPS can be found on its website. TLAPS can mechanically verify a useful subset of TLA+ proofs and specifications. TLAPS is not a standalone proof assistant, but a frontend, which uses multiple automated solvers and the Isabelle proof assistant as backends. It can even check and certify the automated provers in Isabelle (currently only Zenon, but certifying the SMT solvers is planned). You may be interested in reading some of the papers explaining TLAPS’s operation here and here. An interesting real-world specification of a real-time OS kernel scheduler has recently been mechanically proven with TLAPS.
In practice, when writing real specifications, you’ll find that using the model-checker has a much higher return-on-investment than writing proofs (by an order of magnitude). Not only does the model checker save you a great deal of effort, but you can only prove things that are true, and very often, you’ll make assertions that are wrong. The model checker will let you know exactly why it is that your assertions are wrong; struggling with a proof may lead you to your mistake, but only after considerable effort.
Nevertheless, sometimes you may find it useful to write a proof. TLA+ has a rich structured and declarative proof language, based on Lamport’s interesting ideas for a structured proof system that assists both in the readability and the rigor of mathematical proofs. The system is detailed in How to write a 21st century proof (with an older discussion in How to Write a Proof), which is an interesting read regardless of whether or not you’re interested in TLA+. Lamport first gave a talk explaining his ideas on structured proofs in 1991. It was not well received:
Lots of people jumped on me for trying to take the fun out of mathematics. The strength of their reaction indicates that I hit a nerve. Perhaps they really do think it’s fun having to recreate the proofs themselves if they want to know whether a theorem in a published paper is actually correct, and to have to struggle to figure out why a particular step in the proof is supposed to hold.
Twenty years later, attitudes have changed, although not practice:
The talk was received much more calmly than my earlier one, and the mathematicians were open to considering that I might have something interesting to say about writing proofs. Perhaps in the last 20 years I have learned to be more persuasive, or perhaps the mathematicians in the audience had just grown older and calmer. In any case, they were still not ready to try changing how they write their own proofs.
TLA+’s proof language is rich with constructs designed to make it easier for people to read and write proofs, and can be learned in a day or two once you know TLA+. The proof language deviates somewhat from the relative minimalism that characterizes the rest of TLA+, and focuses more on readability that evokes prose proofs as much as possible, using a wide selection of keywords — over 25 — many of which are synonyms and syntactic sugar. I will not cover them all, but just highlight the core elements.
The paper introducing the proof language reads:
The goal of the language is to make proofs easy to read and write for someone with no knowledge of how the proofs are being checked. This leads to a mostly declarative language, built around the uses and proofs of assertions rather than around the application of proof-search tactics.
While formal proofs are some sequence (or a tree) of applications of the logic’s inference rules, writing proofs in this way is untenable, as the rules are too primitive, and each moves you forward towards the goal too slowly. So mechanical proof assistants often have a higher-level proof languages. Some, like Coq, have an imperative proof language, where a proof is constructed by chaining tactics. You can think of tactics as macros for the primitive inference rules. Others, like TLA+ have a declarative proof language (and Isabelle has both imperative and declarative proof languages). Declarative proofs are designed to be easily readable by people, and resemble how humans write proofs. At every step of the proof they only list those facts — axioms, other lemmas or theorems, and previous proof steps — required to prove the current statement, without explaining how. They basically list the input and the output for some chain of deduction steps, leaving the actual steps for the tool to figure out. This, however, means that there is a difference between a legal proof and a useful proof. For example, the following is (probably) a formal proof in TLA+
but, of course, it will convince no mathematician and certainly not the mechanical proof system, which cannot deduce the steps from the input to the output. This, however:
may or may not be a valid proof, because we don’t know whether Goldbach’s conjecture is a theorem or not, and if it is, whether or not the Peano axioms suffice to prove it.
A useful proof is one that can be relatively easily verified either by a human reader and/or by the mechanical proof system. This happens when it is obvious how proof goal (theorem/lemma or a proof step) is entailed by the facts listed as its proof. What “obvious” means depends, of course, on the capabilities of the person or algorithm verifying the proof, where “verification” ultimately means becoming convinced (perhaps even supplying a formal certificate — the long chain of primitive inference rules connecting the assumptions to the consequence) that the goal is indeed entailed by the facts listed.
Both imperative and declarative proof languages have their pros and cons (and both are quite tedious). Imperative proofs are so hard to read that they are effectively meaningless to a human; on the other hand, they let you know exactly what the verifier knows at each step, so they are easier to write by comparison. Declarative proofs are easy to read, but writing them is often a game of trial and error, where you supply more detail and hope that would do the trick, while the feedback you get is just whether the verifier has managed to prove the goal from the supplied facts or not.
The TLA+ proof language does not presuppose any specific capabilities on the part of the verifier, be it human or mechanical, instead allowing hierarchically refining every proof step by making it into a proof goal of its own and recursively breaking it down into another, hopefully simpler, series of proof steps, and so on until finally we get proof steps that are each obvious enough for the verifier. This is the idea behind Lamport’s structured hierarchical proofs.
At any point in a TLA+ proof, there is a current proof obligation, which claims that a proof goal is entailed by a set of facts (other theorems axioms or proof steps) and definitions called a context. A proof goal is anything that requires proof. It can be a theorem introduced with the keyword (or one of its synonyms,, ), or, recursively, a proof step of one. A (declarative) proof is either omitted (with the clause), stated to be if it is a direct result of logical inference rules and other built-in axioms that don’t require further assumptions, or supplied in a (or, optionally, ) clause, which lists all facts from which the obligation can be deduced as well as any definitions that the obligation depends on and must be examined (“expanded”).
A theorem can be stated in two ways. It can be a logical proposition given as a formula (like $\A r, s, t : r \subseteq s \land s \subseteq t \implies r \subseteq t$ or the above statement of Fermet’s Last Theorem), or as a more powerful, more general pair, where the clause lists some assumptions that, if true, would entail the consequence in the clause. The pair basically means. For example:
or:
The keyword introduces a new variables, as in “let P be any…”. by itself is shorthand for, or just, signifying that the variable is a constant rather than a temporal one that can refer to different values at different times in an algorithm; this is a in the exact sense as we learned above in the section Constants. If unbounded, it means any value or any (non-temporal) operator or formula. It is a second-order free variable. $\ASSUME A \;\PROVE B$ is a proposition but it is not a TLA+ formula; it doesn’t have a model in the TLA+ logic, so the formulas of the logic are still all first-order. See the discussion to follow, as well as in the section First Order Logic and Other Orders, for the reasoning behind this design.
For example, the following theorem demonstrates a bounded, as well as introducing parameterized formulas:
Note how we assume the existence of a theorem (a true proposition) in the nested.
The ability to write second-order theorems is important in a proof system, as it allows the user to make general, reusable lemmas for use in proofs. For example, an important theorem (exported by the NaturalsInduction module provided with TLAPS) that can be used in many circumstances is the following, which defines induction over the naturals:
Instead of $\A n \in Nat : P(n) \implies P(n+1)$ above, we could have used the nested $\ASSUME \NEW n \in Nat, P(n) \;\PROVE P(n+1)$.
We can then use that theorem to prove the following (silly) one:
( would have sufficed in this case, both for a human reader as well as for TLAPS, and we could have stated the theorem more simply as the formula $\forall x \in Nat : x = 0 \lor x - 1 \geq 0$). Notice there is no need to actually define an operator of the form $P(n)$; it is automatically inferred from the formula $x = 0 \lor x - 1 \geq 0$ that it can be understood as an operator parameterized by $x$.
Theorems of the kind we’ve seen can be introduced as axioms to define inference rules for new logical connectives (for example, for something like separation logic). However, built-in axioms cannot be removed (so we can’t remove the law of excluded middle as an axiom to ensure our reasoning is constructive). Axioms are declared with the keyword or with, the construct we covered in the section about constants.
While TLAPS has been designed to be fully backend-agnostic, when using it you may sometimes find it necessary to use specific solver features. For example, $\BY Z3$ can tell TLAPS to use the Z3 SMT solver to discharge (verify) the particular proof, and you can even — although it’s not recommended and you’re unlikely to need it in practice — make use of Isabelle tactics. In fact, the proof of the $NatInduction$ theorem above provided with TLAPS is $\BY IsaM(\str{(intro\;natInduct, auto)})$.
Let’s look at an example that requires expanding a definition in the proof. The TLAPS solvers are powerful enough to prove the following theorems about the algebraic structures we defined in the section Set Fundamentals directly from their definition, without any added assistance:
$\BY \DEF Monoid$ says that the proof relies on the content of the definition of $Monoid$, as no facts are used nor any definitions expanded unless we explicitly say so (inside long proofs — which we’ll get to right away — there are ergonomic constructs designed to save us repetitive mentions of facts or definitions in multiple proof steps). The second theorem requires examining the inner definitions of $Monoid$ and $Semigroup$ used in the definition of $Group$, as it requires the associativity property, defined in $Semigroup$.
More interesting theorems cannot be proven satisfactorily with a single clause, and must be broken down into smaller proof steps. Each proof step states a proposition and requires proof (or ) with a clause, or, recursively, by a nested series of proof steps, thus forming a tree-like hierarchy. Every step is labeled with “$\seq{depth}name.$”, where depth is the depth of the step in the hierarchy, and name is an optional label for the step, usually just the index of the step in the sequence. A named step can be referenced as a fact in a clause as if it were a named theorem. Every sequence of proof steps, at any level of the tree, must end with a step, whose goal is the parent proposition of the sequence, known as the current goal. Here’s an example of a proof structure:
Note that a proof may contain multiple steps with the same name (e.g. $\seq{2}1, \seq{2}2, \seq{2}3.$ all appear twice in the outline above), however, there can be no ambiguity when referencing steps, as you can only reference steps appearing previously in the same sequence or in higher levels of the hierarchy. The idea of a hierarchical proof is that each nested sequence provides the details of how its goal (i.e., parent) is proven, until the leaf nodes are obvious enough. If, as a reader, you’re not interested in the details or the step is obvious enough without the more detailed steps, you can collapse the tree in the TLA+ Toolbox. This hierarchical structure results in very readable proofs, as you can easily grasp the outline of the proof, and then delve deeper for more detail if you like.
The proof language has some constructs that allow for a more natural expression of the proof (similar to common techniques in prose proofs), or to improve readability. Instead of listing the set of facts and definitions that are supposed to entail the goal, the keyword introduces facts and definitions that are then implicitly added to all subsequent steps in the same step sequence. The matching keyword does the opposite, removing implicit facts from consideration. Because doesn’t introduce a proposition, it is usually written in an unnamed step (e.g. $\seq{2}$ as opposed to, say, $\seq{2}5$), as there’s never a reason to reference it.
A more interesting ergonomic construct is. Say that assuming A, we want to prove C, and that we could do that by first proving $A \vdash B$ and then $B \vdash C$. Sometimes it is more convenient (to guide the reader in the intent of the proof) to first prove $B \vdash C$ and only then $A \vdash B$. In a prose proof, we usually say “suffices to prove B because…” and then move on to proving B. We can do the same in TLA+ with the construct. When used in an unnamed step, it changes the current goal as seen in the example below, taken from the hyperbook, which demonstrates the use of as well as gives you a sense of what a real proof looks like. The example proves some theorems that can be mechanically checked by TLAPS about the GCD operator we defined above in the section Some Important Sets:
The construct helps writing a proof by cases. For example, instead of:
you can write:
Finally, let’s take a look at the construct. If we have an assumption of the form $\exists x : P(x)$ we can use it by ing a fresh variable $x$ for which $P(x)$ is assumed (it works similarly to $\NEW x, P(x)$). Here is an example adapted from the TLAPS documentation. In addition to, it makes use of and also demonstrates a proof of contradiction:
There are quite a few other constructs that capture common proof techniques; you can find a list of them here (as you can see, their meaning is precisely defined by the more basic constructs we’ve covered). There are also constructs that allow adding local definitions to a proof, a scheme that allows naming and referencing parts of formulas, and a convenient syntax for writing proofs by a sequence of equalities or inequalities.
For an example of the last, if TLAPS weren’t able to prove the theorem $UniqueInverse$ automatically — or if the proof, although obvious to the mechanical prover, is not obvious to the human reader — we could help the system or the reader by writing the following detailed proof, where $@$ refers to the right-hand side of the relation mentioned in the previous step:
The appendix of How to write a 21st century proof contains a full, mechanically verified, TLA+ proof of a simple theorem in calculus along with all necessary definitions.
While TLA+ can be used to prove general mathematical theorems, it was not designed for that task. Mathematicians interested in formal proofs would be better served by tools designed for that task, like Isabelle or Coq. Engineers who choose to write formal proofs are encouraged not to waste their time on proving mathematical theorems, but to either use the library of proven mathematical theorems supplied with TLAPS or to merely state a mathematical theorem and omit the proof. They should concentrate on proving the correctness of their algorithms or system designs. In part 3 we’ll see how that’s done.
Conclusion
Using formal math to precisely define objects and their properties is pretty straightforward, can be learned easily by engineers, and doing that forms the core of the work in TLA+, and, in fact, in any specification language or proof assistant.
You’ll usually use TLC, the TLA+ model checker to automatically verify your assertions. Formal proofs, on the other hand, are rather laborious — especially if we want them to be mechanically checked — even when written in a relatively nice proof language like that of TLA+, and even when SMT solvers are used by TLAPS to carry some of the burden.
While we haven’t even begun exploring any of the interesting theory of TLA+, this installment covered nearly all of its syntax; in fact, we’ve covered almost all definitions in the standard module library, too. The entire logic for defining dynamical systems contains just a handful of additional operators — $’$, $\Box$,, and $\EE$ — applied to the data logic we’ve learned.
Next week we’ll look at how TLA+ models algorithms and their properties mathematically, and at the proof techniques that work best in verifying algorithms.
Discuss on RedditThe nonprofit news site Oakland Local, which was in the forefront of trying to fill gaps in community news coverage at a time of financial stress among newspapers, says it will at least temporarily suspend publication as it seeks a new management team.
The site will continue updating through June 15, then remain static until a new editor and publisher can take over from Susan Mernit, who co-founded the site in 2009 and is leaving to devote more time to Hack the Hood, where she is the CEO and executive director. Hack the Hood trains young people of color for careers in the tech industry.
Oakland Local -- a news associate of KQED -- has put out a request for proposals to keep the site going.
"We’re not turning the site off," said Mernit. "But we are going to stop updating it as of June 15. I don’t think that we’ll have a new editor/publisher by June 15; I think what we’ll have... hopefully are some great conversations with people who'd like to take it on. Many sites have suspended publication for a few weeks to a month without any penalty. We did it last September when we redesigned the site. I don’t think this necessarily means it’s shutting down, but part of that is really contingent on the response of the community."
Mernit said the hoped-for-transition to new management has less to do with finances and more to do with the time required for her other job. Associate Publisher Margaret Lucas and Managing Editor Latoya Tooles are also stepping down.Photo: F Carter Smith / F. Carter Smith / Bloomberg Image 1 of / 28 Caption Close
Image 2 of 28 <b>Royal Dutch Shell</b>, cutting as many as 300 jobs from oil sands project in Alberta, Canada <b>Royal Dutch Shell</b>, cutting as many as 300 jobs from oil sands project in Alberta, Canada Photo: Paul O\'Driscoll / BLOOMBERG NEWS
Image 3 of 28 <b>ConocoPhillips</b>, 2015 spending down 20 percent to $13.5 billion<br>Pictured: ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lance <b>ConocoPhillips</b>, 2015 spending down 20 percent to $13.5 billion<br>Pictured: ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lance
Image 4 of 28 <b>Apache Corp.</b>, 2015 spending down 26 percent to $4 billion in North America <b>Apache Corp.</b>, 2015 spending down 26 percent to $4 billion in North America Photo: Apache Corp. / Apache Corp.
Image 5 of 28 <b>Marathon Oil</b>, 2015 spending down from $5.7 billion to $4.5 billion<br>Pictured: Marathon CEO Lee Tillman <b>Marathon Oil</b>, 2015 spending down from $5.7 billion to $4.5 billion<br>Pictured: Marathon CEO Lee Tillman Photo: Mayra Beltran / Houston Chronicle
Image 6 of 28 <b>Swift Energy</b>, will spend $100 million to $125 million after cutting budget 70 to 75 percent <b>Swift Energy</b>, will spend $100 million to $125 million after cutting budget 70 to 75 percent Photo: Swift Energy Co.
Image 7 of 28 <b>Rosetta Resources</b>, 2015 spending down 20 percent to $950 million <b>Rosetta Resources</b>, 2015 spending down 20 percent to $950 million
Image 8 of 28 <b>Continental Resources</b>, 2015 spending down 41 percent to $2.7 billion<br>Pictured: Continental CEO Harold Hamm <b>Continental Resources</b>, 2015 spending down 41 percent to $2.7 billion<br>Pictured: Continental CEO Harold Hamm
Image 9 of 28 <b>Emerald Oil</b>, 2015 spending down 10 percent to between $210 million and $240 million for drilling and completion <b>Emerald Oil</b>, 2015 spending down 10 percent to between $210 million and $240 million for drilling and completion Photo: Susana Gonzalez / Bloomberg
Image 10 of 28 <b>Chevron</b> delayed its 2015 capital spending announcement<br>Pictured: Chevron CEO John S. Watson <b>Chevron</b> delayed its 2015 capital spending announcement<br>Pictured: Chevron CEO John S. Watson
Image 11 of 28 <b>Petronas (Malaysia)</b>, 2015 spending down 15 to 20 percent<br>Pictured: Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia <b>Petronas (Malaysia)</b>, 2015 spending down 15 to 20 percent<br>Pictured: Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Photo: Vincent Thian / Associated Press
Image 12 of 28 <b>Goodrich Petroleum</b>, 2015 spending down 50 percent to between $150 million and $200 million<br>Goodrich CEO Walter G. 'Gil' Goodrich <b>Goodrich Petroleum</b>, 2015 spending down 50 percent to between $150 million and $200 million<br>Goodrich CEO Walter G. 'Gil' Goodrich Photo: Julio Cortez / Houston Chronicle
Image 13 of 28 <b>Energy XXI</b>, 2015 spending down 14 percent to between $670 million and $690 million <b>Energy XXI</b>, 2015 spending down 14 percent to between $670 million and $690 million Photo: Martin L Vargas / Energy XXI
Image 14 of 28 <b>Oasis Petroleum</b>, 2015 spending down 43 percent to between $750 million and $800 million<br>Pcitured: Tommy Nusz, left, chairman and CEO of Oasis Petroleum <b>Oasis Petroleum</b>, 2015 spending down 43 percent to between $750 million and $800 million<br>Pcitured: Tommy Nusz, left, chairman and CEO of Oasis Petroleum Photo: Kevin Cederstrom / Associated Press
Image 15 of 28 <b>Denbury Resources</b>, 2015 spending down 50 percent to $550 million <b>Denbury Resources</b>, 2015 spending down 50 percent to $550 million Photo: Melissa Phillip / Houston Chronicle
Image 16 of 28 <b>Linn Energy</b>, 2015 spending down more than 50 percent to $730 million <b>Linn Energy</b>, 2015 spending down more than 50 percent to $730 million Photo: Linn Energy / Linn Energy
Image 17 of 28 <b>Statoil (Norway)</b>, abandoned oil and gas three exploration leases in Greenland<br>Pictured: Statoil CEO Eldar Saetre <b>Statoil (Norway)</b>, abandoned oil and gas three exploration leases in Greenland<br>Pictured: Statoil CEO Eldar Saetre Photo: Krister Soerboe / Bloomberg
Image 18 of 28 <b>Suncor Energy (Canada)</b>, cutting investment and operational spending by $1.6 billion to $1.8 billion, and employment by 1,000 jobs <b>Suncor Energy (Canada)</b>, cutting investment and operational spending by $1.6 billion to $1.8 billion, and employment by 1,000 jobs Photo: JEFF MCINTOSH / Canadian Press
Image 19 of 28 <b>Excelerate Energy</b>, putting Port Lavaca LNG project on hiatus<br>Pictured: Rob Bryngelson, chief executive officer of Excelerate Energy <b>Excelerate Energy</b>, putting Port Lavaca LNG project on hiatus<br>Pictured: Rob Bryngelson, chief executive officer of Excelerate Energy Photo: Aaron M. Sprecher / Bloomberg
Image 20 of 28 <b>Saudi Arabia</b>, facing $39 billion budget deficit <b>Saudi Arabia</b>, facing $39 billion budget deficit Photo: JOHN MOORE / AP
Image 21 of 28 <b>Halcon Resources</b>, spending down 45 percent to between $375 million and $425 million <b>Halcon Resources</b>, spending down 45 percent to between $375 million and $425 million Photo: Brittany Sowacke / Bloomberg
Image 22 of 28 <b>Sanchez Energy</b>, down to $600 million to $650 million after planning for $1.15 billion <b>Sanchez Energy</b>, down to $600 million to $650 million after planning for $1.15 billion Photo: DIEGO GIUDICE / BLOOMBERG NEWS
Image 23 of 28 <b>Antero Resources</b>, cutting 250 contract land broker jobs <b>Antero Resources</b>, cutting 250 contract land broker jobs Photo: Scott Dalton
Image 24 of 28 <b>Concho Resources</b>, will cut 16 to 20 percent of its estimated $2 billion to $3 billion budget <b>Concho Resources</b>, will cut 16 to 20 percent of its estimated $2 billion to $3 billion budget Photo: Daniel Acker / Bloomberg
Image 25 of 28 <b>Ensign Energy Services(Canada)</b>, cutting 700 jobs in California <b>Ensign Energy Services(Canada)</b>, cutting 700 jobs in California Photo: Daniel Acker / Bloomberg
Image 26 of 28 <b>Canadian Natural Resources</b>, down 19 percent, from $8.6 billion to $6.2 billion <b>Canadian Natural Resources</b>, down 19 percent, from $8.6 billion to $6.2 billion Photo: NORM BETTS / BLOOMBERG NEWS
Image 27 of 28 <b>OFS Energy Fund</b>, laying off 150 oil field employees in Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma <b>OFS Energy Fund</b>, laying off 150 oil field employees in Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma Photo: Asad Zaidi / BloombergImage copyright bbc Image caption Exeter Crown Court heard that injures and heavy drinking left Neil Mitchell unsteady on his feet
A woman was wrongly accused of killing her best friend - because police could not understand her Liverpool accent.
Teresa Rylands was cleared of murdering Neil Mitchell in Newton Abbot, Devon, when the prosecution withdrew its case.
It emerged her alleged confession during a 999 call was mis-transcribed because of her accent.
Ms Rylands, who spent two months in prison, said although she was glad to be free, she regretted having been unable to attend Mr Mitchell's funeral.
Mr Mitchell died in hospital after falling down the stairs at his home while more than four times over the legal alcohol limit for driving.
They were lost souls who gravitated towards each other Anne Bellchambers, Solicitor
Exeter Crown Court was told the 48-year-old had suffered brain and leg injuries in a motorcycle accident in 1983 which, when combined with heavy drinking, left him unsteady on his feet.
After the accident, a "hysterical" Ms Rylands called 999 for an ambulance, during which she was thought to have admitted pushing Mr Mitchell.
However, acoustic tests showed she said: "I don't care if you say I pushed him down the stairs, just get someone in here."
The prosecution said the mistake occurred because Devon and Cornwall Police staff were confused by her strong accent.
Anne Bellchambers, Ms Rylands' solicitor, said her client had always denied injuring Mr Mitchell.
"These were two people, both with epilepsy, both who liked a drink and both with troubled backgrounds who formed a friendship," she told BBC News.
"You could say they were lost souls who gravitated towards each other and although Teresa's delighted that she's been cleared, she's sad she couldn't say goodbye to Neil."
Hug 'threat'
Ms Bellchambers said her client had spent two of the past seven months in jail and for the remainder, was under curfew and electronically tagged.
"Now she plans to come back to Devon and get on with her life - she's even threatened to come and give me a hug."
Devon and Cornwall Police said: "The content of the tape did not indicate that Teresa Rylands had committed any offence and there was insufficient evidence to support a realistic prospect of conviction."
However, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said it went forward with the case because initially there "was a reasonable suspicion that Ms Rylands had committed the offence and that the continuing investigation would provide further evidence".
It added: "Having reviewed the evidence... we no longer felt it was sufficient to support a realistic prospect of conviction and we therefore discontinued the case."
An inquest is due to be held into Mr Mitchell's death.Sometimes I make art to make people smile. Sometimes I make art to get the weird ideas out of my head and into the real world. And sometimes, on those rare occasions, I get to do both!Let me just say, I am NO fan of the infamous fan-fic Cupcakes in any of its myriad of horrific forms. That being said, the animated version has a dance number that is all kinds of adorable. So cute that some days I watch it just to feel happy. It's like a perfect, tropical island of cute in a sea of soul-crushing horror.SOOOO After the MLPFIM season finale, I had this odd idea of Cadence and Chrysalis doing the oddly adorable cupcake dance. The idea wouldn't go away and so- A THING is born.For context, here is just the video of the dance number set to some sweet Andrew WK accompaniment- [link]John Jonah Jameson, Jr.[1][2] is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics, commonly in association with the superhero Spider-Man. The character was created by writer Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko, and he first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man #1 (March 1963).
Jameson is typically depicted as the publisher or editor-in-chief of the Daily Bugle, a fictional New York newspaper. Recognizable by his toothbrush moustache, flattop haircut, and ever-present cigar, he carries out a smear campaign against Spider-Man. He employs photojournalist Peter Parker, who, unbeknownst to Jameson, is Spider-Man himself.
Portrayals of Jameson have varied throughout the years. Sometimes he is shown as a foolishly stubborn and pompous skinflint who micromanages his employees and resents Spider-Man out of jealousy. Other writers have portrayed him more humanly, as a humorously obnoxious yet caring boss who nevertheless has shown great bravery and integrity in the face of the assorted villains with which the Bugle comes into contact, and whose campaign against Spider-Man comes more from fear of youngsters following his example. In either case, he has remained an important part of the Spider-Man mythos.
Jameson is also the father of John Jameson, the Marvel Universe supporting character who, in addition to his job as a famous astronaut, has become Man-Wolf and Star-God.
As a result of his father's wedding to May Parker, Jameson and Peter Parker are related by marriage.
Academy Award-winning actor J. K. Simmons portrayed the character in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy, as well as voicing him in various additional works such as The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Avengers Assemble, Ultimate Spider-Man, Lego Marvel Super Heroes: Maximum Overload and Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H..
Publication history [ edit ]
Created by writer Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko, Jameson first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man #1 (March 1963). Stan Lee stated in an interview on Talk of the Nation that he modeled J. Jonah Jameson as a much grumpier version of himself.[3] Later Spider-Man writers Tom DeFalco and Gerry Conway agreed that J. Jonah Jameson was as close as Lee ever came to a self-portrayal, with Conway elaborating that "just like Stan is a very complex and interesting guy who both has a tremendously charismatic part of himself and is an honestly decent guy who cares about people, he also has this incredible ability to go immediately to shallow. Just, BOOM, right to shallow. And that's Jameson."[4] Conway stated that whenever he wrote Jameson's dialogue, he would hear it in Lee's voice, and on one occasion even wrote a Jameson speech that was almost directly quoted from a Stan |
and Republicans have largely avoided talking about downsides. Democrats are ready to pounce.
“There are critical, life-changing decisions being made about Americans’ health care right now in the United States Senate that should have people on high alert,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said in this weekend’s Democratic radio address. “This legislation is going to put the health of millions of Americans at risk.”
___
LONE RANGER RIDES AGAIN
Republicans never ceased complaining that Obama passed his law without a single GOP vote. Now, their bill has failed to garner any Democratic support. Not surprisingly, polls show that Democrats and independents disapprove of the legislation by wide margins.
“They’re sending legislation through the Congress that is only supported by one party... and somehow thinking it’s going to have a different outcome,” said economist Gail Wilensky, a Republican. “It’s like, really, why would you think that?”Mamadou Tandja had his first taste of power after a 1974 coup
In a country plagued by coups and and chronic poverty, Niger President Mamadou Tandja built his reputation on providing political and economic stability. But with reports of a coup in the capital, Niamey, it seems Mr Tandja may be swept away in much the same fashion as many of his predecessors before the introduction of multi-party elections in 1999. Mr Tandja won two elections - in 1999 and 2004 - and was due to step down last December after 10 years in power. But despite widespread criticism, Mr Tandja pushed through a constitutional amendment scrapping such presidential term limits. Critics said this was aimed at allowing him to stay in power indefinitely. But he said he just needed more time to complete projects such as the country's first oil refinery, the construction of a dam on the River Niger and the mining of new uranium sites in the north of the country. His supporters said these projects had already started to raise living standards in one of the world's poorest countries and would be jeopardised by any change of power. The BBC's Idy Baraou in Niamey says Mr Tandja has always insisted he would never let down his people, especially in hard moments when they need him. And he has often told foreign critics that he was "serving Niger and its people, not the international community". But the opposition have accused him of trampling over Niger's new-found democracy. They said his attempts to remain in power were little different from the military coups which people in Niger thought had been consigned to history. 'Grassroots man' Mr Tandja was born in 1938 in Maine Soroa, 1,400km (870 miles) east of Niamey. He was raised in a family of shepherds. His father was of Arab descent, his mother was ethnically Kanuri. Mr Tandja's plans have caused huge protests He has a reputation as a pragmatist and his motto is: "To reconcile Niger's people with work." He is known for his sense of justice and care towards the poor, needy and particularly rural people. His ties with farmers and herdsmen have given him a reputation as a popular grassroots politician. He has two wives and is the father of many children. A retired army colonel, Mr Tandja first came to power in December 1999 following what the international community called "a fair and transparent democratic electoral process". That election came just eight months after a military takeover. His 2004 re-election was the first time a president had been voted in for a second term. At the time, observers called it proof of Niger's "democratic maturity". Before this double victory, Mr Tandja had already had a taste of power. In 1974 he took part in Niger's first military coup, ousting President Hamani Diori. He was named interior minister by Mr Diori and also served as an ambassador for many years. 'Democratic maturity' It was not until 2005 that President Tandja's government experienced its first serious social crisis. Locust attacks and poor rainfall led to large-scale protests organised by civil society groups and opposition parties. President Tandja said the 2005 food crisis had been exaggerated Civil society groups denounced hikes in the prices of basic commodities like sugar, milk and wheat flower. Opposition parties accused his government of "unprecedented and rampant corruption". The government was heavily criticised for doing too little, too late to prevent the failed harvests turning into acute food shortages, affecting some 3.5 million people. The government had rejected calls for the free distribution of food and instead subsidised the cost of staple foods. But the very poorest said they still could not afford to buy enough to stave off hunger. Journalists who reported on the scale of the problems were harassed. And the president launched a scathing attack on UN aid agencies, accusing them of exaggerating the scale of the problems in order to get donor funds. He also accused opposition parties of trying to gain political mileage out of the problems. Analysts in Niger say Mr Tandja's handling of the 2005 crisis owes much to his experiences in 1974, when the government's failure to deal with the severe food shortages led directly to a coup.
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionDaily flight logs from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation reveal that the federal department has been busy loaning Predator drones to “state, local, and non-CBP federal agencies.”
According to EFF’s summary of the documents, the number of CBP drone flights flown by other organizations has increased “eight-fold between 2010 and 2012.” EFF further reports that “CBP has failed to explain how it’s protecting our privacy from unwarranted drone surveillance.”
CBP calls its report on its Predator surveillance program the “Concept of Operations.” EFF received this report, as well as three years of flight logs, as a result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
An EFF blog post reports that the Concept of Operations document discloses that “CBP already appears to be flying drones well within the Southern and Northern US borders, and for a wide variety of non-border patrol reasons. What’s more — the agency is planning to increase its Predator drone fleet to 24 and its drone surveillance to 24 hours per day / 7 days per week by 2016."
Around the clock, domestic surveillance provided by two dozen Predator drones buzzing in the skies of the United States will, as much as any other federal project, convert the “homeland” into a virtual prison with the inmates under the watchful, never-blinking eye of the wardens.
Just how will the information collected by these unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) be used? The CBP report published by EFF provides some insight:
As the Concept of Operations report notes, CBP’s goal is that its drone data will be “persistently available” (p. 21) and interoperable (p. 29) — not just within CBP, but to other agencies, and also possibly to other countries. CBP plans that its “UAS will provide assured monitoring of entities along land borders, inland seas, littorals and high seas with sufficient frequency, continuity, accuracy, spectral diversity, and data content to produce actionable information.” (p. 29)
While there was much valuable information contained in the cache of documents provided by CBP to EFF, the agency redacted most relevant data related to dates and geographical location of the drone flights. What was revealed, however, was a partial list of the agencies and departments who’ve borrowed CBP’s Predators. The roster includes the FBI, ICE, U.S. Marshals, U.S. Coast Guard, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Investigation, North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation, North Dakota Army National Guard, Texas Department of Public Safety.
Beyond the law-enforcement purposes behind the drone deployments, EFF reports that “CBP conducted extensive 'electro-optical, thermal infrared imagery and Synthetic Aperture Radar' surveillance of levees along the Mississippi River and river valleys across several states, along with surveillance of the massive Deep Water Horizon oil spill and other natural resources for the US Geological Survey, FEMA, the Bureau of Land Management, the US Forest Service, the Department of Natural Resources, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.”
While such activities seem, at first blush, legitimate and not subject to the same scrutiny as more overt surveillance missions, there are collateral aspects of these uses that deserve attention.
Perhaps most critical is the ultimate disposition of the images recorded by the drones deployed on these environmental missions. Photos of rivers, forests, and levees necessarily include pictures of the homes, cars, and other property of people who live in and near these areas. Such surveillance would seem to violate the Fourth Amendment, unless CBP has promulgated standard operating procedures to protect such unwarranted searches.
EFF’s summary of the information it received from CBP also revealed that the agency:
plans to make its drones and the data gathered through its drone surveillance even more widely available to outside agencies. For example, CBP plans to share data on a near real-time basis, possibly “via DOD’s Global Information Grid (GIG)/Defense Information Systems Network.” CBP also plans that “joint DHS and OGA [other government agency] combined operations will become the norm at successively lower organizational hierarchical levels,” which will, presumably, reduce the already limited oversight for CBP’s drone-loan program.
Beginning in 2006, the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) began purchasing its growing fleet of (as yet) unarmed Predator drones. In testimony to Congress, CBP claimed this technology would purportedly aid in securing America’s southern border. According to a report written by the DHS inspector general, as of the end of 2012, CBP will have 12 of these aircraft in its arsenal with a total cost to taxpayers of nearly $200 million.
Inexplicably, the CBP took delivery of two drones in 2011 and 2012 despite the inspector general’s statement that “CBP had not adequately planned resources needed to support its current unmanned aircraft inventory.” So, since they weren’t using the drones they already bought, why not buy more? Although that spendthrift attitude is typical of government agency budgeting, perhaps the purchase of Predators is motivated by a goal a bit more sinister than either DHS or the Obama administration is willing to admit.
These other purposes are even hinted at in the DHS report. The tasks being performed by the CBP drones extend well beyond the patrolling of the border and into many other areas, a situation described by one reporter as “mission creep.” Here is a brief catalog of some of the ways CBP is farming out its drone fleet.
In addition to the borrowers listed in the EFF disclosure, the DHS report indicates that CBP Predators have been used to conduct missions for the following federal and state government agencies:
U.S. Secret Service,... Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE);... Department of Defense; Texas Rangers; [and] U.S. Forest Service.
With regard to ICE’s use of the CBP drone, the inspector general’s report indicates that the aircraft “provided surveillance over a suspected smuggler’s tunnel, which yielded information that, according to an ICE representative, would have required many cars and agents to obtain.”
Yes, without the loan-a-drone program, the ICE surveillance mission would have required “many cars and agents,” as well as a warrant. With a drone, the government doesn’t need no stinkin' warrant.
In a separate report issued in April 2012 by the Department of Defense, the Pentagon revealed the locations of over 100 new domestic sites that could soon serve as launch sites for military drones.
The list of present and proposed drone bases includes 39 of the 50 states, as well as Guam and Puerto Rico.
As for congressional oversight of such serious potential threats to fundamental individual liberties, Representative Ted Poe (R-Texas) has introduced the Preserving American Privacy Act of 2013. Poe’s bill mandates that “in operating a public unmanned aircraft system or disclosing any covered information collected by such operation, a governmental entity shall minimize, to the maximum extent practicable, the collection or disclosure” of “information that is reasonably likely to enable identification of an individual; or information about an individual's property that is not in plain view.”
On the Senate side, Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is taking the lead in the fight to prevent unconstitutional surveillance.
On May 22, Paul introduced the Preserving Freedom from Unwarranted Surveillance Act of 2013. This measure protects an individual's right to privacy against unwarranted drone surveillance.
Paul’s Preserving Freedom from Unwarranted Surveillance Act would reaffirm the right of Americans to be “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” as guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.
"The use of drone surveillance may work on the battlefields overseas, but it isn't well-suited for unrestrained use on the streets in the United States. Congress must be vigilant in providing oversight to the use of this technology and protection for rights of the American people. I will continue the fight to protect and uphold our Fourth Amendment," Senator Paul said.
Despite these laudable legislative efforts and despite surging international opposition to President Obama’s remote control warfare and death-by-drone program, one of those high-altitude, high-tech, snoop-and-snipe aircraft — owned or loaned by the federal government — may already be flying missions in the skies over the United States.
Joe A. Wolverton, II, J.D. is a correspondent for The New American and travels frequently nationwide speaking on topics of nullification, the NDAA, and the surveillance state. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.Tableau, DataSift and Google BigQuery are intent on taking social media analytics to the next level. The three recently forged a partnership that will enable users to seamlessly integrate their data within these platforms, allowing near endless possibilities for social media data analysis. Users will be able to delve deeper into data from Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and a slew of other social networks, faster than ever.
The collaboration got its first test at LeWeb 2013 in June. They turned out this nice Social Media Dashboard, gaining incredible insights from live social media data in real time.
Here’s how it works:
DataSift Collects the Data
DataSift connects users to conversations and interactions occurring on their social media channels as they happen. The platform captures all the data surrounding these social activities, with the option to combine and organize data how you see fit. You can even mix in lists and other data sources, gaining deeper levels of insight.
Google BigQuery Stores the Data
Once DataSift collects such a large amount of social data, it needs a place to store it. That’s where Google BigQuery comes in. BigQuery’s web-based, flexible infrastructure makes it an excellent platform to store and quickly access real-time data. Users can easily scale the interactive service to accommodate huge datasets.
Tableau Visualizes the Data
After the data is collected and stored, Tableau does what it does best – visualization. Using a native Google BigQuery connector, Tableau can easily create a live connection to social media data stored within BigQuery. After establishing that connection in mere seconds, Tableau gives users the ability to instantly visualize and analyze their data to the full extent of Tableau’s capabilities.
That’s it!
The partnership between Tableau, DataSift and Google BigQuery checks off a massive item on the wish lists of analysts and marketers alike– real-time social media analysis. Users can finally make decisions and gain insight at the speed of social media. It’s easy to see the astronomical value this presents to any business engaged in social network activity.
Ready to Get Started?
If you’re ready to start capitalizing on your social media data, get in touch with us. We’ll get you set up.Comcast Money Behind Phony Congress Neutrality Push As we noted previously, Senator John Thune and Representative Fred Upton have been pushing their own "bipartisan net neutrality solution" in Congress with an eye on pre-empting the FCC's plan to impose tougher, Title II-based neutrality rules. The goal appears to be to table rules that are actually the weakest we've seen yet -- make a few minor concessions, then push forth the rules as a "bipartisan" example of why we don't need Title II. Not too surprisingly, the International Business Times highlights how Thune and Upton quote: Asked about the contributions, Sena Fitzmaurice, a spokeswoman for Comcast, pointed out that the company contributes to most members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate Commerce Committee, including Democrats opposed to the Republican plan. (Upton is chairman of the House committee.) She said, in most instances, Comcast donates larger amounts to representatives in states where it has an increased presence -- for instance, in Michigan and Oregon -- and “not because of any particular issue." Comcast, AT&T and Verizon have all suggested that they'll sue if the FCC tries to impose tougher consumer protections. Not too surprisingly, the International Business Times highlights how Thune and Upton have received more cable-industry money than nearly anybody else in Congress. Comcast insists they donate to Republicans and Democrats alike, and implies the fact that two of their biggest contribution recipients are spearheading an anti-net neutrality effort is coincidental:Comcast, AT&T and Verizon have all suggested that they'll sue if the FCC tries to impose tougher consumer protections.
News Jump Tuesday Morning Links Monday Morning Links TGI Friday Morning Links Thursday Morning Links Wednesday Morning Links Tuesday Morning Links Friday Morning Links Thursday Morning Links - Valentines Edition Wednesday Morning Links Tuesday Morning Links ---------------------- this week last week most discussed
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Glen Head, NY 8 recommendations n2jtx Member Law Suit As Wheeler has stated, he expects to be sued regardless so they might as well go for broke. Lovely though how the campaign contributions have no bearing on the fact that these political whores, for lack of better word, are doing the bidding of the companies that feed them. Frankly I wish congresscritters would be required to wear buttons and tags with the names of all corporations giving them money so that they resemble race cars.This winter has been one of the coldest on record. It’s been the coldest winter in at least 30 years, and I saw a report today that there is a chance that this will be Chicago’s coldest winter on record. Presently it is the 3rd coldest on record for Chicago, but another blast of cold air is just moving into the Midwest and East Coast.
Natural gas is a major energy source for heating homes, and prices have been spiking periodically in recent weeks as the weekly draws on natural gas inventories are higher than normal. Natural gas consumption in the US is highly seasonal, so producers use a system of underground pressurized storage that builds inventories until mid-fall, which are then depleted through the winter. Natural gas can be stored in depleted oil or gas reservoirs, in natural aquifers, or in salt caverns.
The US has nearly 9 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of natural gas storage capacity, but only a fraction of that has ever been used. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the actual amount in storage has never exceeded 4 tcf. Inventories will usually build to between 3 and 4 tcf by ~ November 1st each year, before being pulled down to under 2 tcf by the end of winter. So a typical winter season will see just over 2 tcf pulled out of storage — an amount equivalent to about 10 percent of annual US natural gas production.
In the case of a mild winter as in 2012, inventories won’t be pulled down as much before they begin to rebuild. In fact, the winter of 2011-2012 failed to pull gas inventories below 2 tcf for the first time in over 20 years. It wasn’t a coincidence that this corresponded to natural gas prices that went below $2 per million Btu (MMBtu) the following month, and spent a full year below $4 per million Btu (MMBtu).
Presently, the exact opposite is happening. This season’s withdrawal marks the fastest inventory depletion on record during the winter months. We have already withdrawn 2.4 tcf — more than the average for most winters — and we are likely 4-6 weeks away from the bottom. If withdrawals continue at the current pace, the inventory level would reach zero the week of March 28th (see the figure below), which is usually around the time inventories start to recover. This may lead to more spiking prices in the weeks ahead, but more importantly it will probably support higher than normal natural gas prices for the rest of the year.
Gas in underground storage is on a trajectory to hit the lowest inventory on record
Regardless of what happens over the next 6 weeks, natural gas inventories will probably bottom out at the lowest level on record. The current lowest inventory level on record took place on April 11, 2003 at 642 billion cubic feet (bcf).
Natural gas in underground storage hasn’t dropped below 1 tcf since 2003, but the latest EIA report showed inventories on February 14th at 1.4 tcf and falling at a weekly rate of 245 bcf per week (average rate of decline over the past month). At that rate, we will go below 1 tcf of gas in underground storage this week, but the EIA won’t report that number until late next week.
Obviously you could have extrapolated any of those previous years to zero, but the point is that inventories generally start to rebuild after March 28th. Extrapolating previous years would have interested with zero around mid to late April, after injection season has resumed. The following graphic makes it a bit more obvious that this year’s decline is historically abnormal:
The media hasn’t spent much time covering this issue, but I expect it will garner some attention if we drop below 1 tcf next week since it hasn’t happened in over a decade. This would put the US about one more cold snap from sending natural gas prices to the moon.
Natural gas prices have been falling in recent days, but I think that sell-off is premature. I predict that we will drop below the previous all-time low of 642 bcf from 2003. If the weather warms up soon we may be able to avoid it, but it looks increasingly likely to me.
Link to Original Article: Natural Gas Inventories are Headed Toward Zero
By Robert Rapier. You can find me on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook.Wesley So, defending stoutly against his arch-rival Anish Giri of the Netherlands, earns a draw after the second round of the Tata Steel Chess Tournament
Published 5:22 PM, January 16, 2017
MANILA, Philippines - Wesley So, defending stoutly against his arch-rival Anish Giri of the Netherlands, earned a draw after the second round of the Tata Steel Chess Tournament Sunday night, January 15. This was the Philippine-born's 45th straight game without a loss.
"After 10 moves, they exchanged queens and somehow, the writing was always on the wall. This ended in a draw," said grandmaster Daniel King in Chessbase.com.
"Wesley So actually defended very well. He sacrificed a pawn and got opposite colored bishops," said King. "You can see that his rook ties down White."
At one point in his career, Giri turned the tables against So in this same tournament and later forged a 3-0 lead over So. So tied his personal record against Giri, whose results have pleateaued despite being trained by the famous Vladimir Tukmakov, who wrote the provocative Risk and Blunder in Chess.
So, who was born in Bacoor, Cavite and played for the Philippines until he shifted to the United States in 2014, is number 4 in the world based on the January 2017 Elo ratings.
So has one point out of two rounds in this tournament, one of the strongest chess events in the world. In Monday night's third round, he faces dangerous foe Richard Rapport of Hungary, who has half-a-point. – Rappler.comThe day of Massacres.
SK Telecom T1 vs STX SouL
on OGN Saturday, 4th of June,on OGN
Hwaseung OZ vs CJ Entus
on MBCGame on MBCGame
The day of Heroism.
Woongjin Stars vs MBCGame HERO
on OGN Sunday, 5th of June,on OGN
KT Rolster vs Air Force ACE
on MBCGame on MBCGame
The day of Survival.
WeMade FOX vs Hwaseung OZ
on OGN Monday, 6th of June,on OGN
STX SouL vs Samsung KHAN
on MBCGame on MBCGame
The day of Polarity.
SK Telecom T1 vs Woongjin Stars
on OGN Tuesday, 7th of June,on OGN
sufferable
Air Force ACE vs CJ Entus
on MBCGame on MBCGame
The day of Equals.
Samsung KHAN vs KT Rolster
on OGN Wednesday, 8th of June,on OGN
MBCGame HERO vs WeMade FOX
on MBCGame on MBCGame
If you’re at all like me (which I figure you are, since you are reading this at the moment), the last week with minimal amounts on Brood War was almost immeasurably painful. But after 5 rounds of differing formats, slumps, upsets, and even bans after those upsets (<3 Shine ), the final sprint begins. Which will be the qualifying teams? With so many teams fighting for places 4-9, and the #1 spot even more highly prized than in previous rounds, we are bound to see some very tense efforts, and fanboy tears both of joy and of disappointment, for the road to the playoffs is still riddled with hardships... Here are the previews for the games next week, categorized by days, as I see them.The first massacre will take place on OGN, as the orange fist of SK Telecom pounds upon the weathered remains of STX SouL. Once in constant conflict for second place, SK Telecom has resoundingly revived Bisu, and strengthened BeSt and Fantasy enough to be threats to every outside force again, even the TBLS (with the exception of ZvBest, dohsairs still exist in this universe). Their other forces look formidable as well, By.Sun showing brilliant games here and then and the SKTZergs take turns being competent. How then could STX even dream of defeating such a beast? Calm and Kal are mere shadows of their former selves, Hwasin has sunk into the abyss itself, and Bogus resoundingly lost to Bisu the last few times they met, if the paltry guard of STX should reach the Ace match. But when heroes are needed, they sometimes answer the call - Shuttle and hyvaa are on the upturn again, and Last and Modesty may channel the promise they've shown yet again to help out their team in this time of need. STX has even called in their Final Ace, but it will likely still not be enough.The second massacre will take place on MBC. CJ Entus is the natural enemy of Hwaseung OZ, since one of them is Ace dependant and the other consists of players who are good enough to be Aces. This is evidenced by the successes of those teams in Winners League and Proleague. All games between the two in Proleague were won by CJ, whereas all games in Winners League were won by OZ. This is of course oversimplifying matters, but CJ as of now are completely imba, with sKyHigh rebounding, Leta in good form, Hydra in good form, Horang2 in excellent form, Movie in good form and players of the calibre of Snow on the bench for not being good enough to send out... OZ will have it's work cut out for it. Dear and Sky are slow to realize their potential as of now, Killer seems shaky and HiyA feels the burden of OZ on his shoulders and fails to help overcome it. God help them if Jaedong should lose faith in himself and enter a slump, but the outcome of the MSL probably isn't helping matters., but I'm less sure of this one than the STX match. Also not helping: the final match being played on La Mancha and Leta playing on CJ.The sun is shining brightly on the day when these teams meet... Well, in some part of the world, anyway. Nevertheless, the victors will have overcome considerable adversity, no matter the team. Stars not only overcame the slump of their starplayer free, but also a noteriety for losing ace matches in the last rounds. Really and Flying on the lineup greatly aid with this sort of task, obviously, but team morale is hard to change, and in this, Stars has succeeded. Their team morale is one of winners, albeit not necessarily heroes. The underdogs and greater heroes (in my opinion) in this match are MBCGame HERO, who find themselves preservering in spite of all odds once more. With the departure of Light, and possible close retirements of Jaehoon and Saint, MBC still won 3 games of 9, used their rookies to pad out the lineup of which only 5 players had ELO scores, and clenched their teeth, determined to give it their all - no matter what. The Ace match on Alternative also plays into the hands of Stars, as ZerO is on fire lately, and Alternative is probably bad for TvZ, but I think we'll see MBC make this match difficult for them. Ais likely, but a win by MBC would be a lot more impressive.The future is looking bleak for KT fOrGG gone, Violet in therapy, Tempest is playing badly, Action is shaky, Stats is wildly alterating in form, the rookies largely wet behind the ears, and perhaps worst of all, Flash's career is nearing it's untimely end in a yet unknown time period. But they still have this year, and they still look strong enough to take a match from anyone they damn well please, although this can also be said of their opponent. In the blue corner we find Air Force ACE, a seasoned team fully composed of veterans and have-beens, longing for some chance at glory. Truly, this season, ACE has shown results like never before, truly establishing itself as a major contender at one point, although the abysmal results in Winners League nullified all of the previous progress. Yet, they still march on, although they leaft a few questions in their wake at the end of Round 5. Questions like: What happened to ggaemo? Do Iris and firebathero really get outplayed by PianO in practice to justify him being the Ace player? Will Canata still suck on ACE? Regardless of these questions, I see a close and exciting match,, since Aztec is no longer a TvP graveyard.This day is the day of Survival, because the teams participating fight for the closely contested places 4-9, and defeat signals ever diminishing hopes for the team that fears being left at the doorstep of the Playoffs. WeMade FOX and Hwaseung OZ are the trailers, and both desperately need this win. WeMade looks to be the favorite, but looks might easily be deceptive. At the start of every round I keep thinking to myself that WeMade will start doing better. The interviews show them hopeful. Players show some new promise. And then... disappointment. Shine and BaBy in particular seem to have dropped the ball, and RorO and Pure are nowhere near as consistent as they were during last years playoffs. Hwaseung has its own problems, but I'm inclined to see this as a closevictory, especially if it gets to Ace Match on the Zerg-friendly map Alternative. Samsung should have been at the very top of the ladder this season, but JangBi and great have become weaker while the rookies became promising one by one. The success stories of Grape and Reality, in that order could easily have dominated the Proleague. However, now Samsung finds itself in the middle of the pack, although at this moment, strong and full of momentum. It's a good time to meet rival STX, who will probably find Samsung a difficult, yet manageable opponent, if the strengths can be sufficiently utilized. Reality vs. Stork vs. Calm, and Grape vs. Bogus could turn the tide towards STX, but KHAN is no opponent to be underestimated. Even if January makes very questionable choices in the lineup. For this reason, I predict aupset, but this game can go so many ways. A 4-0 by KHAN wouldn't surprise me at all.Bam. Easily game of the Week. Woongjin Stars is on fire, it's Ace player in the finals of MSL, capable of beating anyone and anything. On the other side, the nigh-invulnerable SK Telecom T1, that has dominated the Proleague for almost the entirety of it's 5 round run. Look forward to ZerO vs. Neo.G_Soulkey vs. Light vs. free vs. s2 and Really vs. By.Sun. This should be a good day of BW, and any outcome is possible. I think a repeat of the last game,will occur, but the current monstrous form of Bisu might make this wishful thinking rather than the truth.The match on MBC, on the other hand, looks weak in comparison. Although ACE has what it takes to take a game from anyone, CJ looks as if it is going to dominate most of round 6, if the core players play as they do. Keeping it short this time, I think this will be asteamroll.The week ends with games that promise to be great, and I think they won't disappoint. KHAN vs. KT will be a battle of equals in that we have rookies rising to the occasion, slightly sloppy performances from several of the main lineup, and two aces whose matches are almost always stuff of which BW fan dreams are made of. Although both teams suffer from inconsistency, I'm currently banking on this match to fulfill it's potential and be one of the best this week. Slightly edging for awin here, but honestly, no idea. MBC vs. FOX is usually one of the least followed matchups of the PL, but at least I'm fairly certain it won't be one-sided, especially with a lot for both teams on the line here. I think it will come down to the Ace Match on La Mancha, and I think Sea will make it, because he's clutch, but it could also end up being one of BaBy's lucky Rainbow Socks days, where he is close to unbeatable. Certainly hoping for a good close match, though.At the tail end of Disney’s massive, live-action presentation on Saturday, Star Wars director J.J. Abrams brought out Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o by referring to her as “apparently someone who is legally required to be in every Disney movie.” The joke landed solidly with the audience at Disney’s D23 Expo because over the course of the two-hour presentation, Nyong’o appeared on stage three times to promote first The Jungle Book, then The Queen of Katwe, and, finally, Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Lupita Nyong’o, it seems, is the new face of Disney, and she’s emblematic of the incredibly appealing direction the old-fashioned House of Mouse is taking.
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The title of the panel, “Worlds, Galaxies, and Universes: Live Action at The Walt Disney Studios” couldn’t be more accurate. With live-action heavy hitters like Lucasfilm and Marvel Studios in their stable, Disney does seem primed to take over the world, the galaxy, etc. But what Disney made clear in their ambitious presentation is that their slate of films is quite global minded. Disney’s biggest heavy hitter (well, until Star Wars opens in December, anyway) is Marvel, and the comic-book studio continues to get flak for its lack of diversity. When introducing Marvel’s portion of the presentation, Disney Studios chairman Alan Horn joked, “Everyone’s big. Everyone’s good looking. Everyone’s named Chris.” And, indeed, a good-looking Chris or two (Evans and Pine) did make an appearance on the D23 stage. But it’s clear that the square-jawed, all-American heroes of the typed played by Chris Evans in Captain America: Civil War and Chris Pine in the based-on-a-greatest-generation-true-story throwback The Finest Hours aren’t the only ones Disney is relying on to take their legacy into the next century.
Increasingly, the palette at Disney is looking a lot more varied. Building on upcoming multi-cultural animated projects like the Polynesian Moana starring the Rock and the Día de Los Muertos–themed Coco, Disney unveiled a refreshingly diverse live-action slate. Of all the footage screened during the presentation, the biggest hit was Jon Favreau’s Jungle Book. (Not to be confused with Andy Serkis’s Jungle Book: Origins.) It might seem strange to look for authentic diversity in a tale from “White Man’s Burden” author Rudyard Kipling featuring the voice talents of Bill Murray (as Baloo), Scarlett Johansson (as Kaa), and Christopher Walken (as King Louie), but Favreau was insistent that the star and lynchpin of his motion-capture production was newcomer Neel Sethi as Mowgli. Sethi, who took the stage with fellow co-stars Nyong’o and Ben Kingsley, was given the floor perhaps more often than his 11-year-old self could quite manage. But the convention audience ate up his unbridled enthusiasm with a spoon.
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Meanwhile Lucasfilm, which faced some initial backlash after unveiling the first cast photo for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, debuted a very consciously international cast for their upcoming spin-off Rogue One. Hong Kong action star Donnie Yen, Chinese triple-threat Jiang Wen, Oscar winner Forest Whitaker, Danish dynamo Mads Mikkelsen, intense Australian Ben Mendelsohn, Mexican cutie Diego Luna, and British rising star Riz Ahmed, all join leading lady Felicity Jones. The only white American guy announced, Alan Tudyk, will provide his voice only to a “performance capture” role that has yet to be announced. If we wanted to lodge one complaint, it would be that the “one” in Rogue One seems to stand for “only one woman in this great cast.” But when that woman wears her blaster slung low on her hip like Han Solo, it’s hard to be disappointed.
By Jonathan Olley ©Lucasfilm 2016
Speaking of performance |
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